Homily for the seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)
Readings: Gn 18:20-32; Col 2:12-14; Lk 11:1-13
A few weeks ago, some friends were talking about watching a movie. They knew that it took a dark twist at the end, so they hit the stop button early to avoid the tragic finish. That’s exactly what happens in today’s first reading. The wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah becomes too great for God to ignore, and he decides to destroy the cities. Abraham questions him, as if bargaining him down. If just ten innocent people remain, God will spare the cities. But, as you probably know, if you read on, God does destroy the cities. They did not contain even ten good men. They were corrupt from top to bottom.
Still, it’s not an accident that today’s reading stops where it does. The premature ending focuses our attention on God’s reaction to human corruption. He is not eager for destruction or motived by vindictiveness. To use the terms of later Christian theology, we could say that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is one of the many stories in the Book of Genesis that express the reality of Original Sin. The Biblical message is clear: None of us is innocent. Mankind is corrupt from top to bottom. God’s reaction to Abraham—his desire to spare the innocent—shows that the destruction wrought by Original Sin is not what God wants. Our sinfulness is self-destructive.
If self-destruction were the end of the movie, we could understand turning it off early. But God’s full response to human sinfulness, which unfolds in the New Testament, is not to strike a deal, to plea bargain, or to negotiate. Nor is it to ignore our sinfulness or to excuse it. It is not to declare a new paradigm in which there are no longer any moral absolutes and what was once sinful is now OK, if circumstances are right or you get your pastor’s permission. No, God’s reaction is something else entirely. As St. Paul tells the Colossians, God has removed sinfulness from our midst by “nailing it to the cross.”
What does this mean? It means that what God’s mercy accomplishes is not a negotiated settlement with sin, but a new reality, a new way of being, a new kind of freedom. God offers us the possibility of a new birth, a new relationship with him, but it comes at a cost. The old reality must pass away. The way we accept this offer, given to us by God himself, is, as St. Paul says, through the sacrament of baptism. Through baptism, we are buried with Christ. We go down into the waters which represent burial—imagine the cold depths of the ocean—but we rise from those same waters—imagine the fresh dew of a new day. We need these paradoxical symbols because what happens in baptism is so profoundly new. It’s a deeper change than a movie going from black-and-white to color or even to 3D. It’s more like adding a fourth or fifth or sixth dimension, dimensions we did not even know existed. Baptism means the life of heaven breaking into our lives.
Even today, we probably do not quite appreciate the newness of what God offers us. We try to strike little bargains with God, presuming that he’ll go along with our brilliant schemes. The obligation to attend Sunday Mass? We replace it with some cutesy phrase about God being everywhere. “Everywhere,” after all, is the easiest place in the world to ignore. We pick and choose among which Catholic doctrines to follow, often times becoming disciples of social media instead of Jesus Christ. We take the newness of life God offers us for granted. What we don’t realize is that the deals we are trying to strike aren’t as good for us as the gift God offers.
In the Gospel, in what Jesus says about prayer, he is not suggesting a new and more effective bargaining strategy. You see, in addition to the forgiveness of sins, baptism has another indelible effect. It changes the nature of our relationship with God. No longer are we God’s creatures, but we become his adopted sons and daughters. By participating in the death and resurrection of Jesus, we enter into his relationship with his Father. That is why he teaches his disciples to call his Father “our Father.”
In doing so, Jesus encourages us to see prayer not as tactic for getting what we want, but as relationship with a loving parent. Sometimes parents don’t give their children what they want, but usually they know quite a bit more than their kids. So calling God “our Father” implies a certain humility. It also implies a certain trust. We can pray to God with serenity, Jesus points out, because a father would not hand his child a rattlesnake. God has given us everything we have and are—all that is good. Evil certainly exists in our world, but God does not seek to harm us. He seeks to save us from the consequences of turning away from him.
Finally, calling God our Father reminds us of the deepest reason to pray. As children, probably, we are used to asking our parents for things. Our parents are, after all, the people primarily responsible for our well-being. But as we grow older, I think, when we become adults ourselves—and some of us become parents—we start to realize how precious time with our parents really is. We don’t need to get anything out of it to justify it. It is worth spending time with our parents because of who they are and how unique and precious that relationship is. For most of us, that relationship is where we first experience love. Prayer is spending time with God; that’s why we are here this morning. We don’t need to justify time with the Lord or “get” anything in particular out of it. Time with our loving Father is its own justification. It’s the reason for everything else.
Abraham’s bargaining with God was both a success and failure. Success, because God agreed to everything he asked for; failure, because it turned out it didn’t matter anyway. God’s full answer to the universal sinfulness that made Abraham’s haggling fruitless is the new life of baptism, a gift that mean not just new innocence, but a new relationship with God—not a business partner or a sly salesman—but a loving Father who gives us nothing less than himself.
July 27, 2025
St. Isaac Jogues Catholic Church
Rapid City, South Dakota
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 