Freedom From Fear

"Be not afraid."

Sparrow, by John James Audubon

Homily for the 12th Week in Ordinary Time (A)

It’s not easy to be fearless in our world today, but that’s what Jesus is calling us to do, especially when living our Christian faith.

Our fears today take many shapes. They pile up and weigh us down. Pope St. John Paul II sensed this anxiety when, quoting today’s Gospel, he first urged crowds to Be not afraid. It became one his most repeated phrases, because he wanted to share a message against fear in a time of fear.

Think of the world in the 70s when he was elevated to the papacy. The Russians were at war, Iranian extremists were causing trouble, gas prices were skyrocketing, inflation was out of control. Nothing at all like today, of course.

He would later write that Peoples and nations of the entire world need to hear these words. Their conscience needs to grow in the certainty that Someone exists who holds in His hands the destiny of this passing world … And this Someone is Love.

When you think of it this way, that phrase becomes not just encouragement, but a summary of the Gospel for the modern world. People may ask What does Jesus offer me? What does the Church offer me? There are a lot of answers to that question, but peace of mind and heart can certainly be one of them, and that’s why John Paul made it so central to his message.

In a little while, we will all stand and say the Lord’s Prayer together. After we finish, Father will pray something called the embolism. Not a word you want to hear from the doctor, but it’s okay here because it just means something that’s inserted. We’re all familiar with this prayer, but today let’s think about it a little more.

After the Our Father, listen closely, and take those words into your heart as Father prays that the Lord will deliver us from evil, grant us peace in our days, keep us free from sin, and safe from all distress. In the old translation, the last word was anxiety. The church thought that word had become too clinical, but the meaning is similar. Distress, anxiety, worry. In a word: fear.

And what gives us any reason at all to be free of distress in the lives we live, which can be so upsetting with worries about being Christian a world that has turned against Christ, worries about work and finances, worries about the chaos out there, worries about our kids and their future, worries about sickness and death? How can we face that? How does God expect us to face that?

You already know, because it’s the last words of that prayer. Keep us safe from all distress as ... we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

If love is the heart, the core, of Christian life, then hope is its fuel. I was reading a respected Buddhist once, and he said hope was a bad thing because the most it can do is make the present moment less difficult to bear. I don’t think you could find two more starkly different views of the world. To the Buddhist, only now exists, but to the Christian, now is bound up with a promise from God that He will never leave us alone here in our exile, and that if we remain faithful to Him, He will call us home one day, to Him.

Total peace cannot be found in this life because we are separated from Him. We’re incomplete without him. Our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. And so that hope is a tether between our life here on Earth, and the promise of the life to come. It allows us to strive in faith and love to make these lives a tiny reflection of that promise

So, for example, the union of a husband and wife becomes an image of the union of the soul with God. The eucharist becomes a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. The community of the faithful here at mass participates with the communion of all the saints and angels crowded around the heavenly throne. The beauty we encounter in art, in music, in nature, in a tiny sparrow, is a small reflection of the beauty of the Creator.

All of that is hope. That hope is what allows us to endure the fear that is an ordinary part of our lives. So in the mass, we when we come back to the prayer after the Our Father, what is it that allows us to believe that the Lord will deliver us from evil, will help us find peace, will protect us from sin, will keep us safe from distress?

It is the blessed hope of Jesus.

And how do we all respond that phrase?

With a great outpouring of that hope and statement of the glory of the Lord. What we call the doxology:

For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours now and for ever.

That phrase doesn’t appear in the Bible, but it’s from an early Church document called the Didache.

It’s a statement of faith in God, and hope for His promises. It means that when the Lord tells us to Be not afraid, those aren’t just words. God has counted every hair on your head, and even if we are cast out by the world, even if we are persecuted and wronged, even if poverty afflicts us and sickness steals us away bit by bit, we can trust the one who shaped every bird in the sky, and every man and woman in this church, with His own hands. Even death is just a birth into heaven for those who remain true to the Lord.

And I say this all out loud as someone with a lot of anxiety. A lot. I say it knowing that when the moment comes, and I need to be free from fear, I will struggle to remember my own words. I say it over and over again hoping that gradually, in my flawed way, I will come to believe one of the most important things as we face our trials. So we can remember, no matter what, three simple words from the Lord Himself--Be not afraid--and for one very simple reason: Because God’s got this.