11th Sunday Year C - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2016

At breakfast this morning, Paddy mentioned that it was worth listening to the eulogy given at Mohammed Ali’s funeral by his wife, Lonnie. I couldn‘t find it on my computer, so I listened instead to Bill Clinton’s. And I am glad I did. Clinton mentioned that, although Ali was, like all of us, a flawed man, he was more importantly a man of faith, and a man whose faith was such that it made him free, and was deep enough for him to live with the consequences of what he believed, to be his true self. I thought that was great.

In the Gospel today, Luke presents us with a woman who was also, like Ali, like all of us, a flawed woman. But she was free, wonderfully free, free to be her self. She was free to love, really to love this time. And the source of her love, of her freedom, was, again like Ali, her faith in God. Somehow, she saw or sensed in Jesus the God who was good, gentle, the God who cared, who accepted her; and given her situation, the God who had obviously forgiven her – unasked and unconditionally. Something happened to her, within her. Her faith in God, who had suddenly become real, had set her free to be herself. Oblivious to whatever others thought, she felt herself free to express her pent-up love, with extraordinary flamboyance, the only way she knew.

I am grateful to Bill Clinton for alerting me to Ali’s freedom. It is something I yearn for. I thank Luke for his picture of the forgiven woman, and precisely through his reticence, for his invitation to me to wonder about the process of conversion that had happened in the deepest recesses of her heart. I want to touch into her striking conversion.

Both people illustrate that character flaws do not get in the way of love once our faith is such that we can perceive God’s unfazed acceptance of us just as we are. In the woman’s case, that insight into God became clear through the three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood Jesus. In my case, I think it has been nurtured through the succession of three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood people who have accepted and loved me across my life, with all my flaws. It is still a work in progress. Yet I have noticed that the more I feel certain of God's unconditional forgiveness and easy acceptance of me as I am, the more I feel uncomfortable, nevertheless, with my own sinfulness, particularly my instinctive hostility to others; and want to be free of it. A reasonable effort over the years showed little success.

Here, I turned to St Paul – whom I also admire. Like him, I want to know Christ, to really know Christ. Personally, I do not find it enough to know Christ from the outside, as it were. It is not enough to know about him, nor would it would be enough to see him, even face-to-face. I want to know him from the inside, to discover his love for me by somehow sharing his experience of loving others – loving anyone and everyone, until I can love myself with his love. What gives me heart, and hope, is what Paul wrote of himself in today’s Second Reading: “I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me.” The catch is that he prefaced his remark with another, “I have been crucified with Christ.” Here he was obviously speaking metaphorically – but even metaphorical possibilities seem a bit daunting.

As I grow older, not only am I running out of time. I am also running out of energy. Perhaps that is not a bad thing. Letting “Christ live in me” may be more a question of letting go control and getting out of the road than of striving under my own steam. To all of you on a similar journey, as they used to say in Spain, “Buen cammino!”