I wasn’t going to prepare a sermon for today, because this was rather a different week and our Superior preached a wonderful sermon on love and discernment yesterday, taking care of the Corinthians reading. So, I was going to find a nice sermon online and just read it for today.
I wasn’t going to preach on being known and being consecrated by God before he formed us in the womb. How we are not to be afraid, because the Lord is with us to deliver us from those who might hurt us when we do our Good Lord’s bidding. I wasn’t going to preach on the incredible love which God confesses for us in this Jeremiah passage.
As I’ve said, I wasn’t going to preach on how we are called to love in today’s reading from Corinthians. What it means to love. How love draws us out of who and what we think we are, who and what we think of each other. How love demands that we respond to God and to each other and how to regard ourselves and each other.
How love doesn’t describe an emotion at all. But how love is totally unconditional, coming as a free gift, not because the beloved deserves it but because we choose to give it. How it’s a decision of the will to act in the other person’s best interests, whether we feel like it or not. How to love those who don’t even care about us. How it’s the way God loves us, and the way God calls us to act toward others as well.
So, while I wasn’t going to prepare a sermon, and surfed the internet to find a sermon I could read, I found this quote from a priest called Haddon Robinson: “Love is that thing which, if a church has it, it doesn’t really need much else, and if it doesn’t have it, whatever else it has doesn’t really matter very much”.
And with this in mind, I reread the Gospel passage for today, since here Jesus is after all in a church, and I was struck once again by how temperamental we as human beings can be. How quickly the home crowd went from admiring Jesus to wanting to throw him off the cliff. How quickly their emotions changed, and that showed me how fickle emotional love is. That love which is conditional and not based on a way of living and being, but on a way of feeling.
And then I wondered how Jesus must have experienced this turnaround of the crowd. His people. His friends, and probably some family members as well, who went so quickly from admiration to being enraged and wanting to throw him off the cliff. What did he foresee here of what was awaiting him on the cross? Being at the receiving end of another enraged crowd of his own people?
And then I remembered a scene I saw in our Br Aelred’s favourite TV series, The Chosen. Jesus is watching an old man struggle with his oil press and Jesus is overcome by emotion. And then, the Centurion whose servant was healed by Jesus, happened to be close by and, overcome by compassion, he gave Jesus a long hug.
I then remembered that one of my favourite truths in life is that we all need seven hugs a day for good mental health. This means we do not just need to receive seven hugs, but at the same time, we must give more than seven so that other people can have their quota too.
And since loving in the way that we are called to love is so often almost impossible, just giving a warm, loving hug is often the best we can do.
We are going to exchange the peace soon, so for today we will all have a credit of hugs. And as Jesus has taught us – “What you do to the least of these, you have done to me.” – let us scatter that credit around and give Jesus a hug as well.