People loved by God to love
Ordinary Sunday 30: 26 October, 2003
Fr Neville Connell
Assistant Priest, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
One of the hardest parts of ministry as a priest at St Peter's is
to see humanity which is damaged, often very badly; to meet, to know,
to love, to walk with people who seem determined to destroy them
selves with drugs of one kind or another.
After three years here I have no easy answers to the human tragedy,
the human condition, in the sense of bringing about recovery, restoration – or what we as Christians would say, a new Creation.
Some of those who come to our breakfast programme or to our doors
at home have been baptised, and confirmed even; they are, therefore,
by the gift of God's Holy Spirit, new creations already. Baptism is
the beginning of new creation for us all – yet, defaced, damaged,
broken by human frailty, by sin, someone's sin, someone's selfishness,
someone's pride – theirs or others'.
The Catholic Faith which we preach begins with Creation, as God's
gift of overflowing love. Why did God create? After all, the Holy
Trinity is Being love eternally – the Father loves the Son, who
loves the Holy Spirit, who loves the Father. God in three persons
has no need of anything external. Yet, it is of the nature of love
to overflow; if we know anything of love we know that it must be
shared.
So God's love overflows in the creation, unceasingly. This love is
God's free gift, and wonderfully free, because there are in a sense
no strings attached. We are truly free to reject God, to say that
we have no need of such a hypothesis, as so many do today.
But the same love which brought us to conception and to birth draws
us back to the heart of love; as St Augustine discovered in the
fifth century, after a dissolute youth, "Lord, you have made us for
yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their home
in you". And is not 'restlessness' the mark of so many people today...?
The human foetus, baby, child, teenager, adult – young, middle-aged,
old, is all one person, and one before and after death. We are each one
person. This is Catholic faith.
Our physical growth, our growth mentally, emotionally, pyschologically
are all God's gift to each of us uniquely, as persons male or female
It matters not that we are different, that one seems to have more
ability than another. Only envy, pride, causes such thoughts.
And our spiritual growth is God's gift. In all these ways he draws
us to become more and more the people, the persons he has created
us to be, to become what we are by Holy Baptism, a new creation.
But the very freedom God has given us, the risk he has taken in
Creation, even in the physical earth with its earthquakes and other
disasters, has lead us astray.
The Church has not been immune, with two major splits, in the eleventh
and sixteenth centuries, and many lesser, but just as sad, divisions
along the way.
The existentialists after World War II told us that the right human
response to all this can only be despair. And so many people do
despair, they give up, turn in on themselves, and find solace in escape
in self-destruction – drugs of all kinds. They no longer love themselves
as people worth loving, and so no longer even love their own bodies
We who are Christian have a mission in this despair, the desperate
craving for fun and a 'good time' all around us, and within us. This
mission is to be people of hope. Brother Roger of the Taize Community
reminds us continually that we are to be 'signs of hope';
we are to understand ourselves as loved by God, as people with a
purpose – people whose bodies, minds, spirits and souls are all loved
by God as a unity. People loved by God to love.
In our First Reading today (Jeremiah 31:7-9), Jeremiah has such a
vision, despite the wilful, sinful behaviour of his own people, "Shout
with joy for Jacob... The Lord has saved his people ...See, I will
bring them back ...They had left in tears, I will comfort them as I
lead them back." This applies to those taken away into exile, but
also to those who have turned away in sinful directions.
The Old Testament prophets understood that no matter how often the
Hebrew people turned away from God, He would never stop loving them,
and would forgive them. He would, as it were, always find a way to
forgive, to love them, and so must we.
The Christian community is the fruit of God's love, because eventually
He sent His own Son to share our frailty and temptation, to
share the limitations of humanity. As the writer of the Letter to
Hebrews says in our Second Reading today (Hebrews 5ò1-6), "Every high
priest has been taken out of mankind and is appointed to act for men
in their relations with God..., and so he can sympathize with those
who are ignorant or uncertain because he too lives in the limitations
of weakness." The writer applies this above all to Jesus,
the true High Priest.
Paradoxically, in sharing our human flesh, sharing our weakness,
Jesus gave new dignity to the human body. Jesus took our flesh
from Mary's womb, but as the Son of God, and in so doing sanctified
it. When Jesus was born as a human baby, helpless though he might have
been, a new creation began – new hope was born, and when he was
raised from the dead, the great enemy of all human beings, death,
was overcome.
Death, tragically, becomes the friend, as they see it, of those who
despair. But for those who have hope, death is the time for the
next stage of our pilgrimage of hope, our journey to our true home
Heaven.
In our Gospel Reading for today (Mark 10:46-52), Jesus opened the
eyes of the blind man, and he saw physically; but he saw more, he
saw Jesus, he saw new life, he saw salvation and he followed Jesus.
Blessed Mother Teresa, when complimented for the selfless work
of herself and her Sisters, in giving dignity to the destitute and
dying, accepted the compliment, but said, "But this is not enough.
We must give these people Jesus" That is hope, especially for the
dying. This is salvation.
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