17th Sunday Year C - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2016

Our expectations of our parents change as we grow older. As young children we saw our parents as the ones who ensured our security, met our needs and sometimes, not always, even gave us what we asked. In trying to get what we wanted, we sometimes became experts in manipulation or persuasion or downright persistence. As time went on, we grew up, even though we remained their children. Our expectations changed. They were there for advice; they could provide a listening ear; they could even be useful for a spot of baby-sitting. But we no longer relied on them to meet our every need. Far from it. With time, some roles even reversed. As they grew older, they may have relied more on us for security, and expected us to meet some of their needs. 

Have your expectations of God changed as you have grown older? Is much of your conversation with God an exercise in sweetening up, persuasion or simple persistence as you put pressure on God to meet your needs or the needs of family, friends or the world you live in? 

Certainly, God wants us to grow up. Maturing as persons means making decisions and taking responsibility for our behaviour. But it also means accepting and becoming comfortable with limitations. There are so many areas of our lives where we are not in control, and often these are the most important areas. Though God becomes more friend than parent, we remain children of God and always dependent on God’s energising and forgiving love. 

I find it most encouraging to know that God loves me easily, personally, consistently, and unreservedly. God is constantly giving us all our very existence. God wants us to have the courage to trust; and in today’s Gospel, Jesus does his best to encourage us to accept that God is eminently trustworthy. 

[A mistranslation in Jesus’ story today, unfortunately, muddies the waters, giving the impression that childish persistence can change the mind of an otherwise reluctant God to care for us. Jesus said nothing about persistence. He was referring to the unthinkability that anyone in a Middle Eastern world would do something so shameful and lose face publicly by refusing hospitality to a stranger. His point was that it was even more unthinkable that God not respond to genuine human need.]

The tricky thing always is to find the balance between creaturely trust and adult responsibility.

I know that in order to experience life more richly, to become “better news” to myself and to others, I need to grow in my capacity and readiness to love. Yet I have come to realise that, left to my own resources, I shall grow no further. My spontaneous reaction to people is judgmental. I instinctively sum them up in terms of their impact on me – potential threat or friend, competitor or supporter, thinking the same way or not, insider or outsider. The list goes on. I would love to regard people habitually from a stance of love, or at least respect and acceptance. But I don’t. That is where I find the final sentence in today’s Gospel passage so encouraging. “The heavenly Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.” As I understand it, the Holy Spirit is the joyful, creative energy of the loving God. The Spirit is the energy of God “on tap” in the world. 

The only effective agent of change in me is that creative energy of the loving God. Fortunately, God is standing by, waiting for me to ask. Why ask? I think the reason is because God needs my personal cooperation. I can no longer succeed in loving as a solo performance. Yet it is I who wants to love. My loving needs to be a duet – or nothing. Love, after all, originates in the heart of God. 

Even the Lord’s Prayer seems to me, on reflection, to be a series of multi-faceted requests translating into practice my growing love as I walk through life hand-in-hand with God.