St John’s Cathedral

31 December 2006

The feast of the Holy Family expresses very concretely what Christmas means. The eternal Son of God has become a member of a human family. He shares in the joys and sorrows that are part of family life. God is involved in the basic human relationship of parent and child, as a Child. He lived ‘under the authority’ of two of his creatures.

More than that, he has become part of the whole human family. “By his incarnation”, the Second Vatican Council says, “the Son of God has united himself in a certain way with each individual” ( Gaudium et Spes , 22) . In Christ, God is involved in all our relationships, all our hopes and fears, in a way we could never have imagined. “He sanctified… human ties, above all family ties” ( Gaudium et Spes , 32 ).

To put it another way, we are part of the family of God; we share God’s life. The life that is his as Son of God from all eternity is now part of the life and history of the human family. “We are already God’s children… When he appears we shall be like him” ( I Jn 3:2 ).

People might be forgiven for thinking that it is not that easy to see the peace and love of God’s life at work in the human family. There is war and violence and division all over the world. We see them in our own country and in our own city.

People live in fear, in places scarred by burnt out cars, burnt out houses and burnt out hopes. Guns and drugs and thuggery drag whole communities into mourning and misery.

In his message for the World Day of Peace, which is celebrated tomorrow, Pope Benedict tells us that peace is God’s gift. We could never construct that peace for ourselves because it is a relationship, a sharing in the peace and glory that is God’s own life.

Every human being, in his or her heart, longs for peace, even though fear and greed and prejudice can often lead us to seek it where it could never be found. But we call Jesus the Prince of Peace, because in him we find the peace which is beyond fear, division, grief and pain. That peace began when Christ rose from the dead. We are already God’s children.

Only in Christ can the human longing for peace and truth and justice be fulfilled. In him will we be able to find once again everything that is good in our lives and in our relationship; we will find them ‘illuminated and transfigured’, freed from every imperfection and impermanence ( Gaudium et Spes , 39 ).

But peace is also a task. If we believe that truth, then our task is to live it. The violence that we see in the world and all around us is a complete denial of that truth. It is a rejection of God’s promise. True peace is built on God’s love of each individual made in the divine image, brought into existence by God who is love.

That means that each individual is loved by God; each one deserves our respect. We are not carrying out the task of welcoming God’s peace unless we respect the rights and dignity of everyone – with no exceptions. “As one created in the image of God, each individual… is not just something, but someone” ( BENEDICT XVI, Message for the World Day of Peace 2007, 2 )

Those who engage in violence and intimidation, those who destroy lives through drug dealing are looking for power and prestige and status by destroying not only other people but also their own humanity. In the final triumph of God’s peace, those who have hurt or ignored or failed the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters will be told they do not belong ( Mt 25 ).

To be human is to have in our hearts a fundamental call to recognise the humanity of others, to recognise that their fundamental dignity and worth are the same as ours. That is why the fundamental law of human behaviour is to love one’s neighbour as oneself. That means recognising every neighbour as our equal. We are to love them as ourselves, even more, we are to love them as Christ loves us – without limit. To refuse to accept a person as a person, to treat a person as something rather than someone is to reject and despise a neighbour. St John puts it very bluntly: “Whoever hates his brother is in darkness and is walking about in darkness not knowing where he is going because darkness has blinded him” (I Jn 2:11 ).

But we cannot stop at condemning violence. What about our respect for the people who are most cruelly affected by violence. Do we love them as we love ourselves? Do we love them as Jesus loves us? Here in Limerick there are people whose communities have been made places of fear, there are places where it would be all too easy for young people to give up hope, places where parents are terrified that their children will get caught up in the culture of drugs and violence, either as victims or as perpetrators, places where people are driven from their homes. Loving them as we love ourselves would mean responding to their situation as if it were our own.

Loving them as Christ loves them would mean seeing all of them – including those who commit violence – as people for whom Christ came and whom he calls brothers and sisters.

In the coming year I hope that there will be serious efforts to address the factors that have deepened and intensified these problems in parts of our city. That will involve in the first place recognising that, as Pope Benedict tells us, the human person is the heart of peace ( Message for the World Day of Peace 2007 ).

The challenge is to feel the pain of other people as we feel our own and to respond to them as Christ would do. He felt the pain of human life and he responded to that pain in others with compassion and healing. He treated people who were rejected and on the margins as his friends. He was accused of being too concerned with those who were looked down upon by ‘respectable’ people. He had a particular concern for the sick or troubled. A world in which people loved one another as Christ loves us would be a world where everyone belonged, a world of perfect peace.

But the task of peace building makes never-ending demands on us. It means responding seriously and consistently to the plight of people, at home and abroad, who live in situations that the rest of us would not tolerate. It means insisting that their situation should be treated as a priority by all the agencies, statutory and voluntary, working together. It means that all of us have to give it the kind of priority it would have if our own neighbourhoods were scarred by burnt out houses and the fear of violence. It means going beyond expectations – as Jesus did. Even his mother had not understood the full dimensions of his commitment to be busy about his Father’s affairs.

If the coming year were marked by that kind of respect for all of our brothers and sisters, then here in Limerick and in many parts of the world the prayer of Pope Benedict would begin to be fulfilled:

May Mary show us in her Son the Way of Peace

and enlighten our vision so that we can recognise Christ’s face

in the face of every human person, the heart of peace ( Message for the World Day of Peace 2007,16 )