4th Sunday of Lent B - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2024

Today’s Second Reading was relatively short — but packed quite a punch. In its few lines it presented a succinct look at the spirituality of St Paul, at what sourced his energy to work tirelessly in spreading the faith, and eventually to give his life in martyrdom for the cause of the God who loved him, and with him the whole world.

The passage started; “God loved the world so much” — a simple statement, but challenging. I sometimes wonder how much most of us really believe that, how much it affects our spontaneous sense of ourselves. How secure do we feel, for example, under the all-seeing gaze of 
God? Do we feel God’s knowledge of who we are a bit disconcerting? Paul endeavoured to make his point quite clear: “God loved the world so much that he was generous with his mercy”. This is a secure God, not a touchy God, defensive of his dignity. God knows all about sin. Sin does not faze God. God sees sin, not so much as an offence of himself, as an attitude that undermines our own happiness and with it the happiness of others. Sin leads us into war, into exploitation of our world, its resources and its beauty.

Paul made this point clear, too, going so far as to say: “… when we were dead through our sins, he brought us to life with Christ”. God sees and names our situation as we sadly are — the ‘walking dead’. We don’t go through life, most of us, bursting with joy. It is God who takes us seriously, God who “raised us up with [Christ] and gave us a place with him in heaven”. Paul saw this as our present reality, not just a possibility for the future. It is hard to get our heads around this. “Life with Christ”, “Heaven” can be a ‘now’ reality.

Why does God do this to us? Because God loves doing it. In the abundance of that love [that is God], God is “generous with his mercy”; and it is all gift — “through his goodness towards us in Christ Jesus, [God] is infinitely rich in grace”. “Grace” may be a word that we hear and use often without thinking what it means. It is helpful to see grace simply as the ‘practical, specific shape that God’s love takes whenever God reaches out to us’.

In the effort really to convince us that the initiative in the realisation of our salvation is always God’s, Paul insisted: “… it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith; not by anything of your own, but by a gift from God; not by anything that you have done, so that nobody can claim the credit. We are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus to live the good life as from the beginning he had meant us to live it.”

Hidden within that joyful outpouring of words was the word “faith”: “…by grace that you have been saved, through faith”. “Faith” is also God’s gift. But within God’s generous loving, God also respects the human freedom with which he has graced us all. God’s gratuitous offer of life and salvation needs to be freely accepted by us. It is God’s grace that enables our free acceptance — but we do need to cooperate, explicitly or implicitly. The depth of our trust of Jesus, of our faith in him, will be factors of our personal, cultivated friendship. The sad fact is that too many of us do not make the effort.  

As Jesus expressed it all himself: “The kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News.”  “Believe the good news”. Paul did. And to the extent that we do likewise, we also begin to experience “the good life” that God, in his wonderfully generous love, created us for. 

A smile lights up our faces.