Sent To Seek
God seeks us out and we can be his instruments.
Reading: Luke 15:1-10
The following homily was preached to the student brothers during Compline. You can listen here or read below:
Who among us has never been lost? Sometimes it takes only a moment of distraction, a single step off the path, and suddenly we realize we no longer know where we are.
And in those moments of fear, there is something that brings relief: those who love us begin to search for us. They worry, because we matter to them.
This is exactly what God does with us. The eternal Word has done this for all humanity throughout the history of salvation, and ultimately by becoming flesh, entering our history, seeking us. And He continues to do so even today, with each one of us personally. He speaks to us in a human language we can understand: through the Sacraments, through Scripture, through the circumstances of our lives guided by His providence, and through the people we meet.
I’m sure that all of us, at least once in life, have felt sought after and desired by God. We friars have certainly experienced this search in a special way: God wanted us close to Him, united to Him in a unique way through religious consecration. It may have been a bit frightening at the beginning — perhaps we tried to escape God and His calling — but in the end we said, “Yes, here I am.” Our vocation is living proof that God never tires of seeking.
He found us, called us by name, and invited us to share in His mission of mercy.
Saint Dominic, our Father, became a faithful instrument of that divine search. He could have remained in comfort as a canon at Osma in Spain — a prestigious position. But when he saw, in the south of France, that some sheep had gone astray, when he felt compassion for those deceived by heresy, which disfigured the face of Christ, he did not look away. He left the safety of the ninety-nine and went out in search of the one who was lost. In him, compassion became mission, and mission became the living image of Christ, the Good Shepherd who carries humanity on His shoulders.
Dear brothers, this is the heart of today’s Gospel: God never resigns Himself to losing anyone. And to be true Christians and true sons of Saint Dominic, we must share that same missionary passion of God. We cannot let ourselves be guided by numbers and statistics, which say little about faith. We cannot let ourselves be swayed by prestige, by personal ambitions, by roles, even within religious life. We cannot be content with the ninety-nine when we know that one is missing.
Pope Benedict XVI, speaking of St Dominic, said that: “This great Saint reminds us that in the heart of the Church a missionary fire must always burn. It must be a constant incentive to make the first proclamation of the Gospel and, wherever necessary, a new evangelization. Christ, in fact, is the most precious good that the men and women of every time and every place have the right to know and to love.
Image: Christ the Good Shepherd, mosaic in Frederikvaerk, Denmark.
