HOMILY for 16th Mon per annum (II)
Mic 6:1-4. 6-8; Ps 49; Matt 12:38-42
“This is what the Lord asks of you: only this, to act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8) We like things in threes, so when we see a famous sentence like this, my mind tends to relate these three actions to the three theological virtues, or to God, the neighbour, and the self, or to the mind, the body, and the spirit.
However, I want instead to concentrate on just this phrase: we’re called “to love tenderly”, according to this translation. The adverb suggests how we are to love, ie, the quality of our love, presumably for other people as well as for God, and we’re called to love tenderly, that is with warmth, affection, and gentle kindness. When I hear the word, I think of my grandmother crooning the Elvis Presley song, ‘Love me tender’, which she used to sing to me as a lullaby!
But if we look at other translations, it’s not so obvious that we’re being called to love in this way. For the most well-regarded translations would say that we’re to “love mercy”, or to “love faithfulness”, or to “love kindness”, so we’re not being told about the quality of our love but what we are to love. So, delving into the Hebrew, I realised that the translators are trying to translate the word hesed which is one of the key attributes of God –it is used 249 times in the Old Testament. It’s meaning encompasses all those things: mercy, faithfulness, and kindness. It is also steadfast love, loyalty, and covenantal resilience. It speaks of a God who is always there for us, whose love, as St Paul would say, “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Cor 13:7)
So in fact we’re not being called to just love others tenderly with warmth and affection, although this is certainly still very important. After all, genuine love, I think, has to be tender, perhaps in the way that my grandmother would love me. But this comes from a genuine familial relationship. So, it’s challenging us to see others as our own family, our own kin, indeed, as our own flesh even. And this, of course, is how God loves us.
In Christ God has become our kin, sharing in our humanity, and he loves us as his own flesh, just as the Bridegroom loves his Bride. Indeed, by giving us his own Body and Blood in the Eucharist, Christ unites us to himself in an intimate bond of love. Grounded in this reality which changes us, we are thus called to act not only as justice requires but rather with hesed, with the steadfast, faithful, kind, loyal, merciful love of God. Our realisation of the scope and richness of this love would rightly humble us so that we can but walk humbly with God and, with contrite hearts, seek his transforming grace, as we do at the start of every Mass.
For truly there is “something greater than Jonah here”!
