God and the world
Homily of April 14, 2021
“God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. »
Is it so true and so certain that the world is so lovable to be so loved? We often have a dispute with the world. We speak of it, sometimes, with contempt. Sometimes even with hatred. And sometimes, we Christians behave like children somewhat unworthy of this Lord who loved the world so much.
To be a little more at ease in this relationship to the world, we must remember that in Saint John, there are two meanings to this word.
There is the one who shows that the world can be a temptation: even when it is visited by light, men prefer darkness to light. It would therefore be this created world which closes in on itself and which refuses the light that the Lord projects on it. In this sense, the world becomes a temptation and we remember that in the history of the Church, there is an ascetic current, that is to say, which distances itself from this world and the monastic tradition has strongly maintained this escape from the world.
Let us recognize that, sometimes, we have been trapped in this dynamic and that we have perhaps lost the testimony that we have to give for this world, including that which closes in on itself and which is a testimony of the 'Love of God for him. Never has this confinement of the world to itself dispensed or discouraged the Lord from loving it and we must first of all be witnesses of a God who loves this world with its darknesses as of course with its lights.
Instead of considering the world only as a place of temptation, which we should flee and avoid, the great Christian spiritual tradition invites us to welcome this world as a place of vocation, as a place of mission, as a place of call and nothing less than a call to love him.
This ambiguous world in the very way God loves it to the end, without getting discouraged. We would then have to find the right words and I find that we are heirs to a century, the twentieth, which has adjusted its words to speak of the world. Because we had to get away from a tradition that was too negative. Of a relationship to this world that would only be temptations.
In fact the temptations are formidable, not in themselves, but in ourselves whose heart is too fragile that it often lets itself be taken by the temptations of the world. The attraction of wealth, of power, of badly mastered pleasure… but it is in our hearts that this temptation plays out.
Let us not always refer to the outside world what is quite simply our own weaknesses and rather rediscover this healthy relationship with the Lord inviting us to love this world, to consecrate ourselves to it. We have, in this XNUMXth century, very fine examples of spiritual people who knew how not to fall into the traps of this world and yet they lived in this world with accuracy as a sign of the presence of God in the world. Because what is at the heart of our faith is that the Lord came to inhabit this world in these ambiguities, once again, not to condemn it, Saint John reminds us, but to save it.
May this gospel invite us to this more just relationship with a world which is not, but which is fundamentally loved and saved by the Lord. Amen
