19th Sunday Year C - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2010

What’s my sense of God? What is God like?

I think, in today’s Gospel, that Jesus is saying: Be careful! Your sense of God can be too narrow, too mean, too straight-laced. He seems to be saying that God is a God of surprises, a God of unexpected goodness, of outlandish goodness, of disconcerting love: a master who serves up a meal for his servants in the middle of the night for no obvious reason

Jesus urges us to be ready to open the door to this unexpectedly good God, likely to break into our lives at all sorts of ungodly times.

Be ready! Is he talking about when we die? or is he talking about whenever? today? tomorrow? I don’t think it matters much, because, whenever it is, he still wants us to be ready.

What does being ready involve? If we’re thinking of our death, perhaps our first response might be to say “by being in the state of grace”. But what is this “state of grace”? and we might answer: “Not having any mortal sins on our soul.” To me, that’s a miserable answer – that says almost nothing.

Grace? What’s grace? Grace means gift … But what’s the gift, in that case? and who is giving it? The gift that grace is God’s gift of God’s own love. So the “state” of grace is the state of being with, living with, the God who is in love with us, the God who likes us and who even enjoys loving us. But that reality is not just for then, for after our death. It’s now!

How do we get ready for that? How do we keep awake for that? By learning to see and to recognise the disconcertingly loving God, by learning to appreciate the wonder of it all. I think that we shall do that when we die only if we’re learning to do it now, if we’re making the most of every opportunity to see, to appreciate and to truly believe the love around in the atmosphere, and to get drawn into it and to practice it ourselves.

We can learn to see our world and the people in our lives as gifts; as sort of sacraments of God. God is constantly surprising us through them – if only we learn to recognise God there. We can keep learning to love … and that often starts by recognising our so often spontaneous hostility and choosing, delightfully, to ignore it.

What a God! popping up in unexpected places at unexpected times … and loving us in such unexpected ways through so many unexpected people. That God is with us now as we continue with this Eucharist, our weekly chance to say “Thank you” to God – after all, that’s what Eucharist means.