3rd Sunday Lent C - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2010

In the Gospel today, Jesus spoke firstly, of our need to repent, and, then, in the parable, of God’s patience: God waits with expectant anticipation.

But we easily misunderstand repentance and see it as sometimes like a business transaction: If I do certain things – certain difficult things that I would prefer not to do – then God won’t punish me. Well, that’s what repentance looks like to someone who has only started to repent. The motivation is misguided; but, early on in our journey towards God, we do need to strengthen our wills sufficiently to establish some control over our otherwise unguided appetites and desires.

That seems to have been what John the Baptist was calling for. Certainly, it was what the Pharisees required of each other. But that is just the start, and, perhaps, it is never going to be completely successful. We need to move on. To repent really involves seeing things differently, getting a different mind-set, standing ourselves on our heads, as it were,

Life with God has nothing to do with business, with earning, or with merit. Life with God is love – without attachments. When God loves us, there are no conditions, no expectations – just limitless commitment and expectant hope. And God’s hope is that we recognise that love, and accept it, and, in our turn, find ourselves wanting to love God without conditions and without expectations, and, perhaps, hesitantly rejoicing in the joy we give each other.

But, God can love us until God is blue in the face, and it will make no difference to us (or to our life in eternity) unless we believe it – really believe it. We need to accept God’s love, learn to delight in it, and respond, on our part, with a love that puts no conditions on God and no expectations, but trusts and waits to be surprised. That is what repentance is: It is our part in what is a necessarily two-way relationship. Without it, there is no relationship. Without relationship, we simply remain closed in on ourselves, avoiding the issue, or caught up in the balance sheet, and in keeping the score.

Jesus earnestly warned that, without repentance, we would perish. He doesn’t mean that God will punish us. We simply miss out on what God is yearning to give us – absorbed in ourselves – for eternity. Repentance is learning to forget about ourselves, and about our interests, and even about our own perfection.

The Christian God is relationship, that we endeavour to express as Father, Son and Spirit. And life for those created in the image of God is likewise relationship. Truly to repent is to stop looking inwards, absorbed in ourselves, and to learn to look outwards towards others. It is learning to see God not so much in a distant heaven but, particularly, in people, even in ourselves.

The Israelites, as we heard in the First Reading today, learned to discover a God who, as the Reading put it, has seen the miserable state of my people, who has heard their appeal to be free of their slave-drivers, and who means to deliver them. So, in uniting us with God, repentance orientates us, as well, towards others.

Love is all of one piece. It is not selective. Our hearts are all of one piece. They either look inwards, or they look outwards. As we learn truly to love, our love opens out to God, to others, even to our true selves. That’s what Jesus was like; and in that lies life to the full.

There’s our program for Lent, and for every day of the rest of our lives: With God, like God – with Jesus, like Jesus – to see the needs of our neighbours, to hear their appeals for help to be free to live, and to commit ourselves to free them from whatever hinders that life. And our neighbours are those in our own homes, our own town, our nation and the world at large.