Homily
for the
26th
Sunday of Ordinary Time
Sept.
26, 2021
Collect
St.
Joseph Church, New Rochelle, N.Y.
“O God,
you manifest your almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy…” (Collect).
When you
were young, after some mishap befell you as a consequence of something you said
or did, did your mother or a teacher ever exclaim to you, “See! God punished you!”?
Many of us were brought up in the fear of God, God the all powerful, God the almighty. We thought he was always watching to catch us in wrongdoing. Many of us may have thought that every mistake, every fault, every shortcoming was a sin, even things over which we had no control. I can’t tell you how many people confess, “Father, I missed Mass when I was sick”—which certainly isn’t a sin. But if we believed God was watching to catch us, ready to punish us, if not here with some form of suffering, then hereafter with condemnation to eternal hellfire, “where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48)—then we were always on edge, always afraid of God.
Pope
Francis has been trying for his entire papacy, now in its 9th year, to convince
us that, as he says, “The name of God is mercy.” Actually, that’s not a new idea, a new
teaching, at all. Francis didn’t compose
the Collect for today’s Mass; it’s been around for a long time. Its focus is God’s mercy.
Yes, God
is all powerful. But his power is
expressed in his mercy, his readiness to grant pardon to sinners—as royal power
and presidential power can be expressed by a pardon. God pardons real sins, not our honest
mistakes, which aren’t sins; not our forgetfulness, which isn’t sinful; not
even for our shortcomings in matters beyond our ability to control; these
aren’t sins either.
But our real
sins, our deliberate, willful choices to offend God or our neighbor—these
God is ready to pardon if we’ll only say, “I’m sorry. I want to do better. I want to be filled with the Spirit of God,
like the 70 Israelite elders in the desert (Num 11:25-29). I want to be kinder, truthful, a better
spouse, a better worker, a more generous and helpful neighbor, less
judgmental,” and so on. God is
merciful. He forgives readily, happily.
That’s why Jesus came to us—not to condemn the world but to save it, as
John’s Gospel says (3:17).
So we confidently ask God to bestow his grace upon us, to empower us to be more faithful friends of Jesus. If we’re his friends—and he fervently desires that we will be (cf. John 15:13-15)—then we’ll inherit the kingdom of heaven with him (Collect). God desires it, and in his mercy will make it happen as long as we consent, as long as we allow him to pardon our sins and promise to do our best to avoid them in the future—rather what Jesus was speaking of in the 2d part of today’s gospel, about casting aside anything that leads us to sin (Mark 9:43-48).
May the
Spirit of God settle upon us and keep us close to our Lord Jesus Christ, whose
greatest desire is to bring us to eternal life.
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