23rd Sunday of Year C 2013

23^rd.Sunday (Year C)

(Wisdom 9:13-18; Philemon 9-10, 12-17; Luke 14:25-33)

How strange Our Lord seems to us, at times!

And yet, that appreciation is more truly the sign and the measure of our alienation from Him!  We search feverishly and anxiously these days for more people in our Churches, and, in that respect, we regard ourselves as being motivated by the true Christian spirit of evangelization.  And yet Our Blessed Lord was not, apparently, over-pleased by the fact that Great crowds were travelling with Him, for we are told:

He turned and addressed them, ‘If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.  Whoever does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.

Why such a difference between Jesus and ourselves?

First of all, let us give careful attention to the actual situation which provoked those words of Jesus: we are told that great crowds were travelling with Him, and Jesus effectively told them -- with sorrowful compassion for their well-intentioned but only surface-love -- that only those who would follow after Him, behind Him, walking in His footsteps, along His ways, and learning from Him, could possibly become disciples who might eventually learn to walk -- as the apostles -- with Him.  

And there we have a partial answer to the question above, ‘Why such a difference ...?’  It is because too many Catholics these days want and pretend to walk with Him before they have learned to walk behind Him and learn His ways.

Jesus, looking at the ‘great crowds’, wanted disciples who would learn, first of all, obedience and self-commitment: disciples willing to learn, that is, to commit themselves to His Spirit and submit themselves, with Him, to His Father in total love and  trust.  We moderns, on the other hand -- if we are willing and able to recognize, understand, and admit our own motives and propensities aright -- want and seek after ‘great crowds’, ostensibly indeed, to fill our churches, exalt Mother Church, and give glory to God, but also -- and all too often -- to satisfy those more personal needs we might even be hiding from ourselves: that is, to quieten our spiritual anxieties and comfort our fears, to confirm our Catholic confidence or  even stir up our pride.  

Whereas Jesus did all in humility for total love of His Father and suffering mankind, we do so much from deep-rooted self-love and subtle self-interest.

And looking back again at the Gospel account, why did our Lord use such an emotive and, dare I say it, ‘objectionable’ word as ‘hate’?

As you probably know, ‘hate’ in that context means ‘put in second place’; and it’s objectionable connotations are useful because Jesus wanted to strongly -- very strongly -- emphasize the fact that God must always come first; parents, family, even self, always second, never before God. However, we should notice too that Jesus understood such ‘hatred’ to be a cross for human nature; part, perhaps indeed the essential part, of that cross He immediately went on to refer to when He added:

Whoever does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.

Again, Jesus speaks most earnestly of the need for any one wishing to become a disciple of His, to seriously ‘count the cost’; and yet we, so light-heartedly at times, seek to encourage converts and claim back ‘lost ones’ by the fellowship we can offer them, and also by the joy of our family and parochial gatherings: such as the  tender simplicity of our baptisms where the innocence of the child so easily prevails over the sublimity of the prayers being offered and responsibilities being assumed, and the splendour of our weddings where the beauty of the bride-to-be and the parents’ hopes for future happiness and fulfilment assume a heart-tugging pre-eminence over the lovers’ for-better-or-for-worse commitment to each other before Christ, over the Church’s prayers for the blessing and abiding presence of the Spirit, and for God’s greater glory in His universal plan of loving salvation.

Jesus once said (Matthew 23:15) to some Pharisees,

You cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves,

 and that should be borne in mind by us today, lest our modern zeal makes new converts twice as superficial in their Catholicism and discipleship as too many of us have long been.

Our Blessed Lord summed up His thoughts in these few words:

Anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be My disciple.

 

St. Bede gives us great help to rightly understand these words, for he distinguishes clearly between those called to ‘leave behind, relinquish’ all possessions, and those here called to ‘renounce’ such possessions: that is, those called to take great care that they do not allow themselves to be possessed by their possessions.

What, however, are we to understand with that word possessions?

It does not refer to merely material things, for there are many human spiritual realities we appreciate and treasure: for example, ‘my freedom’ was of great significance in the early years of the Church and, indeed, still is in many parts of the world where Mother Church -- even to this day -- suffers persecution; and there are, of course, the frequently encountered and unworthy memories of such treasured freedom lingering on the lips of those who like to invoke ‘my opinion’ to excuse their public words and actions.  ‘My reputation’, ‘my good name’, ‘my peace of mind and heart’, are also among such ‘possessions’ which a man can value much more highly than merely material things.

Jesus’ words:  If anyone comes to Me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple; and  Whoever does not carry his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple, seem to refer to personal bonds of love on the one hand and to our instinctive rejection of suffering on the other, and here Jesus’ words were soon to be backed up by His own Personal example and experience whereby they have acquired a most touching intensity of significance and depth of meaning for us.

For, surely, His deepest Personal suffering came when He had to leave His mother – already a widow – as He died in great ignominy and ‘excruciating’ pain on the Cross on Calvary: committing her, of necessity, to the loving care of one of His disciples, not to family; and the greatest physical and psychological torment of His humanity undoubtedly began in the garden of Gethsemane where He – sodden with sweat like drops of blood -- besought His Father three times that He be spared the trial!

            If anyone comes to Me without hating his father and mother ...

           Whoever does not carry his cross and come after Me ...

As, in our Gospel reading, Jesus looked round to see the crowd travelling with Him He would appear to have foreseen what ... the biggest and most terrible WHAT of His life ... lay ahead of Him; and surely the words He uttered, those very words before us, are most heavily laden with heart-rending meaning and significance, penetrated through and through with that total love and commitment which would lead Him, most compellingly, to leave His mother a Childless widow in Israel, and to take upon Himself the horrible pain and total ignominy of the Cross: 

If anyone comes to Me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.  Whoever does not carry his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.

The awareness of His Passion and Death was always with Jesus, close to the surface, never to be ignored or disdained, because He needed to prepare Himself for Satan’s final assault and thus fulfil His own longing to give the ultimate expression to His love for His Father and for us when the opportunity came.  Therefore, as with the great crowds who, light-heartedly travelling along with Him, stirred His pity and sorrow for their incomprehension of what was truly involved, so too did James and John later on stir Our Lord to a similar response:

‘Teacher, grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.’  But Jesus answered them, ‘You do not know what you are asking.  Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptised with?’  (Mark 10: 35-38)

Our Gospel story is much more emotive than that episode with the somewhat ‘pushy’  mother of James and John and her two still young and ambitious sons, for in our Gospel the great crowds seemed to instinctively recognize their shepherd; but most touchingly for Jesus, they themselves were, unfortunately and  most sadly, no better than sheep in their following of Him for they had so very little comprehension of what He was doing, and no idea where He wanted to lead them or what were the forces against them.

It was for such a situation that we heard in the first reading:

Scarce do we guess the things on earth, and what is within our grasp we find with difficulty; but when things are in heaven who can search them out? 

Dear People of God, let us give most heartfelt thanks to God for our Lord and Saviour come down for us from heaven; let us endeavour to serve Him with ever deeper and more sincere love, with ever greater humility in our understanding of Catholic truth, and with quiet and patient confidence in our witness to and suffering for the coming of His Kingdom.            

22nd Sunday of Year C 2013

 22^nd. Sunday, Year (C)

(Sirach 3:17s., 20, 28s.; Hebrews 12: 18s., 22-24a; Luke 14:1, 7-11)

The story about the place of honour at the wedding feast seems, of itself, to be merely worldly advice; indeed it seems -- again of itself -- to lead to a rather hypocritical semblance of humility with the subject publicly choosing the lowest place whilst not only inwardly thinking himself worthy of a higher place, but indeed planning to receive honour in the sight of the other guests on being called higher by the host.  And yet, Our Blessed Lord uses such worldly scheming as a parable for heavenly truth and experience.

This, first of all, teaches us that our basic human attitudes and feelings are orientated towards the good ... that our human nature is not fundamentally vitiated.   Though we are weak and ignorant, our human nature is by no means totally corrupted, nor is our natural sensitivity without a measure of spiritual  awareness.  We have been and are made in the image of God, and this nature of ours is deeply disturbed by sin which, fundamentally, does not suit us.

The story told by Jesus about the natural embarrassment one would feel on being dislodged from the highest seat and sent to the lowest, is concerned not only with the resulting public humiliation, but also with the very intimate and morally good response of deep embarrassment on being forced to recognize one’s original and wrongful self-exaltation by unjustly arrogating the place of honour at the banquet table. 

Human nature is made for God and can at times warn us of the presence of sin – something opposed and foreign to our true good -- when our explicit thinking is unable or unwilling to detect or recognize such a presence.   For example, many young people will instinctively feel embarrassment or even a certain fear at the first wrongful sex activity: their good human nature warning them even when their minds and consciences are not sufficiently aware or enlightened; and how, indeed, can they subject themselves to their very first experience of dangerous drugs leading to hitherto alien experiences with unknowable personal consequences without instinctive trepidation?  Adults also may make ‘faux-pas’ or gaffs in public and feel intense embarrassment as a result; and often enough, such feelings are not merely due to an anticipated loss of face, but also from the awareness of having originally spoken foolishly out of personal vanity, or fulsomely in a quest for human acceptance and praise.

Human nature is, I repeat, still good and sensitive enough to give authentic warning signals -- truly, intimations of immortality -- to our minds and their explicit thinking.  Unfortunately, however, we can so quickly learn to resist and confuse our residual integrity, fighting against or even rejecting our instinctive modesty and honesty, with the result that even prostitutes and murderers, thieves and traducers, become hard-faced as the Scriptures and daily-life in the world today tell us, and they will say, ‘Where is our sin; what harm are we doing? 

But why, after wrongly choosing the highest place at the feast would the person concerned have to betake himself to the lowest seat of all?  Because, all the other seats were perhaps taken?  It may be.   However, it may be also that Our Blessed Lord has adapted the real-life situation somewhat in order to fit it for its present function as a parable of heavenly truth.  For, before God we cannot in truth say that we are more worthy than anyone else: first of all, because we cannot – indeed, often will not -- recognize the sin in our own lives, and secondly because we can never penetrate the hearts of others.  Therefore, the only attitude for a conscientious Christian is to take the lowest seat of all.  For greatness in the Kingdom of God is determined not by our opinion of our own worth or that of anyone else, but by God’s judgment, as St. Paul says: 

With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court.  I do not even judge myself.  I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted.  It is the Lord Who judges me.  Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, Who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart.  Then every man will receive his commendation from God.  (1 Corinthians 4:1-5)

This part of our Gospel passage for today is rounded off by a general statement which seems to have been a favourite saying of Our Lord:

Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the man who humbles himself will be exalted.

Pride, self-assertion in ordinary human society is both bad manners and bad policy, but in the Kingdom of God it is totally inadmissible.  There, ‘pride goes before a fall’; there, there is only kind of privilege and dignity: the kind that comes to those who do not seek it, but are content to serve God and man in love and humility.  The advice given in our Gospel reading about who to invite to your parties, is not meant to be exclusive of anyone, rich or poor, close friends or chance passers-by; the hospitality advised by Jesus is one which seeks to give generously, not to get surrepticiously.  To all who in need -- and the rich can be in need also – we should give, if our concience calls and as our conscience guides; give, that is, in generous simplicity not with calculating discernment.

To close, let me offer you a story, from the Desert Fathers, of one who knew how to give when faced with need and how to humble himself in his giving:

Before Abba Poemen’s group came there, there was an old man in Egypt who enjoyed considerable fame and repute.  But when Abba Poemen’s group went up to Scetis, men left the old man to go to see Abba Poemen. Abba Poemen was grieved at this and said to his disicples, ‘What is to be done about this great old man, for men grieve him by leaving him and coming to us who are nothing?  What shall we do, then, to comfort this old man?’  He said to them, ‘Make ready a little food, and take a skin of wine and let us go to see him and eat with him.  And so we shall be able to comfort him.’  So they put together some food, and went.  When they knocked at the door, the old man’s disciple answered, saying, ‘Who are you?’  They responded, ‘Tell the abba it is Poemen who desires to be blessed by him.’  The disciple reported this and the old man sent him to say, ‘Go away, I have no time.’  But in spite of the heat they persevered, saying, ‘We shall not go away till we have been allowed to meet the old man.’  Seeing their humility and patience, the old man was filled with compunction and opened the door to them.  Then they went in and ate with him.  During the meal he said, ‘Truly, not only what I have heard about you is true, but I see that your works are a hundred-fold greater’, and from that day he became their friend.

22nd Sunday of Year C 2013

22^nd. Sunday Year (C) 

(Sirach 3:17-20, 28-29; Hebrews 12:18-19, 22-24; Luke 14:1, 7-14)

Our readings today are centred on the virtue and practice of humility and the gift of wisdom which can alone sustain it:

Humble yourself the more, the greater you are, and you will find favour with God.

The mind of a sage appreciates proverbs, and an attentive ear is the joy of the wise.

In the Gospel reading Our Blessed Lord openly spoke of humility:

Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

Now that was the Jewish, and the scriptural, way of saying, ‘Whoever exalts himself, God will humble; but the one who humbles himself, God will exalt.’

