Ridiculous mercy

Homily
24th Sunday in Ordinary Time C
12 September 2010
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center

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I dialogue with some very intelligent people who do not believe in God because they think He is mean. They think He is arbitrary. He lets bad things happen to good people, or maybe even causes them. These opponents can usually cite a passage in the Old Testament like the flood or God taking vengeance on His enemies ruthlessly. These people have a point, I guess. God does not mess around with evil. He hates evil with a much more perfect hate than you or I hate evil. We can tolerate it but He does not. God is also just. He is much more just than you or I are. He can see that it is not just to allow people who do not always do good to always live. Yet we can and do complain that it all seems so unfair, that bad people sometimes get to live longer than good people, even though neither should live forever. I guess people who think God is cruel can make some kind of argument. But I usually find that God is more just and hates evil more than we do. We blame God, or wonder where He is, during natural disasters, even though deep down we know that we probably have all the resources and expertise needed to keep people safe. It is moral evil, caused by man, that causes the most cruelty and pain. God may allow evil, but you have to stretch pretty far to say He is not good. God is not cruel. It is true that He does not let us live forever, but it is also true that the life we have is good. Life is worth living because God is good.

But even conceding that very intelligent people sometimes do make arguments against the goodness of God, their citing the times in the scriptures where God seems to take vengeance, or is unfair, seems quite selective indeed. Just as we did not judge KU's season this year, at least we should not have, based on that horrific play against North Dakota State, so also when it comes to God's revelation of His mercy, we see early on in the Bible the possibility of God being only just and not merciful. We see what it might be like for God to continually sweep away everyone in the world over and over again, starting over again with the one most righteous person He could find. But in today's beautiful scriptures, what we see in the Bible instead is the story of the revelation of the heart of God. With the turn of every page, God appears to be more merciful. God may be just on the outside. He may hate evil more than we do. But on the inside, at the heart, God is love. He is mercy. What we see in today's scriptures is the revelation of who God really is, when all the dust has settled. He is a God who allows a man like Moses to be an instrument of His mercy to the Israelites who have become idolaters. He is a God who chooses the greatest persecutor of Christians, Saul, to be an apostle of His mercy and to make more converts to the faith than all the other apostles combined. He is a God who likens Himself to a shepherd who risks losing His entire flock because He cannot bear to lose one little dumb sheep. And by the way, I've been told on good authority, that a sheep carried on the shoulders usually pees on the shepherd who is carrying him back. Or worse. Yet there is more. The God of all glory and majesty compares Himself to a ridiculously foolish widow who wastes all day looking for a penny, then calls Her neighbors for a penny finding party. He reveals Himself as a Father who is willing to give everything that He is asked to give, even to a Son who wishes He was already dead, and who then runs in the most undignified way to embrace that same son the instant he is willing to say He is sorry.

Our God is revealed through the teaching and gift of Jesus Christ to be the God of ridiculous, unthinkable mercy. In the Scriptures, this mercy is revealed as God's deepest attribute, the thing we should most know about God. It is also God's most powerful attribute. God's limitless desire to forgive is more powerful than any natural disaster he could allow or any justice that He can threaten. God will not take back the freedom He has give mankind in love, and so His greatest weapon for the redemption of man and His freedom is His limitless mercy, a mercy that flows from the life and the heart of His only Son.

The challenge of every Christian, I think, is to prefer nothing to the love of God, to prefer nothing to a complete dependence upon this mercy that is revealed to us this morning. Every Christian, from the greatest objective sinner to the least, must say with St. Paul, that of all sinners, I am the foremost. We consider ourselves the foremost sinners, not in a spirit of slavish scrupulosity, but so that we may know God's mercy above all things, and not sit in judgment of others like the older son. We do everything that we can to do good and avoid evil, so that we do not harm others, or put our lives and the lives of others at risk, like the younger son selfishly did in today's Gospel. There is no guarantee that the younger son would come back. Many do not. That is why we do not flirt with evil. But the goal for those who avoid evil is still the same, to day by day become more dependent upon God's mercy, not less. We do not have to do this the hard way, but to do it the hard way is better than to not learn God's mercy at all. It is our goal, the righteous and the unrighteous alike, to know God's mercy more, not less. To need it more, not less. To see that mercy as the most powerful thing in our lives, and the most powerful gift that we have to share with others. More than economic justice, more than greater armies, more than intelligent diplomacy, what the world needs most to eradicate the evil that was present on 9/11 9 years ago is to be touched and healed and set free by God's mercy. Let us begin by preparing our hearts and minds and bodies now for a most fruitful reception of that mercy ourselves in the holy sacrament of the altar.