The Protagonist of the Heart Is Christ

17th Sunday of the Year

The protagonist of our first reading today is not God. The author who composed this section of the Book of Genesis does a masterful job of telling a story. Two characters engage in a dialogue—really, a negotiation—in regard to what justice demands for a people who have committed crimes. And almost immediately the contours of the argument become clear: one character says that for the sake of justice the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah must be destroyed, while the second character says that for the sake of mercy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah must be saved. The problem for us is that the first character—the one who wants to see these cities destroyed—is God. The protagonist of our first reading today is not God.

My guess is that many of you while hearing these words from Genesis quietly and perhaps imperceptibly began to cheer for Abraham and against God. That is how good stories work. We are given a character whom we support in his or her struggle against the antagonist who works to do harm. So, in the Book of Genesis today, we hear these two characters engage in something like a hostile negotiation—and we know that there are lives at stake—so we take the side of Abraham and choose against God. We want God to lose the argument. And there, I think, for the Christian, is a real tension. How can we justify choosing against God? But how can we choose for God when what God wants is to destroy human life? There is a tension here for the Christian that needs to be sorted out.

The way to resolve the tension is to understand the work of revelation. Revelation is the work of God telling us something true about himself. And the work of revelation is dynamic and alive; there is no single way through which God tells us about who he is and how he lives. The work of revelation is dynamic and alive. And so, in our first reading today the work of revelation is accomplished in a remarkable way. Two different Gods are given to us through this story. The first God who appears to us is the God who reveals. The God who reveals is the God who presents himself to Abraham and negotiates the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. The God who reveals is the God who demands justice for crimes committed. The God who reveals is the God whose words and desires make him into the antagonist of the story. The God who reveals is the God who we want to lose the argument.

But then we are given a second God: the God who is revealed. Who is the God revealed? The God revealed is a God of mercy. The God revealed is a God whose love for Abraham runs so deep that he humbles himself to even listen to what Abraham has to say. The God revealed is the God whose deepest motivation is to preserve innocent human life and so is ready to negotiate for the sake of love. The God revealed is a God who cannot allow innocent life to be destroyed no matter the depth of the injustice that surrounds these lives. The God revealed is himself the protagonist of a story—but of a story far greater than any single episode recorded in the Book of Genesis. The God revealed is the protagonist of salvation history—the God who reveals himself most fully through the life of an Incarnate son who dies on a cross so that many will be saved.

The story of our first reading presents us with two Gods: a God of justice and a God of mercy; a God who reveals and a God who is revealed. And the only way for us to make sense of these competing presentations of God is to understand that God is doing varsity-level revelation. God negotiates with Abraham on terms that Abraham can understand—the terms of divine justice and divine condemnation—but by the end of the dialogue God has revealed himself to Abraham as a God who loves and as a God of mercy. And what astonishes is that we who hear the story of Abraham and Sodom and Gomorrah so many centuries later are drawn into the same movement of God’s self-revelation. The God who reveals himself to us through a negotiation with Abraham is ultimately revealed to be the God who loves us . . . the God who grants us his mercy in just the same way that he bestowed mercy upon the innocent of Sodom and Gomorrah. The God revealed to us through Abraham is the same God who we know has sent Christ into the world so that we might not be destroyed by sin.

So far, what I have been describing in the work of revelation is a movement that flows in one direction. God appears to Abraham—just as God appears to us through Abraham—and reveals himself through a negotiation over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. And the God who is revealed to us by the close of the narrative is a God of mercy—a God who will not allow the innocent to suffer for the crimes of the unjust. The movement of revelation here flows in one direction: from God to Abraham.

But there is a second movement of revelation in the Genesis narrative—a movement that changes everything about the Christian life. Let me ask you a question: from where do you think Abraham derived his understanding of mercy? Let me ask a second question: who developed the conscience of Abraham . . . who filled his heart with an intuitive grasp of what is right and what is wrong . . . who instilled in Abraham’s heart the truth about what love demands of us? We know the answers to these questions: God. The God who reveals himself to Abraham through a negotiation over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah is the same God who reveals himself through Abraham by giving Abraham the gift of a conscience that knows the beauty of mercy and the gift of the courage needed to stand before God and defend innocent life. The work of revelation is dynamic and alive: God reveals himself to Abraham just as God reveals himself through Abraham. The work of revelation is a remarkable thing.

I said that the work of revelation changes everything about the Christian life. Here is why that is the case: your life is an instrument through which God reveals himself to yourself and to the world. God presents himself to you through the work of creation, through scripture, and through the life of the Church. But God also works through you to prepare your heart and mind to receive everything that God wishes to tell you about his life. Your life is an instrument through which God reveals himself to the world. And the only way that the world will behold the glory of the God who has revealed himself to us is if we Christians play our part in God’s work of revelation. The world must see the God who reveals at work in our lives or those who lack belief will never behold the God who is revealed to be the God of mercy and of love. Imagine in the Genesis narrative if Abraham had chosen to malform or disfigure his conscience; imagine if Abraham had rationalized his way to concluding that mercy is some kind of injustice and that righteousness demands the loss of innocent life; imagine if Abraham had rejected the ways in which God was working through him and simply agreed that Sodom and Gomorrah ought to be destroyed.

Here is the reality at stake: when we are not open to the work of revelation in our lives then God is not revealed to the world through our lives. What is at stake here is the evangelization of the world and the building up of the kingdom of God. Our lives—like the life of Abraham—must become the instruments through which God continues with the work of revelation. I said not long ago that God is not the protagonist of our narrative from the Book of Genesis this weekend. I also said that God is the protagonist of salvation history. I think we can say more about that claim. Fr. Luigi Giussani once said that the real protagonist of history is the beggar: Christ who begs for man’s heart, and man’s heart that begs for Christ. To beg for Christ—to experience that kind of desire, to be possessed of that kind of thirst for God—well, that kind of desire comes only from God himself. For the Christian, the protagonist of the heart is Christ: the Christ who reveals to us the fullness of God and the Christ who fills our heart with the desire for God. To beg for Christ requires that we do the work of revelation; that we turn ourselves into an instrument of divine revelation so that the world might behold the glory of God.

Homily preached on July 23rd, 2022 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary