30th Sunday Year A - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2023

It does not seem a happy world we are living in.

There is so much mutual hatred, so much extreme violence. And the deliberately targeted victims are too often civilians — hundreds and thousands of them. The obscene amounts of money and resources squandered on the world’s armaments industries dwarf the amounts spent on feeding, clothing and housing the world’s poor and hungry.

We can thank God, at least, that our own nation does not face the threat of war, though we sometimes choose to join in them.

Today we have come to Mass to be greeted with three Scripture readings, each mentioning in its own way the theme of mutual love: love between God and us, love between neighbours, and redemptive love flowing from the heart of Christ to a world still suffocating in its sinning. I hope that today’s is a message that we all here find wonderfully attractive. As we let God’s love soak into us, we find ourselves wanting to love God more. As we begin to love God more, we find ourselves increasingly wanting to love others — to be brother or sister to all.

No wonder! We are made for love. The powerful dynamic of the world’s love originates from God. Creation is saturated with love. We human creatures bear the image of God … who is love. Yet therein lies a profound problem. So that we might love, we were necessarily created to be free. Unhappily, in our insecurity, we have too often freely chosen to use that freedom to turn away from the ways of love, and to opt for selfishness; which all inevitably results in deeper envy and fear; and in turn floods our world with further hostility and violence.

Yet God has not hesitated for one moment to seek to save us from ourselves. God insists on loving this world, on genuinely loving us all. God eventually sent the Second Member of the Trinity to become human and to live among us, in order to save us from ourselves and from each other.

With so much divine love at our finger-tips, all we need do is to make ourselves available to it in order for us to receive it into our heart and so into our world. What a difference it would make to ourselves and to our world if we deliberately set ourselves to engage with God each day, even briefly: to hear God address us by our name, to hear Jesus call each of us his friend! We are so close to God, but it so easy for us simply to remain unresponsive to God’s caring, thoughtful presence.

We worry and feel sad about the violent wars being currently fought in our world. We yearn to be able somehow to bring about peace between the warring sides. We feel so useless, so powerless. Pope Francis, among others, urges us to pray. But we can wonder whether prayer ultimately achieves anything.

At least, let us give it a go. We can say prayers we have learnt by heart. We do not need to say anything. It may be better for us not to say anything. It is enough, as the wonderful mediaeval mystic, Teresa of Avila, once wrote of prayer, to imagine God there within our hearts … or, better, “simply to gaze upon God, present within us”.

If all of us Catholics around the world undertook to pray with greater dedication, especially if our prayer reflected a genuine love for everyone, what an enormous surge of love that would bring into the world!

Would it be enough to influence the world’s mood? There is little else truly constructive that we can do. It is worth trying. And at least our little world around us will be better for it.