The theme chosen at our parish for the liturgy today is “Jivit Bodlat - Hi Devachi Soddvonechi Ievzonn” (Change your lives – This is God’s plan for salvation).
Before anything else, however, we need to ask the question, why is it necessary for God’s salvation? The answer requires that we go back to two Sundays ago, when we read from the book of Wisdom, where we learned that God did not desire death, He made man to live, but that death entered the world because of the envy of the devil and Adam and Eve’s cooperation with the devil. Our original relationship with God, a relationship of holiness and purity was destroyed by our disobedience, by our sin, and as a result we began to experience death. It is from death that God wishes us to be saved. He wishes us to be saved from the vale of tears, so that we may return to live with Him in heaven.
What was His plan to save us therefore? His plan was, as we learn in the second reading, right from the beginning of the world, to reconcile us with Him, through His Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. That through His blood, the blood of a sinless creature, our transgressions would be forgiven, and we would be able to live, once again as children of God, this time through adoption through our God and brother, Our Lord Jesus Christ.
There is something else that we need to recognise though, that all of salvation history, rests on a detail that we very often forget, that damnation or redemption relies on us. It was through our cooperation that we sinned and fell from grace, and it is through our cooperation that we are saved. This is the great dignity that God offers us, He chooses that we cooperate with Him in His great task of saving the world.
And how are we to cooperate with him? By changing our lives!
Now changing our lives (Jivit bodlat in the Concanim translation) is perhaps not the best way to communicate what the Gospel means. In English, the word is translated as repentance. But even this is not entirely satisfactory. The word in the original Greek, is metanoia, which means to change one’s life because one repents one ways, because one sees the sinful nature of our way of life. In other words, to have a change of heart, or to convert.
And this, Brothers and sisters, is how God’s plan of salvation will work; though the conversion of our hearts, recognising that our flesh is weak, and our body urges us to sin, but that we must not give in to these temptations, but accept the grace that flows from the Eucharist and the sacraments, and change the ways in which we live our lives.
But because God makes us cooperators in his salvation, there is something greater in store for those who change their lives. The psalm today reads:
Kindness and truth shall meet;
justice and peace shall kiss.
Truth shall spring out of the earth,
and justice shall look down from heaven.
Truly brothers and sisters, when we change our lives and cooperate with God’s grace then kindness and truth shall meet, justice and peace shall kiss, truth shall spring out of the earth and justice shall look down from heaven. Look around you, don’t you think that our Goa, once upon a time, our golden Goa, deserves to see these things? If so, then know that all of this is possible by our individual conversion.
But don’t expect that this will happen in dramatic ways. On the contrary, it will happen in small, almost imperceptible ways. After all, the following verse of the psalm says:
The LORD himself will give his benefits;
our land shall yield its increase.
Justice shall walk before him,
and prepare the way of his steps.
We may act, but it is God who grants these benefits. We only work for the kingdom, but the kingdom is established by God alone. One thing is clear, however, our job as baptised is to prepare the way for the coming of the Lord. Let us, therefore, dear brothers and sisters, change our lives, convert our hearts, and cooperate in God’s plan of salvation for the earth.
(A version of this homily
was first preached in Concanim to the faithful at the parish of Nossa Senhora
do Rosário, Fatorda.
Image: 'Allegory of Peace and Justice,' Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.)
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