Trinity Sunday - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2017

A number of shops in Hamilton have decorated their shop windows in rainbow colours to show support for the “Pride & Inclusion” football match in the town next weekend.  As might be expected, citizens have reacted differently – some quietly pleased, some highly opposed, most, I presume, fairly indifferent. I would not be surprised if the members of our Catholic congregation experience a similar range of reactions.  It was against this background that I have been pondering this past week on the readings for today’s Mass.

 God loved the world so much. What a great starting point! The world God loves is this world with its amazingly complex assortment of people and cultures. God loved this world so much that God wanted everyone in it to find eternal life. That this might be, God even sent his Son into this world.

 Why was that necessary? Listen again to the Gospel, “God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world [that was the farthest thing from God’s mind], but so that through him the world might be saved”... because this world of people loved by God needed to be saved – saved, obviously not from God, but from the mess we make of ourselves and of each other. Look at our TV news programs and it seems that this world that God loves has an incurable death wish, rather than an irrepressible urge for life, for eternal life.

 Eternal life is precisely what it says. It is life. It has to be lived. And for us humans, it has to be lived freely. Eternal life is something more than, over and above, immensely more wonderful than, human life. Eternal life is the same kind of life that God lives. And as the Gospel text made clear, God loves. God is love. Eternal life is living like God – so loving the world, each other, not tearing it or ourselves or each other apart, as we seem bent on doing.

 We cannot at times help judging the attitudes or action of others. Certainly God judges the world, and God’s judgment is clear. All of us are sinners; we are guilty. But that is totally irrelevant to God’s loving us.  We can find it hard to get hold of that; perhaps it calls for a certain maturity, or suffering, or confronting our unavoidable failures. Jesus was not sent into the world to condemn anyone; there is no violence in God. Judging does not rule out loving. God, seeing us destroying ourselves and each other, seeks, rather, to heal us, to heal those hidden wounds that drive us to mutual nastiness, hostility and destructiveness. God’s clear intention is to save us.

 But we have to cooperate, because eternal life calls for free decision on our part. Jesus came to show us through his whole lifestyle and teaching the need for us to become alert to our innate hostility, to try to move beyond it and choose to see this world as God does, to love this broken world and everyone else living in it, even if they don’t love us. We can freely hold back from loving, from forgiving, allowing our hostility to take over. But by so doing we condemn ourselves to life without love – hardly compatible with eternal life.

 Because God loves the world and creates everyone in it, God loves gay people as much as God loves straight. God has only one way of loving, and that is with all stops out, infinitely intensely, without discrimination, without conditions. While we often, and inevitably, in all sorts of contexts, have strong views on the rightness or wrongness of others’ actions and lifestyles, whether they are straight or gay, we certainly are never in a position to judge whether others are in a state of sin. Only God has access to the depths of human hearts. And if somewhere God sees sin, God’s response of healing mercy goes into overdrive.

 As people endeavoring to live with the life, and the mind and heart, of God, we endeavor to respect everyone, to be sensitive. That is basic. We may disagree with others, but as Pope Francis said once in answer to a question about gays, “Who am I to judge?”