33rd Sunday Year C - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2010

In today’s Responsorial Psalm, the psalmist rejoiced because The Lord comes, comes to rule the earth. He will rule the world with justice. God – the just judge.

In the First Reading, the Hebrew prophet Malachi expressed his sense of the justice of God: The day is coming now, burning like a furnace; and all the arrogant and the evil-doers will be like stubble. The day that is coming is going to burn them up, says the Lord of hosts … But for those who fear my name, the sun of righteousness will shine out with healing in its rays.

According to Malachi, God’s justice means punishment for evil-doers, and reward for those who fear God’s name. Israel was obviously still on its long journey across the centuries into the heart of God.Gradually, its sense of God was becoming less and less distorted, closer and closer to the truth.But the sense of God as punisher of the evil and rewarder of the good was still an adolescent sense of God.

Jesus gave us a quite different insight into God and God’s justice. God loves the world, this world of good and bad people, this world of sinners. It was God’s love for us all, sinners and saints, that was the reason why God sent his Son. God’s justice is not about condemnation or punishment.

As the Gospel of John puts it: God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved. The thrust of God’s justice is not to punish, but to call to conversion, and to enable that conversion, precisely by loving us. Nor is the thrust of God’s justice to reward, either. Reward is about earning. That’s too miserable a sense of God! God’s love is not earned. It cannot be earned. It doesn’t need to be earned –because God loves us gratuitously, unconditionally, infinitely – precisely, as St Paul wrote, while we were still sinners.

We reward ourselves with heaven; we punish ourselves with hell. Heaven and hell are the lived experience of our choices to allow ourselves to be drawn into the mystery of love or to close ourselves off from the mystery of love of God, of others, and of our true selves – undistracted, forever.

There is suffering in the world; but it is not God’s doing. Much of it is caused directly or indirectly by us. Today’s Gospel makes it clear: as long as people choose not to listen to Jesus and to reject Jesus’ way of life, there will be wars and revolutions – nation will fight against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And at the more personal level, men will seize you and persecute you … some of you will be put to death. There’s suffering alright – but so much is our doing.

Certainly, there are also earthquakes and plagues and famines that are not our doing – but they are not God’s punishment, either (even if we find it impossible to sort out everything about the mystery of suffering in the world).

Jesus turned common sense upside down. His response to the world’s violence, and to evil oppressors, was to allow himself to be their victim – not, as Malachi imagined, to burn them up … leaving them neither root nor stalk. The world is the way it is because people choose to counter violence with violence, and so often, in their self-righteous crusade against evil, even to claim that God is “on their side” (as though God is not on everyone’s side).Jesus chose the way of the victim, and challenged his followers to do the same: your endurance will win you your lives. 

The last of the Beatitudes always haunts me: Happy those who are persecuted in the cause of right, and, as if that is not enough, Jesus added: Rejoice and be glad – for your reward will be great in heaven – (not God rewarding, but our rewarding of ourselves for choosing to accept and to be caught up in God’s unearnable and infinite energy of love).