2nd Sunday Advent C - Homily 6

 Homily 6 - 2021

The word “integrity” invariably seems to attract my attention. And it occurs three times in today’s First Reading written by the prophet Baruch. So I am triply attracted. Integrity speaks to me of an easy simplicity, a purity of heart [as Jesus mentioned in the Beatitudes], ‘true to ourselves’, no hidden agendas, pure authenticity.

Baruch was working at an utterly depressing time for the Hebrew People. Their city Jerusalem had been destroyed, their temple with it, and they had been herded into humiliating captivity in distant Babylon. Yet Baruch’s sense of God was such that he could look to the future, leave room for God, and hope not only for liberation but even for a glorious future for his fellow slaves. He encouraged them to “wrap the cloak of the integrity of God around” themselves, because some time in the future God would guide the people back home “with [God’s] integrity for escort”. Jerusalem [the name means “home of peace”], would be rebuilt — and God would give it a purposeful new name: “Peace through Integrity”.

“Integrity” is what our world so sorely needs at the moment, what our country needs, what our politicians need. Nations seem to be losing even the meaning of the word “truth”. Truth is coming to mean whatever people want it to mean. As truth disappears, common vision, political unity, cooperation, even civility, run the danger of disappearing with it.

Since political leaders are drawn from the general population, if we want leaders of integrity, the population in general need to be people of integrity. The population, in its turn, is made up of you and me. Any hope for a “Home of Peace—Peace through Integrity” involves us. It perhaps may need to start with us disciples of Jesus.

God, who was intent on making Jerusalem a “Home of Peace — Peace with Integrity”, is the God who later sent his Son, Jesus, among us. Jesus came with an almost impossible mission entrusted to him by his Father to save the world from itself. I say ‘almost impossible’ because Jesus’ respect for human dignity was such that he necessarily respected human freedom. Our free cooperation with Jesus is essential if we want our confused world ever to experience salvation.

Jesus’ practical message to us boiled down essentially to, “Love your enemy”. What on earth could he have meant by “love”? Where do we start?

In today’s Second Reading, Paul wrote, “My prayer is that your love for each other may increase more and more”, that that love “may never stop improving your knowledge and deepening your perception”, and then transform you so thoroughly that “you can always recognise what is best”.

The “knowledge” that allows any possibility of genuine integrity, of “deeper perception”, is self-knowledge: an inner knowledge, not of things but of our personal feelings, the energies stirring constantly within us, our often hidden motivations driving our rationalisations. And such self-knowledge can be the fruit of time spent ruminating on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and on many of his parables, especially when reinforced by meditation or quiet prayer.