A homily for the Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 23, 2024
Jb 38:1, 8-11, 2 Cor 5:14-17, Mk 4:35-41
The young people among us, and those of us who think we’re still sorta young, know this riddle:
If God is so powerful, can he make a rock so big even he can’t lift it?
I’m pretty sure the answer is yes.
I’m pretty sure the answer is yes — even though it seems confusing — because there’s nothing God can’t do.
As Jesus reminds us in Matthew’s Gospel,
For human beings this is impossible, but for God all things are possible.
God created this universe, with its maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars, as the late astronomer Carl Sagan calculated. (By the way, Carl never said “billions and billions” on his TV show, though he did use the phrase as the title of his final book.)
God said, “Let there be…” and there was light, and everything else.
All of Creation.
In this universe and perhaps countless others.
With nothing more than a divine thought or word or wave of a celestial hand, God created air and water and rocks and trees and fruit and vegetables and animals and Muppets and iPhones.
God created us. Humankind. You and me and all the people who lived before us and all the people not yet born.
Then God said, “Let’s give our children free will, so they can make their own decisions, especially if they decide to make love their way of life.”
Wow. What an incredible gift. No other creature has free will, as far as we know.
But when we think about it, our free will is a little like the boulder in the riddle. God created something he won’t mess with. God created something he won’t try to change or move.
Out of love and with the highest hopes, God gave us all the power to choose to do the right things for each other and for all of Creation … and the power to thumb our noses at the Almighty instead, and go our own way.
The power to be right, led by the pure, shining force we know as love.
The power to be wrong, misled by the putrid, shiny force we know as evil.
God gave us the power because God is all-powerful.
God gave us the power because God is all-loving.
God gave us the power because God is all-forgiving.
And because God is all of that and infinitely more, because God is mind-bogglingly big, God also has the power and the boundless love to walk with us always, nonstop. To walk with us individually as well as to walk with all members of the human family collectively.
God is walking in front of us, behind us, and alongside us as we journey through this life toward our eternal one.
Yes: God is waaay out there in Heaven and beyond, and at the same time, God is right here. That’s the power of God.
God is always listening as we think and speak and ask questions and pose riddles, and God is always ready to give us an answer if we have the good sense to listen for it.
And God will wait if we don’t.
Our readings from Scripture today share the theme of divine power. They were written in simpler times, written for simple people who needed to experience something dramatic, who maybe needed a whack upside their heads to begin to appreciate the immensity of God’s power and love.
In the days before Christ, people feared God the way children used to fear parents who spanked them.
Then came Jesus, who preached the Law of Love and set humankind on the way to a more mature relationship with God. But people in the first century didn’t have an abundance of science yet, so they still believed things like there was a sea up in the sky. Their understanding of God was maturing but not fully mature.
Two thousand years of experiments and exploration have given us a wider knowledge of … well … almost everything, or at least a lot of things.
Let’s not forget that all of those things, all things visible and invisible, were created by the power and love of God. God’s love for us.
In this technologically saturated world of AI and CGI, it’s all too easy to leave Father, Son and Holy Spirit out of our consciousness.
We can’t. We just can’t.
