The following is in two parts. The first is the homily I actually preached for today's texts. What follows is what I first wrote, but decided it was too "thick" for everyone to follow (trying to cram too much into too limited space). I include it, though, because––for those interested–– it fills in "reading between the lines" for what was actually preached.
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March 15, 2015–– 4th Sunday in Lent
2 Chronicles 36:14–16, 19–23 / Ephesians 2:4–10 / John 3:14–21
Living in the Love of God
What if…. every morning…. before we did anything else…. we took time to orient ourselves…. for the whole day…. to one encompassing reality: God loves us!?
Today’s Gospel has one of the most well-known verses in the entire Bible: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.
I’m a parent and a grandparent. I would give anything possible for the good of my kids. On the other hand, I cannot imagine choosing to give a single one of them up to death. Try to grasp the incomprehensible: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son….
We can hear it without truly giving ourselves to it, and it’s like we become inoculated to the transforming power of this most basic truth: God loves us!
When people do not know the love of God (and that’s different than having some idea about God’s love), something horrible happens: We go looking for love in all the wrong places. We even develop warped ideas of what love really is. “Love” becomes selfishness.
We can become so twisted in our own ideas of love that we do not want to know the real love of God. God’s love can even make us angry when we’ve developed a pattern of turning away from it. The Gospel tells us everyone who does wicked things hates the light. When this happens, the people who do know the true love of God appear to be out of touch and even “unloving”! That happened to Israel and it’s described in the first reading: They mocked the messengers of God, despised his warnings, and scoffed at his prophets, until the anger of the Lord against his people was so inflamed that there was no remedy.
Has it ever occurred to you that every hard and horrible thing in this world is ultimately rooted in people trying to live outside the love of God? Turning away from God’s love is death. Even in today’s Gospel, this text that proclaims the incredible the love of God, there is a warning––a grim reality: whoever does not believe has already been condemned because he has not believed….
There is a choice to be made. Every day we make a decision, either intentionally or by default. God loves us. He wants us to love him back. So I ask again: What if…. every morning…. before we did anything else…. we took time to orient ourselves…. for the whole day…. to one encompassing reality: God loves us!?
If we truly love the God who loves us, everything else falls into place. This is the Gospel.
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God’s Love In A Hard World
God so loved the world…. This is one of the most well-know verses of Scripture in the entire Bible. In his first letter St John even says God is love (1Jn 4:8). Out of this declaration comes perhaps the hardest question in all of Christianity: If God’s love is so great, why do so many horrible things happen in this world?
How does one answer such a question in a short homily? To be sure, a full answer is not possible (even in a long book). To understand the intricacies of God we would have to be equal to God, so please know that we all need to begin (and to remain) at a place of humility. Ultimately, all we can do is bow before God (which is the essence of worship) and “trust and obey” (which is our only sure response––and there is a wonderful gospel song by that title).
Still the question haunts us: If God’s love is so great, then why do so many horrible things happen in this world? Perhaps simple is sometimes best, so I offer some simple observations from today’s readings. I hope we can see why the reading from Chronicles is paired with John 3.
The Scriptures explicitly proclaim God’s love. This truth is at the heart of the Bible and the Church. The love of God is literally the reason we are here; we were created in love. The love of God is the only thing that offers any hope for us in the world as we know it.
This is because, even as God’s love is the ultimate truth of existence, it is also true that this world is full of hard and awful things. Why?
This world is full of hard and awful things because we (human beings) have chosen that! We do not like to hear this, and it is quite unpopular to have opinions that lead to passing judgment, but we really need to understand the whole context of Christian Faith. Christianity is the only belief system that makes sense of all the data and offers an answer that is both internally consistent and offers genuine hope (which is not to deny that some issues are left unresolved; God is God, and that’s the nature of faith).
God created human beings to be rational, responsible, and relatively free (I say “relatively” because our freedom is contained within God’s sovereignty––only God is God). God made us as we are because he is Love, and we were created to love. It goes against the nature of love to be coerced; love is a choice that must be freely given. So when God wants us to love him back (because he created us in love), he gives us the choice not to love back. What most people do not understand is that when we do not love God, awful things happen. God made the world to “run” according to his Love, and when we act against that we make life in this world very hard.
This is what the Old Testament reading is about. God’s people, Israel, who were given God’s special directives of how to live, disobeyed and repeatedly rejected God’s messengers of warning. The repercussions of their willfulness grew larger and larger until everything around them collapsed. That is always the ultimate result of dismissing God.
God’s love does not mean we are free to do whatever we wish and then get by with wrong things. The true nature of love included responsibilities. It is not love to marry a person and then practice adultery (spiritual adultery against God was a recurring message of the prophets). It is not love when a parent does nothing to correct and even punish a child for behavior that is harmful or destructive (and again, Scripture likens God to a loving parent that disciplines his children for their good). God is so loving that he uses even hard things to help us embrace his kind of love.
The idea of love has become so twisted in our society that we need a context for understanding the true implications of love. God is love, and God’s love is just that––God’s love. We are not the ones who define love. When we try to make love something other than what God has designed, horrible things happen. Distorted “love” causes distorted results in our lives.
But even then, God shows his love. God gives us a way back. God shows us what our disobedience leads to, and he shows us what true love does. When we look at Jesus on the cross we are looking at what disobedience to God really means. When we begin to comprehend that God took that death upon himself to show us a way out, we then begin to get a taste of real love.
Jesus is the ultimate prophet of God bringing his love to our world. There is no one that God does not love. There is no one that God does not desire to love him back. But the nature of love remains: We have to choose to respond. We have to choose God’s love above and beyond the many imposters of love that our world offers. Too many people too often choose to go their own way. The Gospel tells of people who preferred darkness to light, and that everyone who does wicked things hates the light. This is like Israel so long ago who mocked the messengers of God, despised his warnings, and scoffed at his prophets, until the anger of the Lord against his people was so inflamed that there was no remedy.
No remedy? After telling of judgment, the Old Testament reading gives a promise of what God will do in the future: he will lovingly restore his people. Then the promise was ultimately fulfilled in the words we know so well: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. Notice God’s motivation: God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. But did you notice that it is conditional? God has not changed. He was not unloving and judging in the Old Testament only to have a change of mind and let everyone off the hook in the New Testament. The Gospel continues: whoever does not believe has already been condemned because he has not believed….
This is the nature of love. God lovingly calls us to know him through his Son. Whoever believes in him will not be condemned. Love is reciprocal. God loves us. He wants us to love him back. If we truly love God, everything else falls into place. This is the Gospel.
