3rd Sunday Lent C - Homily 4

 Homily 4 - 2016

The nations of the West seem to have grown increasingly frightened of difference – frightened sometimes of each other, frightened particularly of peoples from the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan, fleeing in their thousands from conflict and wanting to settle in the West. Australia, somewhat selectively, has become paranoid about its borders, protective of its uniqueness, defensive of its exclusiveness. Foreigners are instinctively seen as threats, not as at least potential brothers or sisters.

Jesus was familiar with the mood of exclusivism; but in his day, the motivation was religious, rather than social or racial. His country was an occupied country, politically weak and in danger of being absorbed by the culturally stronger Roman Empire. Some Jews felt the imperative need to protect their religion. Their God was different; their God was unquestionably superior to the pagan gods; their God was holy. And since their God was holy, they, as a people, needed to be a holy people. These Jews called themselves Pharisees. They saw other peoples as unclean, their ways of life impure. They insisted on difference, separateness and exclusivism.

Jesus’ emphasis was different. Without denying God’s utter holiness, he insisted that the distinctive feature of God was mercy. Since God was above all merciful, his followers likewise were to prioritise the way of mercy. He saw others, not as threats, but as brothers and sisters. He insisted on inclusiveness, on love and intimacy.

I find today’s First Reading fascinating. It speaks of a God who is both holy, “Take off your shoes, for the place on which you stand is holy ground”, and merciful, “I am well aware of [the people’s] sufferings. I mean to deliver them out of the hands of the Egyptians”. And it was precisely God’s mercy, not God’s holiness, moving God to act on behalf of the oppressed people. This was a pivotal story for Israel’s self-understanding and for its further exploration of the mystery of God. I love today’s Psalm, “It is [the Lord] who forgives all your guilt … who crowns you with love and compassion.  The Lord is compassion and love, slow to anger and rich in mercy”. After fourteen centuries of both faithfulness and forgetfulness on the part of God’s people, that divine compassion would come to its fullest and clearest expression in the life and death of Jesus. Later it was familiarity with the best of Hebrew spirituality and his close friendship with Jesus that enabled the disciple John to make the profoundly simple observation in one of his Epistles, “God is love”.

Today’s Gospel passage had two stories of sudden deaths, the first the result of violence on the part of the occupying Roman army, perhaps in response to provocation on the part of the Galileans, and the second the result purely of an accident. Jesus insisted that neither was to be understood as God punishing people for their sins. Jesus’ God does not punish. Yet, still, many people, including Church dignitaries, instinctively associate death, particularly violent or sudden death, with God, either punishing sin or, as people sometimes say when someone dies young, “God only chooses the best”. There is no death in God. For God, death does not have the meaning that it seems to have for most people. Death is the transition from life to life – not unlike birth, which marks the transition from life in the womb to life outside the womb. As one of the Prefaces in the Funeral Mass puts it, “For your faithful people, Lord, life is changed, not ended.”

Then what about Jesus’ comment, “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did”? That may simply mean that unless we learn to prioritise the ways of mercy, to love and to become loving persons, then we shall be unable to experience the joy of the life beyond death [in what we call heaven], which consists strictly of intimately, lovingly, relating to God and to the whole communion of saints.