30th Sunday Year C - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2016

 “[The tax-collector] went home again at rights with God, the other did not”. 

At rights with God, perhaps better, aligned with God, in tune with God, open to and enjoying God. 

St John tells us that God is love. The very essence of God is defined as, consists of, loving. If so, God cannot ‘not love’. God loves everyone, always. And God cannot make exceptions, because God can only be perfect, complete, thorough, total, consistent. So both men went home equally loved by God; yet, one was at rights with God, the other was not. Obviously, it is not enough to be loved by God. That God’s love be of any benefit to us depends also on us. We need to accept God’s love. We need to let it flow through us, and then flow out from us. That way, it changes us.

The Pharisee in today’s story misunderstood God and God’s love. He confused it with reward. He saw God’s love as earned, as controllable. I suspect that most of us, for most of our lives, instinctively feel that way too. He was not attuned to God’s love given gratuitously and always on offer. Basically satisfied with his efforts, he did not see any real need for God’s love, other than as an agreeable bonus. He felt no need to learn to trust totally in God’s gift of love, because in his mind, he deserved it. Because he felt sure he had earned God’s love, when he did sin, he was psychologically unable to own the fact. He was unable to see or recognize his sin and had no motivation to look more closely. Consequently, there was no change in the Pharisee, no growth. He was certainly not in tune with God, not at rights with God – and in a potentially highly destructive place to operate from. This is a major problem for religious institutions and for those of us who are professional religious, and explains partly why clergy sexual abuse was not faced openly and effectively, and perhaps is still not.

The tax-collector’s prayer is worth examining more closely, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner”. He confronted his own sin. He owned and accepted the fact that he sinned. It was a start. More importantly, he believed God’s love. He trusted God and was ready to accept God’s love [and mercy]. 

Interestingly, the fact that we are sinners and the fact that God loves us nevertheless, both allow of degree, of more and less. Over time, our trust in God can grow, opening the way to deeper self-knowledge. Trust essentially is relationship; and relationship can continue to blossom until it becomes: “All that I am, just as I am, offered to all that you are, just as you are”. It is a dynamic that works two ways: the Trinity offer themselves to us sinners and draw us into their inner life of joy-filled love as we in turn accept their love and offer our lives more and more confidently and completely to them.  Indeed, as our trust in God develops and we know in our bones that we are loved totally gratuitously, we can take the psychological risk and face the obvious. We can come increasingly to see just how truly we are sinners, how destructive of our personal dignity our sin is, how much it hurts others – and yet how God’s love for us remains unchanged. We are safe. Bewildered yet exultant, we want to weep.

The perceptive fourteenth century English mystic, Julian of Norwich, agrees with us. “We need to fall… If we never fell we should never know the astonishing love of our Maker. That we sinned grievously … made no difference at all to God’s love, and we were no less precious in God’s sight.” 

Like the tax-collector, we can go back to our homes at rights with God – not sinless, nowhere near perfect and not likely ever to be, no better than anyone else, captivated by God, surprisingly loved, wanting to love, and quietly joy-filled.