11th Sunday Year C - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2010

Jesus understood the woman in today’s Gospel to be a sinner - he referred clearly to her many sins. The general assumption is that she was a prostitute, though the text doesn’t explicitly state what sort of sinner she was. For the sake of our reflection, let’s assume that she was a prostitute. If she was making a living out her occupation, she obviously had no shortage of men as clients. Isn’t it interesting how the social stigma associated with prostitution focuses always on the women and ignores the more numerous men who demand their services.

I have read that, in our current world, the greatest segment of the world’s capital is absorbed by the international arms industry. Second place is taken by the drug trade. In third place is people-trafficking – mainly prostitution. I find that a sad commentary. The arms industry highlights humanity’s profound inability to trust; the drug trade our need to escape a haunting emptiness; and prostitution the inability of so many to find or sustain satisfying interpersonal relationships.

Perhaps, in the end, prostitution illustrates most clearly the problem at the base of it all. Both the fear and the lack of trust that fuel the arms industry and the profound sense of personal dissatisfaction and unhappiness that drive people to drugs arise from the breakdown (or absence) of the ability of people to encounter others at any genuine, deep, I-thou-level.

Jesus lived and died for a world where people would love - where people would deliberately, freely and whole-heartedly choose to love. Using the imagery current in the culture of his day, he called it the Kingdom. But he didn’t just lay it on us. You can’t simply command love. You can only invite. But even that is not enough. Love needs to be empowered. It can be empowered only by someone else’s love. (Not that it’s a tit-for-tat transaction: you love me, so I’ll love you.) Another’s love is creative:it transforms us; it enables us to grow; it opens us out to transcend our normal limitations.

The catch is that the other’s love is a limited love. It sets us free – a bit. It enables us to grow – a bit; but what it empowers in us will inevitably be a limited love on our part. We will still hold back, unwilling and unable to give to the other all that I am just as I am; and, even if we get close to that, we will give ourselves only to one or to a few. Our outreach will be selective. Unless …

Unless the love that sets us free to love is itself totally unconditional and totally non-selective. We believers see that as the love of God, given human shape in the love of the crucified Christ – who, as Paul put it in today’s Second Reading, loved me and sacrificed himself for my sake.

Perhaps, others can mediate God’s love to us – they can be the channels of a love greater than their own. I think we can also access it directly through the process that we call prayer. One way or the other, we can find ourselves slowly, hesitantly, but increasingly able to love with ever growing trust in an ever-widening circle that reaches out toward the infinite. 

As today’s Gospel story showed us, the woman who had let herself be loved and forgiven by God, in and through Jesus, had discovered herself able and wanting to show what Jesus called such great love. Again, as Jesus had maintained, her faith in love and forgiveness had saved her.

If our tortured world is to have any hope of being saved from itself, if swords are to be turned into ploughshares, if true happiness is to replace desperate escapism, if people, particularly women, are to be no longer exploited, we need to choose the way of love. And we begin by discovering and trusting God’s prior love for us.