HOMILY for Mon in Week 4 of Lent
Isa 65:17-21; Ps 29; John 4:43-54
We say in the Creed that through the Word of God, Jesus Christ, “all things are made”. For God’s Word is ever-creative, bringing life and vigour to God’s creation. We see the creative power of God’s Word in today’s Gospel, for Jesus only has to speak the word, and the official’s child is healed. Hence, new life and healing is effective by God’s all-creative Word.
The English Dominican theologian, fr. Herbert McCabe OP says that the sacraments are “signs of the Word of God in history”. Following St Thomas Aquinas, he says that the sacraments reveal God’s eternal Word at work in our whole human history. As such, they point to the past, when God’s creative Word was at work in the Old Testament or in the Gospels, as we hear in today’s reading. And they also point to the future, when God will “create new heavens and a new earth” (Isa 65:17) and Man will have vigorous health, as Isaiah promises. This promise comes to pass when Christ returns in glory. But the sacraments are especially, in McCabe’s words, “the ways in which the Word of God is present to us in our present era”.
Hence, the sacraments are the means in this time, in our lives, by which God’s Word is at work, bringing about a new creation through his grace. In the sacraments, God’s Word brings healing and new life, as he did in the past. And in the sacraments, God’s Word promises a perfection that will be fulfilled at the end of time. And because God’s Word is truth, his promises can be relied upon. Therefore, the sacraments are the means by which God’s grace transforms and renews the heavens and the earth, and this new creation by God’s Word begins with you and me.
For the grace of God given to us in the sacraments makes you and me a new creation. God’s Word is spoken into our lives through the sacraments, so that we are made anew. But not as new creatures. Rather, as McCabe says, “it is extremely important to realize that a creature with grace is not just a higher kind of creature - in the sense, for example, that a creature with intelligence is a higher kind of creature than one without. Grace does not make man a better kind of creature, it raises him beyond creaturehood, it makes him share in divinity. This share in divinity is first of all expressed by the fact that we are not merely things created, we are creatures who are on speaking terms with God”.
So, the Word of God is spoken in us, through the sacraments, so that we can speak to God as his friends. This is the joyful thing that those who will receive the Easter sacraments long for, and it is what already belongs to us as Christians. Thus we rejoiced yesterday on Lætare Sunday, and today’s first reading calls us to rejoice again; we’re called to marvel in the new creation that God’s Word is making. As today’s Collect says, God renews the world “through mysteries beyond all telling”, that is to say, as the Latin text has it, through the sacraments.
Indeed, through our participation in the Mass now, we believe that God’s Word is at work, renewing us and sanctifying us, and hence, the heavens and the earth too.
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