psalm 145 - God is good - is God good? - 14th sunday A

Our responsorial psalm today says:  The Lord is good to all. 

Among us today this affirmation brings peace and joy – indeed God is good.  But I believe that there is also some among us here wherein this statement brings confusion and pain – is God really good, is God really good to all?

To believe that God is good to all is one of the most difficult professions of our faith.  It is easier to recite the creed, I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.  It is easier to believe that God is creator almighty.  But can you profess too with the same ease that God is good to all?

It is easier for me to say to you God created you and me, that God sustains this world, and that God loves each one of us.  But it would not be as easy to say God is good to all, to a mother who just lost her child to cancer, or to the people of Marawi who lost everything in a senseless war, or to the family of an 18 year old who died in the July 6 earthquake in Leyte.  Is God good to all?  Is God really good?  Is God really good to all or just to some?  Many times our convictions are too different from our real feelings – la-in ang ginapatihan ta sang sa balatyagon naton, indi bala?

And many times too our real feelings betray our convictions.  Our real feelings tell us kill those drug addicts, kill those muslim terrorists, death penalty to the rapists and the plunderers and the murderers, and yet we say, the Lord is good to all. 

What do we mean then by good when we say the Lord is good?  What do we mean then by all, when we say the Lord is good to all?

Is the Lord good?  In my life it has always been a struggle to understand what good is and how God can be good.  Is God good because God provides?  Is God good because God answers prayers?  Is God good because God heals, God eases the pain, God miraculously causes the discomfort to cease.  But life was not always like these.  In fact it was not like these most of the time.  And I know, in most of us here present, whose faith we can only categorize as ordinary, and that includes me, it is not always easy to believe in this kind of divine goodness.  For me it was not always a life of ease, it was not always pain-free, it was never always comfortable.  In almost everything, my relationship with God is, I manage to survive, barely, but I did. 

So what is God's goodness to me?  It's in the responsorial psalm too and it says, The LORD lifts up all who are falling and raises up all who are bowed down.  Notice that the act of lifting and the act of raising someone falling, someone bowed down, can only be done when God is there, when God is near.  Lifting and raising someone cannot be done from a distance.  You have to be there to lift.  You have to be there to raise.  And that for me is divine goodness.  I am not alone.  Never alone.  I know deep in my heart I am not carrying this alone.  Even when I look back in my life it was a life that gives testimony that I was never left alone.  God was always there.  God is always near.  God is good because he is always there even when he has to do nothing.  No other goodness can ever replace God's presence in our lives and in our pain. 

Then we go to the second, is God good to all?  What do we mean by all?  Is it just kami or is it a kita as in kita tanan?  Is God selective in his love?  Does he also love the unlovable, the unworthy, the sinners?  Isn't it that Jesus said that God makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. And yet why is it that some are better off than others, why is it that some are richer and some have barely enough to eat?  Why are others more talented, more gifted than some of us, why are others so ordinary and lackluster?   Are they less cared than me and you?  Are there some of us who are better loved? 

I don't know.  I am loved by God differently.  God is good to us in different ways.   I don't know how, I have not yet discovered his pattern of loving.  But just as in our first reading God cannot be put in a box, in the boxes of our biases and preconceptions.  He is king and yet he rides an ass and a colt.  We who pretend to be wise, we who thought we know so many things about God are stupefied and confused many times by his ways in our lives.  God is holy – God is totally other, he is unlike us in his loving, in his caring.

Indeed it is true - God is a lion.  You cannot catch it.  It will catch you.

I came today in this chapel with the seminarians of St Vincent Ferrer – from Grades 11 and 12 to our college.  We want to join you in worshiping a God we cannot fully understand, we cannot fully know, we cannot even fully love.  Nevertheless we know that God is faithful – he is faithful in his words - God can be trusted in all that he does - Amen.