HOMILY WEEK 22 02 – Year II
Living Out Fully Our Trinitarian Faith:
Memorial of St. Gregory the Great
(1 Cor 2:10-16; Ps 145; Lk 4:31-37)
*******************************************************
Step 3 of the A.A. program reads, “Made a decision to surrender our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.”
This step, and today’s readings, invite us to celebrate and live out to the full our Trinitarian faith in God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit – to live in the Spirit, grow in the Father’s love, and become more like Jesus the Son.
While Step 3 is very broad and wide open, allowing members the freedom to claim an image of God with which they are comfortable, we are so privileged to believe in God who is relationship, intimacy, unity, family. The bond of love between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit. Imagine the power of that relationship – Father loving the Son, Son loving the Holy Spirit who in turn loves the Father – a dynamic dance of love or perichoresis. That is a God to whom one can feel free to surrender one’s will and life.
In the first reading to the Corinthians, St. Paul focuses on the Holy Spirit, who alone truly knows the heart of God, and the depths of the human person. The Spirit is also the source of all gifts. Paul speaks of being spiritual and unspiritual. I like the phrase “We are all spiritual beings having a human experience.” We are so fortunate to have an intimate on-going relationship with the Holy Spirit, including the ability to receive inspiration and direction in very down-to-earth matters. I remember asking for guidance when visiting communities, feeling urged to turn into a specific home, and walking right into a heated argument a couple was having that I ended up mediating. It was rather thrilling to think the Holy Spirit was involved in such incidents!
The psalm is all about God. In fact, it is a high point in terms of an Old Testament theology of God, with its description of God as gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, good to all, compassionate to all of God’s creation, faithful in all God’s works, gracious in all of God’s deeds, and upholding the weak and downtrodden. This description stands out like a shining gem amidst all the other often more violent images of God in the Old Testament.
This Old Testament image of God, highly developed as it is, falls short of the fullness of God’s love revealed by Jesus on the cross. It is no coincidence the curtain in the temple in Jerusalem was torn from top to bottom the moment Jesus died on the cross. That curtain was there to keep people away from the Holy of Holies which only the high priest could enter once a year after he was purified. Now there is no separation between humanity and God. In Jesus’ death on the cross, we can see right into the heart of God, and what we see is humility, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, unconditional love, intimate relationship and total non-violence. This is our God!
In the gospel, Jesus, Son of God, Word made Flesh, the long-awaited Messiah in action, heals a man by delivering him of an unclean spirit. That brings to mind the two-fold mission of Jesus as the Messiah – to redeem and to sanctify, to forgive and to heal. That is something only he can do, and in faith we can come to him for forgiveness and healing. The Holy Spirit gives us spiritual insight to see where we need forgiveness (our sins), and for what we need healing (our sinfulness – that which makes us sin). Then the unconditional love of the Father present in Jesus comes to us through the power of the Spirit, and we are made new.
St. Paul claims we have the mind of Christ – a bold statement. Yet that is what Jesus first preached – believe and repent. Repent in Greek is to do metanoia – to put on our highest mind, to be the best person we can be. We truly are to put on the mind of Christ, to think and act as Jesus would, to see reality with his eyes. The bracelet WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) is pertinent here.
I like to summarize our Catholic spirituality with this sentence: We are all coming back to the Father, through Jesus the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit, with Mary our mother.
September 1st was the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation which begins the Season of Creation that runs until October 4th, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi. This is an ecumenical season dedicated to prayer for the protection of creation and the promotion of sustainable lifestyles. I suspect that if Jesus was walking the earth today as he did in Palestine two thousand years ago, given the sorry state of our planet in terms of pollution, he would teach the Great Commandment this way: we are to love God with our whole being, love others as we love ourselves, and love all of God’s creation.
Biblically, we are taught in Genesis to have dominion over creation. Theologically, we are taught that we are to have stewardship over creation. Within the Indigenous worldview, however, we are taught to walk in a harmonious relationship with all of creation, that we are all related and all in this world together. We have four levels of relationships – to God, others, ourselves, and all of creation. The Cree phrase, kahkiyaw ni wâhkômâkanak – “All my relations,” expresses this well. We are invited to pray today not just for the well-being of this creation, but also for the inspiration and motivation for all of us to do what we can to care for creation, and live out the teachings of Pope Francis in his remarkable encyclical Laudato Si.
Today the church remembers St Gregory, who was born about the year 540 into a wealthy Roman family. After a brief but distinguished service as Chief Magistrate of Rome, he resigned to become a Benedictine monk and used his great wealth to establish several monasteries. In 578 he was ordained deacon and sent to Constantinople as papal ambassador. In 586 Gregory was recalled to Rome and became abbot. Four years later he was elected pope. His charity in feeding starving Romans, his protection of Jewish rights and his political diplomacy helped earn him the title ‘great.’ Several centuries after his death Gregory was credited with developing Gregorian chant, although this remains disputed. He is known as the Apostle of England for sending missionaries there, including Augustine of Canterbury. Gregory died in 604, and is a Doctor of the Church.
The Eucharist is an intimate family meal with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We experience the unconditional love of the Father, made present in Word and Sacrament in the person of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Forgiven and healed, we are then sent out, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to live out our Trinitarian faith by loving others as Jesus has loved us, and all of God’s creation.
