To Become Perfect You Must Be Human
14th Sunday of the Year
As this is the first Sunday homily I am preaching here at St. Andrew by the Bay, I was reminded of two stories related to first homilies. The first, is of a young priest. Eager to impress the parishioners in his new assignment he prepared diligently for his first homily. After the Gospel the young priest made his way to ambo to share with God’s people all the things he wanted to say about that weekend’s reading. Many things! As he went on, and on, and on, a voice from the back of the Church shouted out, “save some for next week”! As they always say, if it’s not true, it should be.
The second is a true story that Archbishop Lori loves to tell about the first homily he preached as a deacon. Like the aforementioned eager young priest, the eager and diligent young Deacon Bill Lori prepared at length to give his first homily at the small country parish in St. Mary’s County where he had been assigned. After Mass, as he greeted people in the back of Church, an old man within earshot remarked to his friend, “I don’t know what the young fella was saying, but he sure do talk pretty.”
Now, there is always certain nervousness in preaching to a new community. You have yet to get to know the people, to know their stories, to know what resonates with their experience. In our fallen nature, there is also the element of pride that always manages to work its way in. You want to do well; you want to leave a good first impression. I’ll admit all these feelings have been in my heart this week. I feel truly blessed to be here as your parish priest and I feel blessed to follow, Father Andrew, a dear brother priest whom I love and admire, but at the same time, I realize that he, and his predecessors here, leave big shoes to fill!
With all of this in my mind and heart, I turned to the readings, hoping to find in them some source of consolation. And what did I find?
“Hard of face and obstinate of heart are they to whom I am sending you”.
Oh boy. Not a good start, I thought! Well, I reasoned, thankfully, these words are speaking of Ezekiel, not me. Plus, the people I have met here have all been lovely. Some of them I’ve even known since I was a kid, Martha Monaghan taught me when I was in middle school and Deacon Dave Tengwell came to my home parish went I was a sophomore in high school (which, contrary to how I may appear to some of you, was over 20 years ago!) But I was thinking about them and how beautiful it is to come back to the county where I grew up as I read: a prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kind . . .
I began to wonder, if, in the words of the old spiritual “maybe God’s trying to tell you something!”
Well, he is trying to tell us something. But the good news is that it’s not about me, it’s about Christ, about God made man who came as one of us that we might become like God. Christ who humbled himself to share our human nature, that we might share in God’s divine life. Christ who, like Ezekiel before him, was rejected by those to whom he was sent, by his own people.
In the Gospel today, Jesus stands up to preach in the Synagogue of his hometown of Nazareth. The people are astounded by his teaching, by his wisdom, but there’s a challenge for them: they know him. They know his family, they know the humble kind of work he did, they know where he came from, put simply, they know just how human he is.
And this humanity is, for them, a source of scandal, a stumbling block, something they can’t get over, something that blinds them to the fullness of who he is and what he has the power to accomplish.
As a quick side note: I think there is something humorous in the fact that St. Mark concludes this episode by saying:
“Jesus was not able to perform any mighty deed there, apart from curing a few sick people”.
Oh, just that!
What the hometown crowd could not accept, is something that would remains challenge through the ages. How is it that God could truly take on our human nature, live as one of us, sharing in all that we experience, like us in all things but sin?
This is often a struggle because of our own experience of being human, our own awareness of our shortcomings, our failures, and weaknesses. How can Jesus be who he says he is and be human? And if Jesus is human, how can he have the power to save? This is, for many, then as now, a stumbling block, a barrier to belief. But humanity, with all of its struggles and limitations, is precisely the way God choses to save us.
And why? Because God desires us to encounter him in the flesh, in our experience, in our life here and now, and so the tool he has to work with is reality, our humanity.
Similarly, God wills that we encounter him in the reality of the Church, a reality that is holy but, also a reality filled with sinful human beings, as we know so well. Is humanity messy? Yes. But humanity is the means that God choses. As on Don Massimo Camiscasca put it, “God wishes to communicate himself through the human and he accepts all its ambiguities”.
We might be willing to accept that when it comes to humanity, in general, but what about our humanity, our shortcomings, flaws, and limitations?
I think there is often there a tendency we can have, at least I know I can have, to think, “well if only I could get this or that together, then I would be fine”, “If only I didn’t have that problem, then I could follow Christ or follow him to the full”.
While it’s different for each of us, I believe there is, in all of us, some flaw, some shortcoming, difficulty, some struggle or another that we have and that we just can’t seem to get rid of. The temptation we have is to think: “Well if only that were gone, then everything would be fine.”
St. Paul thought the same way. In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, we hear him speak about “a thorn in the flesh” that assailed him day and night. And this was not just a small annoyance, he speaks of it as “an angel of Satan” sent to beat him, to keep him from getting too elated.
See, St. Paul was blessed with a powerful awareness of Christ’s presence, he experienced an astounding in-breaking of God’s grace into his life, and, as we hear in today’s passage, he received “an abundance of revelation”, likely speaking about profound mystical experiences he had in prayer.
Truly Paul was blessed with a beautiful life of faith, but there was still that thorn in the flesh, that thing he just couldn’t seem to get rid of. What was that thorn? Well, we don’t know for sure. Scholars suggest that it might could have been one of three things:
(1) The first possibility is that it could have been the opposition of others. As anyone who has particularly challenging relatives, friends or coworkers can appreciate, this can be quite a thorn!
(2) The second possibility, often referenced in the tradition, is that it referred to some sort of moral weakness or concupiscence.
(3) The third option is that it refers to a physical limitation or ailment, like poor eyesight.
Whatever it was, it was bad, and Paul wanted rid of it. If only this were gone, he thought, things would be fine. But what is the Lord’s response? In short “No”.
“My grace is sufficient for you for power is made perfect in weakness”.
It’s important to note that these are some of the only words of Jesus in scripture that we find outside of the Gospel, words of the Risen Lord. Sowe should think of these words as spoken to us. Like Paul, we can look at our own “thorns” and think, “if only this were gone” then I would be fixed. But the response of the Lord isn’t to “fix us”, to make us perfect, so perfect that we can fool ourselves into thinking we do not need him, but rather the Lord says to us:
“My grace is sufficient for you for power is made perfect in weakness”.
The true power that we have is not from us, and from our own perfection, but from Christ alive in us, Christ perfecting our hearts, working in and through our humanity, in and through the real things of life. So, are we willing to embrace those “thorns”, those limitations, shortcomings or needs and to see them as bridge to the Lord and the power of his grace rather than a barrier? Do we allow these things to bring us to the Lord, to draw us close to him, to bring about conversion in our hearts, to deepen our sense of dependence upon his provision?
Freedom comes from recognizing that truth, the truth of our need, but also recognizing the truth that the Lord comes to help us, lavishing his grace upon us, in and through the concrete experiences of our life, in and through our humanity.
Humanity is not the stumbling block to sharing in God’s life, humanity is the vehicle. And this is good news for us, because, frankly, it’s the only vehicle we’ve got. When we might think to ourselves, “Oh, if only I weren’t so human, if only I were perfect” the Lord says to us, “Too bad. You aren’t. But don’t fear that, don’t allow that to be a stumbling block, grace works through it.”
We may be weak, we may have many problems, many shortcomings, many needs, but the Risen Lord says to us, “Be not afraid”, “My grace is sufficient for you . . . for power is made perfect in weakness”.
Homily preached on July 7th, 2024 at the parish of St. Andrew by the Bay.
Fr. Tyler Kline currently shepherds his flock at the parish of St. Andrew by the Bay, Cape St. Claire.
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