Homily for Thursday, 7 August 2014– Ferial

Thursday of the 18th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:12-13, 14-15, 18-19; Matthew 16:13-23

Jesus asks his disciples in today’s Gospel reading from Matthew, “Who do people say the Son of Man is”? And “who do you say that I am”? These are good questions for us. Who do we say Jesus is? Who do we say God is?

The prophet Jeremiah gives us a good idea of who God is in the last verse of our first reading. Jeremiah says to the people of Israel that God “will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.” In God’s mercy, God does not stop at forgiving our sins; God remembers our “sin no more.”

This distinction is crucial, and yet how many of us understand it? How many of us, when we ask forgiveness from somebody for a wrong action we have done, or even when we confess our sins in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, think of God as able and willing to forgive our wrongdoing through these encounters? If we do think of God in this way, this is correct, because God is a forgiving God. No sin is too great to forgive, except perhaps the sin of not even asking for forgiveness. And yet God does not stop at forgiving our sin. God, as Jeremiah puts it, remembers our “sin no more.”

God, in the words of our Responsorial Psalm, does more than forgive our sin. We pray to God, “Create a new heart in me.” In similar words, the Colombian Blessed Laura Montoya Upegui, who worked with indigenous people deep in the jungles of Colombia, once prayed: “Lord, destroy me and, upon my ruins, build a monument to your glory.”

Lord, destroy what leads me away from you; destroy my sin; remember my sin no more. This is what absolution is about: “Create a new heart in me”; a heart after your glory; a heart after your own heart.

If we understand that God is more than forgiving; that God’s will is to destroy our sin and to re-create us fully in God’s image, does this not radically re-orient our understanding of God? Does it not radically re-orient how we identify Jesus Christ when he asks us, “Who do you say that I am”?

This might radically re-orient how we understand the effect of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, or even our Penitential Rite during Mass. Reconciliation becomes more than just confessing a list of sins and being assigned a formula to pray as a penance.

Our sins are not just forgiven, but destroyed and their void filled with God’s own presence. This is not only radical; but may be (and perhaps should be) scary to us! I say scary because, when we are reconciled with one another and with God; when we not only “do” penance but live penitentially, we are invited to let something die within us; to let go of our sin; to let God destroy our sin so that God can fill its void. “Get behind me, Satan.” God, remember our sin no more. “Create a new heart in” us. Destroy what keeps us from you and build within us “a monument to your glory.”