A Homily for the Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Joshua 24:1-2a, 15-17, 18b Ephesian 5:21-32 or 5: 2a, 25-32 John 6:60-69
You know that you are reading a great novelist when you find yourself thinking, “Yes, that is exactly how I saw it.” Claire Messud is that sort of writer.
Listen to these thoughts on God, from Chloe, a 7-year-old Australian girl. They are found in Messud’s newest, multigenerational novel, This Strange Eventful History. Do they not correspond to how you thought around the same age? Chloe is thinking about a little boy who has drowned in his family’s pool, and about the trouble she is in for the smashed banana in the bottom of her book bag. As she puts it, “I have so many things to worry about.”
I do believe in God, if only secretly. I can’t tell if Mummy or Daddy do, and maybe I believe for all of us. He sees in our hearts and He knows all the wrong things we think and do and have ever done. But if we are good and try very hard, we can hope he will protect us. Every night I say the Lord’s Prayer and a special prayer for everyone in my family to be safe. Nothing feels safe unless I keep watch. I remember a time when I had no fear; and then suddenly came the time when I was afraid of everything, when I could see Death and Disaster hiding in every corner. I pine for the time when I felt free; I think of it as being like Adam and Eve in the bible only I don’t know when I ate the apple. I cannot remember what changed or when, for me, I only know it’s different now. When I was smaller I thought maybe I was God, or a part of God, but now I know this isn’t right. Is God in us? Above us? With us? If He is all powerful, why do such bad things happen?
Mummy and Daddy aren’t God, obviously, but if Loulou is the boss of me, Mummy is our boss and Daddy the boss of us all. They can both get very cross and it feels like God’s punishment, like when Mummy made my birthday cake but it burned and she threw it very hard on the floor—the crumbs flew everywhere like confetti, and the glass dish shattered—and she said, “I will never, ever make a cake again in my life,” and of course it was my fault because the cake was for me; and I also sinned by being secretly selfishly saddest about not having a cake after all. Or when I was six and Daddy yelled because he’d come back from a long trip, and Loulou and I ran down the stairs to meet him, all excited, and the first thing I said was, “What did you bring us? What did you bring?” That was the sin of being spoiled. Of course I didn’t really care more about my present than about Daddy but I was, as Daddy said later when he wasn’t so angry, taking him for granted. But you mustn’t take anything for granted because everything can disappear. Like Michelle’s little brother. He was here, so cute. I remember him with honey-colored curls and big amber eyes, and now he is gone. Maybe she took him for granted, and that is why God took him away.
Chloe thinks of God as the great parent in the sky, the boss of it all—even Daddy. If God gets mad, something goes wrong for you; conversely, if something went wrong for you, God must be mad. So the goal in life is not to make God mad, even if at times you can sense a certain unfairness in life. All you wanted was a birthday cake. Was that really being selfish?
The problem is that our childhood thoughts of God never completely go away, try as we might to revise them as we grow older.
It is foolish to think of God as the parent we must not make angry, and even more foolish to think that the solution is simply to wander as far as possible from such a God, hoping that it will not be noticed. To reject the God of childhood without finding something truer is to run away from a parent. And no one can run far enough.
Today’s Gospel contains my most cherished words in Scripture, which is saying a lot.
The crowd has left Jesus because they cannot comprehend what it would even mean for him to be “the bread of life.” I hear deep discouragement in his voice when Jesus turns to the 12 and says, “Do you also want to leave?” Then Peter, who almost never says the right thing, answers: “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (Jn 6:67-68).
Peter is not sticking around because Jesus has proven himself to be all-powerful, the biggest boss there is. The resurrection is still shrouded in the future. Whatever demonstrations of power he has seen—Christ has just fed the crowd and walked on water—Peter still sees Jesus as a man, someone you can just as easily walk away from as toward. The crowd has also seen his works of power, yet they walk away from Jesus.
But Peter speaks for the rest of the chosen band when he says that he would not even know where to go because “you have the words of eternal life.” Peter has come to love Jesus, not because of what he can do for him but because of who he is. Such is the way of true love.
If we think we need to be someone, to act a particular way to earn God’s love, we still think like a child who fears the loss of a parent’s love. “Maybe she took him for granted and that is why God took him away.”
You only know the real God when you judge the beauty and goodness of the world to be so great a gift that you are convinced there must be a giver. So much cannot come from nothing. You know the real God when you ponder the face of Jesus revealed in the Gospels and you cannot but love and adore the beauty and goodness you see therein.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux said that the only thing we can truly share with God is love. The true disciple does not love God to gain something; love is its own reward. Bernard wrote, “For when God loves, all he desires is to be loved in return; the sole purpose of his love is to be loved, in the knowledge that those who love him are made happy by their love of him.” Are you happy simply because you love God and are loved by him, or are you holding happiness at bay, awaiting God’s approval and subsequent blessings? If it is the latter, you have yet to meet the real God.
Yes, the world is a cold and dangerous place. Like Chloe, we have so many things to worry about. “I could see Death and Disaster hiding in every corner.” But you have never intuited who the real God is, never fully seen what is revealed in the face and figure of Christ on the cross until you realize that God must simply be truth and goodness and love for you, regardless of who you are and what you do.
Of course, you are going to keep asking God to bless you and assist you. God is the whole; we are the fragment. God is the source; we are the dependent stream. But you have become the mature—even if still deeply flawed—disciple St. Peter was when you can honestly say that, come what may, you are not going anywhere. You know goodness and truth and beauty and, most of all, love when you see it. “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
