March 13, 2015
The following is a homily based on the Scripture readings for Sunday, March 15.
We live in a world of radical ideas and impulses. Daily we hear about ISIS whose vicious killings they proudly publish to frighten and shame the world. Islam’s conquest of everyone and everything is their one radical thought. Our own American world is often torn between one extremism or another: Tea Party types refuse to compromise when, for decades, compromise was called the name of the game. Likewise, radical left-wing types appear, looking to overthrow society’s conventions. Who needs money? Who needs property? Who needs laws? Everyone should own everything equally.
In the Gospel today we have the most radical Christian teaching, one so radical that even Christians themselves have barely grasped it. The kernel of this idea is simple and overwhelming: God gave his Son as a gift to humankind in order to bring us the fullest of lives. This teaching tells us about God – that God has shown us, in Jesus, the immeasurable riches of his grace. We cannot calculate these riches. We cannot measure the extent to which God has taken the initiative to love us, and show us love, in Jesus. God is total, pure, unlimited love.
The Gospel says that if we see this truth about God, then we will not be condemned. But if we refuse to see this truth about God, then condemnation has already happened. This raises many alarm bells for us, of course, because this immeasurable love of God soon starts sounding like a threat, and this opens for us the other ideas of God that fill our heads. God as the power broker. God as the punisher and avenger. God as the one pulling the strings in history and in our lives. This is why even people who know God’s love very well still ask themselves “What did I do?” when cancer or mishap comes to them.
In other words, we do not easily believe in God’s unlimited love. We believe in God as the policeman whose love is quite conditional on our obeying the law. But this is exactly the kind of God Jesus came to erase from our hearts. We can see how, in the first reading, the Ancient Jews interpreted their history as God’s punishment. This reading from the Second Book of Chronicles is one of the most compressed and dour descriptions of the destruction of Jerusalem, the subsequent Exile in Babylon, and the return of the Jewish people to Israel after more than fifty years of captivity. See what God does when we don’t obey him, we want to say. God takes revenge. And so, in the name of God, people in our own day take revenge as well.
But what is this condemnation in the Gospel? It is only and really this: that we live with the consequences of having blocked God’s love and life from our hearts. This is not what God does to us; it’s what we do to ourselves. We distort God’s image because it takes too much for us to affirm God’s goodness and love as we should. After all, if we see God as pure and generous love, then how should we live? How can we be as petty and craven as we are? So we project our pettiness onto God.
The death of Jesus rather teaches us this: God’s love abides in and through our whole lives, when those lives are rich, and when they are in stress; when we feel wonderful and when we feel depressed; when we are vibrant, and when we are broken. Was not the Father with Jesus through the cross? And was not God, paradoxically, with Ancient Israel in its exile? That God loves us does not mean that pain and death disappear; that God loves us means that pain and death become transformed in the infinite love of God. Jesus converts his death into the definitive sign of God’s generous, forgiving, and renewing love.
How many sports events have folks with signs holding up John 3:16, the verse we read today? It often seems corny to us. Who knows how they even understand the verse they are pushing into the camera lens? But Lent challenges us to probe this verse in our lives. Do I believe in Love, Love as the origin and destiny of all creation, Love as the meaning of all history, and Love as the explanation of my own life and destiny? To believe that is to believe in the mission of Jesus. And this, of course, is the most radical teaching we can ever learn.