Homily for the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

“If there are ten righteous people, I will not destroy it.”

Abraham intercedes for the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. He is told that yes, if there are ten righteous people to be found there, the two cities would not be destroyed. So, let’s extend this by asking: What is it that is preserving this world from destruction? The answer is the same: the “righteous,” the just, or the justified.

“Righteous” is an unfortunate word, because it has come to be associated with a smug and morally superior posture. The theological fact of the matter is that we are made “right” (jus) or justified by grace, not by anything we might have done. Whatever genuine righteousness there is in our lives, it is not due to our own initiative, but is a justification that comes through grace:

“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast” (Eph 2:8–9).

Very often, however, we feel that we are not doing much for this vast world; we have virtually no power to change things on a grand scale. What difference does my existence make to this world as a whole? I and everything I do are virtually unknown, and if I were to die tomorrow, life would certainly go on without me.

This first reading challenges such thinking. Think of ten people in a state of grace—ten people who are almost completely unknown but who belong to the Lord, who try to serve God to the best of their ability, who pray, who participate in the Mass, receive Christ in communion, go to confession when they need to, etc. Basically, you who are reading this—included, of course, are our non-Catholic and non-Christian brothers and sisters who also belong to the Lord.

You may live in a densely populated city, which is part of a larger province or state, which is part of a larger nation, and you are surrounded by a myriad of people who may very well be so preoccupied with their lives that they give no thought to God and are completely indifferent to his will. Who knows? We don’t really know. But what you do know is that you belong to the Lord, you are doing your best to live in accordance with his will, you pray, you come up for communion because, I’m guessing, you want to receive him into yourself.

Well, the Lord protects his own. And if the city or province or nation in which you live manages to destroy itself, you will be affected in a bad way. So the Lord protects you, his own, by protecting all those around you—who are being protected and preserved from the complete self-destruction that sin, indifference, and self-seeking inevitably bring about. How this works in precise detail is beyond our ken. But without your knowing, without your explicit awareness, you are indirectly saving and preserving this world—or this nation, or province, or city—from the effects of its sins, which is self-destruction.

Psalm 116:15 indicates that precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful servants. How much more precious are the lives of his faithful servants?

So, although some of you may feel as if you are doing nothing for this world, you may be surprised to discover the contrary when you stand before God in judgment. That judgment may not be as negative as you might expect, but rather a revelation that you loved God much more than you thought, and that your simple faith has done much more good for this world than you thought possible.

Perhaps this is very much like parents with a newborn who work to put in place all sorts of safety measures in their own lives—in the house, in the yard, in the vehicle, etc.—all for the sake of the child, who has no understanding at this point that this is happening or how.

Now, in the Gospel, we read:

“…ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you…. If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?”

I’m quite convinced that we tend not to ask because we don’t really believe our prayer will be answered. We have a tendency to project our own limits onto God—in particular, the limited scope of our own love. But consider the love you have for your child or children. Can you imagine a love of greater intensity?

God’s love is fittingly compared to the love a mother has for her child—and yet God’s love is boundlessly greater than that:

“Can a mother forget her baby, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you” (Isa 49:15).

We have been given the grace to believe this, but it is very difficult to believe from the depths of the heart that I am the object of such a love. Part of the problem is, again, projection. Just consider how many people we encounter each day who are simply non-entities to us.

Someone is on death row. We read about his heinous crimes, and perhaps we have no problem with his impending execution. However, there is someone in that person’s life who sees things differently—namely, his mother. She knows him in a way that we do not; he belongs to her, and his death is her death. And yet, scripture reveals that God’s love for him is even greater than his mother’s love for him.

The Gospel really is good news. And this brings us to the second reading:

“Even when you were dead in transgressions … he brought you to life along with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions; obliterating the bond against us, with its legal claims, which was opposed to us, he also removed it from our midst, nailing it to the cross” (Col 2:13–14).

We have a horrible tendency to slip back into the legalism and transactionalism of the Old Testament—that forgiveness is conditional upon what we do. But this reading reveals that all our transgressions have been obliterated. The prison doors have been unlocked and opened—we are free to go. No charges hover over us.

If we could only believe that extraordinarily good news, our lives would change radically. We’d be living in the joy of Easter.

Confession is not the sacrament in which we suddenly receive a forgiveness that was not there before. Rather, we are given the grace to open ourselves up to the forgiveness that has always been there. It is not God who has a hard time forgiving us. Rather, we have a very difficult time believing in that forgiveness.

But many of us would rather do something in order to feel we have earned it in some way. Yet if we could earn it, that forgiveness would no longer be a “sheer gift.” When we finally begin to realize this, we will have begun to live.

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Image: Bible Primer, Old Testament, for Use in the Primary Department of Sunday Schools (1919), by Adolf Hult. Published by Augustana Book Concern, Rock Island, IL. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Identifier: bibleprimeroldte00hult. Digitized by the Library of Congress.