Homily for the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 4, 2016
Church of the Resurrection, Cincinnati
(Wisdom 9:13-18b; Philemon 9-10, 12-17; Luke 14:25-33)
I invite you to imagine with me that you and I are living in a small village in Galilee in the year 31 A.D. There’s a lot of buzz going around the district. An itinerant preacher has been stirring up a lot of excitement. People say they’ve never heard anyone speak like him, with such authority. He’s extremely attractive. Great crowds have begun to follow him.
Let’s imagine, also, that the harvest-time has just passed. The fields have been gleaned. It’s a kind of down-time, with little work to do. So we decide, hey, it might be fun to go over and check this fellow out.
We do, and it is indeed exciting. New people to meet. Kind of like Woodstock in 30 A.D.
And then we reach the point at which today’s Gospel story begins. The text says that he suddenly ‘turned.’ We must imagine that he was going on ahead of the following crowd, and without any forewarning he turns. He uses a term that will become a central theme of Luke’s Gospel from now on.
They were ‘followers.’ And he now invites them—and us—to move into a new relationship: “If you want to be my disciples. . . ”
Being a disciple suggests a new degree of closeness to him. A new level of intimacy. A disciple is an insider, someone in the inner circle. Disciples hear things that the general crowd isn’t privy to. We hear that he spoke to the crowd in parables while disciples were taken aside for private teaching.
To be that close to the Lord is a privilege we would all want. And it is being offered. BUT—there are conditions. We are being asked to review everything we might hold most dearly in life to ask where it fits in comparison to the place of the Lord. Parents, family, marriage, possessions—even life itself.
Luke has Jesus use a shocking expression to make the point. He tells us we are to hate our parents.
We know Jesus can’t really be telling us to hate. In fact, Matthew, in his Gospel uses a softer expression: “if you love thesemore than you love me.” Scholars tell us that it is common in Semitic tongues to use extreme forms of expression that are not to be taken literally—but are to be taken seriously.
It’s all about priorities, about assigning worth. He’s calling for a conversion of mind and heart from the way the world views these things. Discipleship is serious business.
But that’s only half of the picture of what’s going on here. If we focus only on the conditions for being a disciple we could make it all about us. We need to look at the story from the perspective of Jesus and his mission.
Just think: his ministry is succeeding. More converts every day. He’s on a roll! Why would you change a successful formula? Especially, why put up a new obstacle that could slow the whole movement down?
Because that isn’t his mission! His mission is not simply to attract more numbers of people with perhaps questionable motives. Jesus isn’t into celebrity, he’s not into attracting groupies.
He has set his face like flint on his way to Jerusalem. His conflict with the religious leaders of the people is going to grow more heated. He will not back down. And they will put him to death. As an enemy of the faith.His followers are going to be scandalized at seeing him defeated. He has to let them know the cost they might be asked to pay. Like someone building a house or a king preparing to fight a war they need to be realistic about what it will take. He has to prepare followers to become disciples.
There is another point we might easily overlook. Jesus is not afraid that this difficult new message might cost him some—perhaps many—of those followers. We saw what happened when he used shocking language to make them confront the scandal of the Eucharist. “They said, ‘this is a hard message’ and they walked with him no more.” He will pay the price of that loss. The mission calls for it.
Discipleship involves having a mindset that is directly opposed to the vision of this world. World-thinking is all about getting. Taking. Possessing. It’s about controlling; clinging; protecting what we have so that someone else doesn’t get it from us.
Discipleship is about precisely the opposite. It’s about not hanging onto; not clinging. It’s about having an open hand, being ready to let go if love of God or my neighbor calls for it. It’s about putting the other first.
We can make any created reality a way of avoiding the claim of the Gospel: family, friendships, property, our reputation. Maybe just ‘my way of doing things.’
You’ll pardon me if I say something here about the spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola. (A plug for the home team!)
In his Spiritual Exercises Ignatius has the retreatant pray for the gift of ‘detachment.’ That doesn’t mean not caring. It means exactly the opposite: caring deeply; being passionate about life and important values—while at the same time being ready to hand them over if the work of the kingdom calls for it.
Ignatius’s own degree of detachment was revealed when someone asked him late in life, after he had devoted 15 years to building a world –wide body of missionaries, what he would do if the church decided to dissolve his beloved Society of Jesus. (It wasn’t an abstract question; church authorities were always threatening the work.) Ignatius said it would take him 15 minutes of prayer in the chapel and he could let it all go.
You know, there is a certain providence at work in today’s reading from the Gospel. Because almost at this very hour Mother Teresa is being canonized in Rome. We couldn’t have a more fitting example of discipleship. This is someone who had a very clear sense of her priority in life, her mission.
And she suffered for it. People said, “Why do you spend your energies on people who are beyond help?” She and her sisters were criticized by professional medical people because they didn’t meet the standards of modern medicine. Her answer was that they didn’t understand her mission. She was dealing with people already dying. Others might be called to try to save them, and she respected that. Her mission was to accompanysomeone in the last moments of life: to be personally present to them. She gave it even more focus: she said, “I want their very last memory of this life, the last thing their eyes would see, to be a smiling face.”
She even suffered in her relationship to the Lord. The media expressed amazement that for 30 years her prayer was without any consolation. She wondered if God was pleased with her. The news was presented to the public as a source of amazement because the world’s idea of holiness is that the saints are children untouched by human reality.
And she suffered at the hands of church leaders who turned her into a celebrity rather than a pilgrim. They tried to use her as a way of chastising other sisters: “She is a real nun! She wears a habit!” It is to her credit that when she realized what was going on, she went public in her praise of Western sisters. She refused to be used as an instrument of an ideological attack on nuns she said were holy women.
There’s a rich irony in the event of her canonization, isn’t there? We can now believe that she is in heaven and it’s OK to pray to her. Of course the laity have been praying to her for years. They didn’t need any permission. . . .
As we receive the life of Jesus at the altar today it seems clear how we should pray: in gratitude for the example of a saint who walked the earth right in our day, and asking for a deeper appreciation of the discipleship, the intimacy with the Lord, that he offers us today.
Amen?