Homily for May 10th, 2017:
John 12:44-50.
“Whoever
sees me sees the One who sent me,” Jesus tells us in today’s gospel reading.
What do we see when we look at Jesus?
We see that he preferred simple, ordinary people. He came to the world in an
obscure provincial village on the edge of Nowhere, where nothing interesting or
important ever happened. Jesus moved not among wealthy or sophisticated people,
or among scholars and intellectuals, but among ordinary people.
Jesus was of the earth,
earthy. In his youth he worked with his hands in the carpenter’s shop. His
teaching was full of references to simple things: the birds of the air, the
wind and the raging waves, the lilies of the field, the vine, the lost sheep,
the woman searching for her one lost coin, leavening dough with yeast, the
thief breaking in at night.
In
preferring simple people and simple things, Jesus was showing us what God is
like. He who is God’s word, God’s personal communication to us, is saying that
God loves humble people. In his earthiness Jesus shows us God’s love for this
world and everything in it.
Many people think of God
and religion as concerned only with some higher, spiritual realm. Not true! God
loves the earth and the things of
earth. He must love them, because he made them. And God does not make anything
that is not lovable. God made each of us, using our parents as his agents. And
he loves us with a love that will never let us go.
How do we know that?
Jesus told us himself when he said: “Greater love has no one than this, to lay
down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). And Paul writes in his Letter
to the Romans: “It is
precisely in this that God proves his love for us: that while we were still
sinners, Christ died for us” (5:8).
That,
friends, is the gospel. That is the Good News.
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