Homily: Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time Cycle B: 2012

I wonder at times... I have this sneaky suspicion that things are not always as they seem.

What I mean by this is that if you listen to people... I mean really listen then you might hear something interesting.  Listen to what people say when they are talking about God.  I think it can be very educational.  


God is hard to describe.  We've got 2000 years of Christian history and billions of pages of theology on the topic of God but yet God is still hard to describe.


It is true, Jesus, made the question of, "Who is God," much easier to understand but still I learn a lot when I listen to people talk about God.

So here is my sneaky suspicion.  I think that when people talk about "who they think God is" they are often talking about themselves.
I do think that George Bernard Shaw was somewhat correct when he said, "God created man in His image and likeness and then man returned the favor."


Listen to others as they talk about God and you just might hear them describing themselves.


So who is God?


Jesus is the definitive answer to this profound question and I think is very important that we pay attention to this Gospel reading. (Mark 2:1-12)  One man was healed, some were astounded, and some were offended.  God does not always fit what we would want Him to be.


The single most challenging aspect of God is his reckless mercy.  When we want mercy God's recklessness is healing and comforting.  When other people desire his mercy God's recklessness can be very offensive.


In this Gospel Jesus offers mercy before he offers healing.  It seems as if mercy, the forgiveness of sins, is the greatest need that the paralyzed man has.  The miracle of the physical healing is a way that Jesus demonstrates that He does have the authority to forgive sin... and that he wants to!


God has tried to show us that He wants to be merciful and forgiving.  In our first reading (Isaiah43:18-19, 21-22, 24b-25) we hear that God will do something new.  The new thing that God desires to do is be merciful.  This isn't new for God but rather it is new for us.  For so long we've "made God in our image and likeness" rather than the other way around that for God to be merciful is incredibly new for us.


God doesn't change.  God didn't one day decide to stop being vengeful and suddenly begin to be merciful.  St. Paul tells us in the second reading (2 Cor. 1:18-22) that God is not a God of "yes" and then "no." God is consistent in His "yes" toward us.  God is always merciful.  God does not change it is us who need to change.  Mercy is new for us because we aren't always comfortable with a recklessly merciful God.

The men who brought their paralyzed friend to Jesus were hoping for a miracle.  They were hoping that Jesus would heal him.  They received that miracle but Jesus' first priority was mercy.  Jesus wanted that man to know God's mercy more than anything else.  Jesus wanted everyone to know that He is merciful.  He worked this miracle to prove it!


I wonder... if you were to describe God would you put "mercy" at the top of the list?  If you were to describe yourself where would mercy be?


All to often we celebrate justice and retribution.  We cheered, as a nation, when our worst enemy was killed this past spring.  We often feel like justice is done when some criminal is sentenced to the death penalty.  Personally, I often struggle to simply forgive the person who cut me off in traffic.  I can promise you the horn in my car works well.


God wants to give us a new and reckless gift of mercy but He also asks that we show that same mercy to everyone else.