HOMILY
- We are told that God’s ways are not our ways but I have often wondered what that means.
- I recently commemorated the life of a young man who died in a car crash. As part of the memorial we sang the Salve Regina that includes the words “to thee do we cry poor banished children of Eve AND from this valley of tears.”
- This reference to life hardly reflects the life that God wants for us.
- But if does often correspond to the reality that we end up living. Despite our best efforts to live a life free from suffering and pain.
- Of course, we could see life as something of a lottery, where luck and chance work with serendipity to create the life we live.
- But if we seriously believe in God we are confronted by the Gospel which insists that God has God’s ways.
- Peter, our frontrunner in faith, gets it half wrong when he answers Jesus that He is the Christ of God. Peter is right to see Jesus as the One from God but he fails to see Jesus as the one who must suffer and die.
- We too try to understand life as a life without limit; a life that is best lived through the lens of success and human achievement.
- This is NOT life as Jesus reveals it to be. Jesus is the one who lives for ‘something more’ and for others and who does not count the cost in following the dream = to live a good life towards the future in fellowship with others. To live towards a horizon defined only by the pursuit of greatness; to live towards an already tasted immortality.
- To the question: “Who do you say that I am?” We poor disciples of Jesus struggle as we do.
- I suppose that we can be Christians and not be able to answer that question.
- As a priest, it is just not an option for me. I would simply be remiss if I knew nothing of God’s ways.
- I am confident of the words of Jesus that life is gained by losing one’s life. The life that we imagine to be our meaning of life.
- As far as I can tell, the wealthy do not benefit from their wealth. The philosophers are not enriched by their philosophy. And even the healthy shatter from within when circumstances overtake them.
- Jesus asks only that we surrender our life – in whatever aspect – in a fundamental option for God.
- While this might seem at first to be a failure, as with Jesus, it opens us to a promise from God while, at the same time, closing us to an agreement with ourselves.
- Those of us who faithfully come to this altar of sacrifice and loss are not fanatics.
- We come to find life in the liturgy of life sacrificed and life given.
- We come to re-set our life’s compass, according to Jesus Christ, who took up his cross, suffered and entered into the fullness of life.
- Faith like this, takes us to the limits, and calls us into the Kingdom of God
- I can still sing the Salve Regina: “And after this exile show us the precious fruit of thy womb, Jesus”.
- This is out of date language but it is full of hope and confidence.
- When we have that hope, then the ways of Jesus will be our ways too. God’s ways, a life draped in hope, faith and love, will be our ways.
- Then we will also know that often enough God’s ways are not our ways.