Homily: 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle B
As human persons, we all know love in some way, and we know
that love always involves at least two things: someone who loves and an object
being loved. Further, I would guess that
most of us can tell the difference between the superficial love we have of things,
such as coffee, chocolate, or a delicious steak, and the love that we have for
other people. I would even venture to
say that those of us who think of ourselves as “pet lovers” would still be able
to distinguish between the love that we have for our cats, dogs, or birds and
the love that we have for our wives, our husbands, our children, and our close
friends. We recognize that the deepest,
most authentic love is something that is shared equally, and that even the most
loyal dog or loving cat, or even the most decadent slice of chocolate
cheesecake, cannot return our love to us as equally as we can give it.
Throughout the centuries, many theologians have come to the
realization that for God to be perfect, he must be love, because there is nothing more perfect than love. And that for God to be love, fully and completely within himself, there must be a
plurality of persons within the one, singular Godhead. If there wasn’t, God would have to go outside
of himself in order to love, which would mean that at best he would be someone who loves, but that he couldn’t
be love itself. But God is
love in himself, as Saint John reveals to us.
What this means then is that God somehow must be more than one person;
otherwise he couldn’t be love in
himself. Still further, for love to be
perfect it must be shared between persons who are equal to each other. Therefore, since God is perfect, the persons
who are somehow within the one Godhead must both be perfect, otherwise the love
that is God would be incomplete,
which is impossible, because he is perfect.
Confused yet? So am I. Let’s see if we can bring this closer to
home.
When my friend Jennifer loves her husband Doug, she does so
“perfectly” (inasmuch as she can, since none of us can really do anything perfectly). This is because the love between two people
who are married is a love between equals, a man and a woman, a husband and a
wife; that is, two persons. Because Doug
and Jennifer are equal, Doug can completely receive the perfect love that Jennifer
gives and he can return his own perfect love to Jennifer, which she can receive
completely. Now when Doug loves his cat,
he does so “imperfectly”. This is
because love, in order to be perfect, must be shared by equals. Obviously Doug and his cat are not equals. This doesn’t make Doug’s love for his cat any
less real, but it does make his love less than perfect, because the cat cannot
fully receive Doug’s love—that is, he can’t know it for what it is—and he
certainly cannot return to Doug his own love, at least not in the way that we
understand love.
This understanding that perfect love can only be shared
between equals is reinforced in our reading from the book of Genesis where it
tells us that, after God created Adam, he sought to create a companion for him,
but that none of the animals were suitable, because none were equal to
him. When God created Eve, though, he
took a part of Adam so that Eve would be “bone of his bones and flesh of his
flesh”: in other words, so that she would be his equal. All of this is to say simply that love, in its
most deep and authentic form, is between persons: that is, between equals. Yet, there is still something missing.
Let’s continue by stating something that we might think is
pretty obvious: that if God is perfect love within himself, he must be supremely happy. Just as Doug and Jennifer know that with
their perfect married love, they need nothing else in this world to be happy
(besides God, of course), so God, because he is perfect love within himself,
needs nothing else to be happy. Did you
hear that? God needs nothing else to be
happy, not even us. Even if God hadn’t created anything, he would
still be perfectly happy in the perfect love that he is in himself. Sounds kind of selfish, doesn’t it? Well, rest assured, it is. Love between two people that is closed off
from being shared with others is selfish; in a sense, the couple is “hoarding”
the delight of their love all for themselves.
For love to be perfect, and if it is to be the highest level of
happiness that one can experience, there must be an openness to being
shared. In other words, the perfect happiness
that results from perfect love would not be possible if a) the two were not
open to sharing that happiness with a third and b) if there wasn’t a third
person with whom to share it. This
sharing is what certain theologians have called, “fellowship.” And just as the two who love must be equal in
order for love to be perfect, the third, in order to fully share in the
delight, that is, the fellowship, of the two, must also be equal to them.
Doug and Jennifer were having difficulty conceiving a
child. This was a great burden for them
because their married love literally ached for there to be a third person,
equal to them, who could fully participate in the happiness of their love. After a while, they decided to get a puppy. They knew that the puppy could never
participate fully in their delight, but their desire that there be fellowship
in their family was so great that they were willing to compromise with an
incomplete fellowship until God’s will granted them the grace of a more perfect
fellowship by having a child (which he did, three times!). For God, however, this isn’t a problem. We know that he is perfect love. And so we know that he is a plurality of equal
persons in himself. And, thanks to the work of various
theologians, we know that this plurality of persons must be three: the One who
loves, the One who is loved, and the Fellowship of their love; that is, the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
I know that this has been a lot to take, but there is one
last thing that needs to be said. There
is good reason why the example of Doug and Jennifer works here, because the
very nature of a family, formed by the marriage of a man and a woman, is itself
an image of the God. And it is in the differences, differences which are
complementary, between a man and a woman that makes possible this image. Just as the differences between the Father
and the Son complement each other and make possible the outpouring of love that
literally begets the Holy Spirit (a begetting that would not be possible if it
were “the Father and the Father” or “the Son and the Son”), so too the
differences between men and women complement each other to make possible the
outpouring of love that begets, that is, co-creates
with God, a child, a person equal in dignity that delights in the fellowship of
love with his or her mother and father.
Anything else, quite frankly, is false: it’s artificially creating
something God never intended. Can
co-equal love exist outside marriage?
Sure. But it cannot be marriage, and therefore an image of God,
if the possibility of total self-giving, to the point of the natural creation of another, does not
exist. To think otherwise is to fall
victim to original sin: that is, believing that we can have it our way, instead
of adhering to the wisdom with which God created the world.
Friends, we live in a society whose members have been working
to redefine marriage and family for over a generation. The result is that countless young people
today have little to no experience of marriage and family as God intended it to
be. One of the critical consequences of
this change is that we’ve lost our sense of what it truly means to be created
in the image and likeness of God: that is, to become a plurality of persons in
which perfect love is given and received, and whose delight spills over into fellowship
with a third.
As we as the Church in the United States enter this “Respect
Life” month, let us remember and defend the inherent dignity of the family—man, woman, and their children: for,
in doing so, we will not be able to forget, nor fail to defend, the inherent dignity
of each person, from his creation in his mother’s womb until his final, natural
breath, and at every point in between. When
we do, we will honor and glorify God in his creation, which includes each of
us. And so, as we approach this altar of
thanksgiving today, let us thank God for this great gift; and let us renew our
commitment to living as and defending his image in the world.
Given in Spanish at Our Lady
of the Lakes Parish: Monticello, IN
October 6th, 2024
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