Homily for Monday, 4 September 2017– Ferial

Monday of the 18th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Psalm 96:1, 3, 4-5, 11-12, 13; Luke 4:16-30

This homily was given at St. Clare Church, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

What is it possible for us to know about heaven? How much of eternal life, of being saved, is dependent on our own effort or works versus God’s free gift of grace?

On this Labour Day, our celebration of work and everybody who works, our readings point more toward eternal life as God’s free gift than as having anything to do with our effort. In his first letter to the Thessalonians, St. Paul writes words of tremendous hope. “Jesus died and rose again,” St. Paul says, and for this and no other reason, we have the possibility of eternal life. “Through Jesus,” who has died and has risen from the dead through no merit of ours, “God will bring with him those who have died.” All St. Paul asks of us is to “encourage one another with these words.” It is no wonder, then, that today’s reading from 1 Thessalonians is often one of the selections at funerals in our Church, a time when we want to be encouraged; to know that our God is merciful and wills most of all that we might have eternal life.

Luke’s Gospel, too, emphasizes God’s gratuitous gift. Neither the possibility of eternal life nor God’s presence with and care for us in this life is limited by our effort or factors like our ethnicity or religious tradition. God is the creator of the universe and so is the universal giver of the possibility of eternal life. When Jesus speaks this truth through the images of outsiders like the “widow at Zerephath in Sidon” receiving the prophet Elijah in a time of famine or “Naaman the Syrian” being cleansed before any of the “lepers of Israel,” the people in the synagogue of Nazareth become furious with him. How is it that these outsiders receive God’s preferential treatment? Does it matter that we believe in the right God in order to be healed; in order to be saved? Do our efforts matter for our salvation?

If we listen attentively to our Gospel reading today, we hear that our efforts and our right worship do matter for our salvation, but perhaps not in the way we might most naturally think. Today’s Gospel reading is Jesus’ basic “mission statement: “To bring good news to the poor… to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

But this is not only Jesus’ mission; it is ours also. How, then, are we bringing good news to those in need? How are we, in St. Paul’s words, encouraging one another by our words and our deeds? How are we working to free the oppressed and the marginalized and to welcome and integrate the outsiders? How are we doing all this without worrying about whom God will save and whom he will not?

Heaven is God’s gift of grace, but we are still called to cooperate in this life in making God’s gift of grace known universally. French philosopher Gabriel Marcel once said, “To love another is to say to that person, ‘You shall not die.’” To love is to will and work for eternal life for everybody and all creation, and to trust God’s grace to make this will; this dream of ours a reality. We are called to dream this dream and work to realize it; to love one another. If we do simply this, the rest of the work of our salvation is God’s.