August 7, 2020
A homily by Paulist Fr. Mark-David Janus, inspired by some of this week’s First Readings at Mass from Jeremiah.
A jeremiad is a long angry complaint, a word
understandably derived from the book of Jeremiah.
Jeremiah 31 is the exception:
“I have loved you with an everlasting love”
is God’s message to the people
Jeremiah has spent 30 chapters lambasting.
Loved you with an everlasting love,
Ever-lasting, a word that time travels,
Reaching all the way back to before the beginning,
“I have loved you before you were born”
Reaching forward into infinity
“I will always love you beyond the end of time.”
This is how God loves even his most disappointing children.
The German theologian Thomas Soding writes
That this sort of love means
we are not loved because of who we are,
we are loved because we are.
Do you see the difference?
Our challenge is the same as that of Jeremiah,
How do we preach this in such a way
That people encounter God’s love?
Maybe parents can understand
What it means to love someone before they are,
Loving a child before they are born,
Loving them not because of who they are
but because they are.
Those of us who are not parents and perhaps
Those of us who have not been loved that way
We have dig deep, we have to stretch
To reach to find the words, to find the actions
That communicates how God loves.
It is not an easy task-especially in a world
That loves so very differently, if at all.
People want to know only one thing from a Christian:
“What it is like to know God?”
This is our mission, our ministry, our challenge
To make explicit God’s everlasting love,
The love that time travels back before we were born
And forward, beyond that place when we die.
Amen.