Homily for Friday, 31 August 2018– Ferial

Friday of the 21st Week in Ordinary Time


Readings of the day: 1 Corinthians 1:17-25; Psalm 33:1-2, 4-5, 10-11; Matthew 25:1-13

This homily was given at St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.

We pray today in our Psalm response, “The earth is full of the goodness of the LORD.” And, at least deep down, do we not know this to be true? We know the truth of the presence of the Lord in the goodness of his creation, of the earth and the universe, well enough that this truth is in some way what draws us here to worship as Church, many of us daily.

For many of us, is this truth, the goodness of God present in the world, not maybe more present in our everyday experience than for others? From the beginning of St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, from which we hear today, we might get the sense that St. Paul’s experience of the world and God’s presence in it is not the same as that of the earliest Christian community in Corinth. St. Paul addresses a prosperous Corinthian community that believes itself to be self-sufficient. The Corinthians are hostile to the apparently foolish message of St. Paul of allowing the power of the cross of Christ to speak for itself.

But the gospel the Corinthians of St. Paul’s time wanted to hear and many still want to hear today, is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Gospel St. Paul preaches, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is ridiculous to the Corinthians of his time and today’s proponents of the so-called “prosperity gospel,” a gospel wherein the rich and self-sufficient are blessed and the poor cursed.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ does not cynically deny that, as our Psalm says, truly “the earth is full of the goodness of the LORD.” But the Gospel of Jesus Christ, most often best preached not by the most eloquent or showy, but by everyday unheralded people (and I do not doubt many of us saints), is a Gospel of God’s goodness and presence in the world that transforms the world.

Neither does the Gospel of Jesus Christ deny the evil in the world; the evil perpetrated by members of the Church and even of its leadership. No, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the good news, at its heart, that even the worst possible evil will not have the last word. God will have the last word.

This emboldens St. Paul to preach the raw power of “the cross of Christ” to the Corinthians. “The cross of Christ” stands as the worst evil this world has ever known, the Son of God put to death as a criminal. But the cross of Christ also stands as the greatest witness to how full the world is of God’s goodness.

If this paradox—the world’s greatest evil is also the greatest-ever witness to God’s goodness—sounds ridiculous, it is. But, for many of us perhaps, this paradox resonates with our experience. Despite the violence in our world, the wars, the people forced from their homelands, the abuse of vulnerable people, we still believe and hope enough in God’s goodness to be here to worship our God.

This looks like foolishness to much of the world. We gather here, and I speak here now, with no special eloquence or wisdom. We gather here because we believe in a Gospel of Jesus Christ that includes and yet overcomes the cross. We believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which alone transforms the greatest evil into the good that saves us, “the goodness of the LORD” that has always filled the world.