There is
a marked home field advantage in the Olympics.
Host nations on average win 20 more medals than they did in the summer
games previous to the ones on their soil, and 10 more gold. You might wonder where this advantage comes
from. Some of it is probably not being wearied
by travel, competing in the climate you train in, the kind of advantages that
accrue from being at ‘home.’ But, I’m
sure a big part of it too is the fans, the people cheering you on.
That’s
what the letter to the Hebrews promises us in our race, our journey together to
holiness. It’s not that we’re ‘at home’
where we are. In that beautiful Marian prayer,
the “Hail, Holy Queen,” we Catholics identify ourselves as “poor banished
children of Eve,” and so we are. We are
away from our home. And God is calling
us back, to go back to living with perfect love and integrity and holiness with
Him, with our neighbors, and with creation.
We’re not there yet, so God calls us on this journey home, the journey
to love, and that journey is exciting enough that our second reading refers to
it as a race. And it’s a race we run
with the greatest home field advantage possible, even though we are not home
yet: we have the fans, the crowd, the ‘cloud of witnesses.’ We run spurred on by the cheers and
encouragement, the prayers and the example, of all those who have gone before
us, the canonized saints, and of those whose happiness the earthly church is
not yet aware.
They
truly act to strengthen us, and are cause enough for awe and wonder and
thanksgiving, but God gives us still more.
To return for the moment to the Olympics, marathon records are rarely
set at the Olympics, and one of the reason is that competitors can’t use
pacers. Pacers are people paid in some
other marathons to run a certain stretch of the race at a high steady pace, and
then drop back, or drop out completely, and let the real racers duke it out for
the top spots. Well, God doesn’t give us
a pacer who’ll ever drop out, but gives us a leader, a champion, a fellow racer
who says “follow me,” Jesus, the perfectly faithful one who perfects us in our
faith.
Jesus
doesn’t just tell us to have faith, like a sideline coach shouting out, “five
forty-five pace now!,” but strengthens our faith precisely by being faithful
himself, like those athletes who consistently lift their teammates’ play by
their excellence. Jesus’ unwavering
faith in God’s power to raise, Jesus’ faith in God’s love which would restore
him to be with his beloved people even after he’d been put to death at their
hands, our hands, that’s what allowed him to continue to be present to the
world even when it turned on him, what allows him to continue to be present to
us even when we find it within ourselves still to hold back. That’s what it means to have a perfected
faith, to trust in God in a way that lets us love in ways that are risky, in
ways that are bold, as Christ dares to love us.
In the
Gospel, Christ asks, “Do you think I came to bring peace?” And a perfectly fair answer would be, “yes,
Jesus, I do.” I think that because
Zechariah sang about it in chapter one, and the angels affirmed that promise in
chapter two; because you yourself told so many people to ‘go in peace’ and told
your disciples to go village to village proclaiming peace! I think that because our tradition tells us
that peace is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, and I know you came that the Spirit
might dwell in us and work with you to guide us in this race. Jesus did come to bring us to peace, but not through peace. If we dare to
love with whole-hearted freedom and availability with which he loves us, the
trusting, perfected-faith, love, we will run into strife, into conflict, into
opposition. If nothing else, we will
endure the grief that only those who love deeply know.
Christ
knew all of that. Christ pierced through
it, like an anchor piercing stormy waters, and found rock, found the love that
raises from the dead, found home. And he’s
with us, running with us, leading us home.
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