15th Sunday Year B - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2024

What I suggest that we do this morning is to spend some time working on today’s Second Reading in a similar way to how Mary worked on aspects of her life. In the early chapters of his Gospel, Luke said of her, two or three times: “As for Mary, she treasured these things and pondered them in her heart.” She “treasured” certain experiences: she appreciated them; she suspected that there was more to them than she had immediately picked up. “She pondered them”: she gave them time to sink in, not primarily into her head, but deeper than her head — “into her heart”, to really notice how they affected her, how she felt, how she reacted ‘deep down’. [And according to Luke’s timeline, she would hardly have been twenty years old!]

Why I suggest we do this is because I think that that was what Paul was doing in today’s Second Reading. He felt impelled to praise God, and to try to put words on the energy that was released within him. He praised God as “Father”, the source of all that is and all that happens. Particularly, though, for being the source of all that the human Jesus was and is. Paul referred to Jesus as the “Christ”, because Jesus was also uniquely the human revelation of God, not just through what he said and did, but especially through his sharing in and being alive with, the same divine life and love of the Father. Paul saw everything originating from and flowing from the Father.

Paul he also called Jesus “our Lord”. In what sense is this Jesus our “Lord”? I can think of two ways. The Father raised the crucified, dead, Jesus to life; and in the process somehow raised us, too, to a new way of being alive, namely, in Jesus. Remember Paul’s initial experience of Christ, when he was on his way to Damascus to wipe out the small Christian community living there; how the risen Jesus challenged him with, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Paul needed time to ponder that — and what a difference that pondering made to him! He came to see, as we heard in the Reading, that through Jesus, we had become “God’s adopted children”. We, too, would live with the very life of God, and, as consequence of that, we would “gain our freedom, the forgiveness of our sIns” — without our doing anything, apparently, on our part.

That had always been God’s plan: “before the world was made, God chose us, chose us in Christ … to live through love in God’s presence.” Paul saw this as “God’s free gift to us” — and that God was “determined”. Everything about us is God’s gift. God’s love is totally gratuitous. It is by no means our achievement. It is not something that we have merited.

I think that our coming to accept this, even to begin thinking about it, happens only as our own human love starts to mature. Before that, we remain stuck in a “reward/punishment” analysis of life and of our relationships with others [especially with God]. Only as this maturing happens do we find ourselves beginning to really want to love each other, everyone, as God does, to love God as God loves us, and, as Paul put it, “to praise the glory of his grace” [of his gratuitous graciousness or, simply, the wonder of his unconditional love].

And since Jesus is the one through whom God’s whole plan unfolded, we want to reach out fervently, single-mindedly, humbly, and truly personally, to him as “our Lord.”

The treasuring and pondering on life will no longer be done dutifully — they will come naturally. And the older we get, the more wonderful life can become.