Sunday, February 3, 2013

Homily for February 3, 2013 (4th Sunday C)


May Jesus Christ be praised and may his holy Mother pray for us.

Saint Paul writes that in the end, there are three things that remain: faith hope and love.  Of these three things, St. Paul writes, the greatest is love.  Today in the midst of the prophetic call of the prophet Jeremiah and the prophetic rejection of the Lord Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth, the Apostle Paul teaches us about love.  In teaching us about love, we learn about faith and hope as well.

When we speak of faith, hope and love we are speaking about the three theological virtues.  This means that they are given by God and through them we are drawn closer to God.  Faith is that virtue by which we believe in God and in all that God has revealed to us through creation, through the prophets, in the Lord Jesus, and through his Church.  Our response of faith is given in response to the invitation of God.  When we speak of the virtue of hope, we mean that virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our true happiness, relying on the promises of Christ.  St. Peter reminds us in his first letter that we must always be prepared to give a defense for our hope.  We must always place our true hope in the promises of the Lord Jesus who is the divine physician and the conqueror of sin and death.  Love, dear brothers and sisters, is the virtue by which we love God above all things, and love God for his own sake, and we love our neighbors as ourselves out of love for God.  Love is the greatest virtue, because only love is an eternal virtue.

Only love, dear brothers and sisters, will endure when this world passes away.  There will only be love in the kingdom of the Father.  Faith will have passed away, because we will see with unveiled faces the glory of the one in whom we have believed.  We will see him face to face, and there will be no need for faith, because we will know as we have been known.  There will be no hope in the kingdom, because the promises of Christ in which we have placed our hope will have been fulfilled.  The one in whom all hope is placed will grant us a place in his presence.  Only love will endure.  Only the love that is patient and kind, only the love that is not jealous or inflated or rude or selfish will find a place in the kingdom.  Only the love shown to us in the Lord Jesus, who offered himself in suffering and sacrifice, will endure to eternal life.  Everything else will pass away.  Prophecy and tongues and knowledge and all other spiritual gifts will all fall away before the love that conquers all things. 

And this, dear brothers and sisters, is the love that God has for us.  This eternal love has been offered to us and shared with us from the foundation of the world.  Like the prophet Jeremiah, who was called and loved by God before he was formed in the womb, we were loved by God and called to love by God even before our grandparents met each other.  The eternal love that God has for us, and the eternal love that God has shared with us, is the eternal love that is given to us so that we can give it away.  God has shared his love so that we can share his love.  There is no greater gift that God has entrusted to our care than the gift of his own love.  When we love as God loves, when we love as Christ has shown us to love, then eternal life has begun in our souls.

As we now enter into the mystery of love and share in the total offering of the love of the Lord Jesus, let us renew our faith in all that God has revealed to us.  Let us acclaim our hope in the promises of Christ.  And let us love Christ, as Christ has loved us, and embrace the eternal love of the Father.  Amen.

Preached at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, Monroe, NC