It is important to recognize this, because otherwise Our Lord's little parable could seem somewhat hypocritical:

When you are invited, go and sit down in the lowest place, so that when he who invited you comes he may say to you, 'Friend, go up higher.' Then you will have glory in the presence of those who sit at the table with you.

On the human level such behaviour saps of hypocrisy I say, where outward pretence alone seeks to make a good impression and so lead to the desired invitation "friend, move up higher".  That can, indeed, happen with men who are fixated on worldly appearances and appreciate little or nothing of heavenly realities.

With God, however, things are much different, for in all the events of our lives here on earth God sees and is concerned about their effect on our personalities, above all on whether they further or frustrate the restoration of our original oneness with God, which, having been lost by the sin of Adam, Jesus came to give back and lead to its ultimate fulfilment.   In other words, throughout our lives we are being formed in the likeness of Jesus, by the Holy Spirit, for the Father; and whether we are aware of it or not every single event of our lives has some effect on us, if not directly, then by the reaction it provokes in us …. That is exactly what is meant when Jesus and the Scriptures declare, and when His Church is not afraid to teach in His name, that God sees all, weighs all, and ultimately will judge all:

I know also, my God, that You test the heart and have pleasure in uprightness. (1 Chronicles 29:17)

Whoever exalts himself, God will humble; but the one who humbles himself God will exalt.

Jesus, the visiting Rabbi Who probably had spoken at the preceding service in the synagogue, was now reclining at the centre table with His host -- as was fitting for the guest of honour -- while the other guests were at tables circling round the room, at a respectful distance but, nevertheless, well within hearing distance of the host and his Guest should either of them choose to address the others present. Therefore Jesus, having been invited as an acknowledged teacher and spiritual guide, did not speak trivialities at table -- as we, for the most part, do today when jokes are so often the approved medium of conversation for receptions and social occasions – but rather He chose simple words of wisdom portraying an everyday situation to recall a profound truth, as indeed befitted a young Rabbi reputed to have a most remarkable and unusual ability to expound deep things of God in terms of ordinary human awareness and experience.

And so, Jesus was in no way belittling His host and fellow guests when He chose to speak about what He had just seen happening in this very room where they were all gathered together; indeed, far from belittling them, He would open their eyes, alert their minds, and indeed, hopefully, humble their hearts by revealing what was actually going on around and within them:

When you are invited (to a banquet), go and take the lowest place so that when the host comes to you he may say, 'My friend, move up to a higher position.'  Then you will enjoy the esteem of your companions at the table.

Listening attentively, and perhaps a little critically, to this much-discussed Rabbi, His fellows at table would be immediately aware that His words did not refer so much to the earthly feast they were at that moment enjoying, but rather to the eternal feast of heaven hosted by the Holy One to Whom the hearts and minds of all men are as an open book, and that He was offering them not criticism so much as spiritual enlightenment and understanding when He went on to say:

Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled (which, as I say, meant for a Jew, whoever exalts himself, God will humble), but the one who humbles himself will be exalted (by God)."

Jesus, having empathised with the human feelings of one publicly asked to move up from a lowly position to one much more prominent, really wanted His hearers to gain thereby some appreciation – not just some notional awareness – but to actually gain some sensitive feeling for, and insight into, what might be the heavenly bliss of one exalted in similar fashion at God's heavenly banquet.  They were being led to experience something -- be it ever so little -- of heavenly truth and wisdom: to appreciate the present reality of their own spiritual life with their whole being, mind, heart, and human sensitivity, as distinct from just being notionally aware of it in their abstract thinking.

The second reading, likewise, tries to help us gain some feeling for the religious significance and depths of our presence here at Holy Mass today by recalling the terror experienced by the Israelites at the foot of Mt. Sinai, when the Lord was speaking to Moses at the top:

For you have not come (as did your forefathers) to the mountain that may be touched and that burned with fire, and to blackness and darkness and tempest, and the sound of a trumpet and the voice of words, so that those who heard it begged that the word should not be spoken to them anymore.

The people of Israel had been stricken with awesome fear and apprehension at what had been commanded them: "If so much as a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned or shot with an arrow."  And indeed, so terrifying had been the occasion that Moses himself had said, "I am exceedingly afraid and trembling."

In other words: You haven't come to an erupting volcano (and we have all seen, at least on TV, something of the horrors of such titanic violence)!   Not at all!  You have come to something much more fearsome:

You have approached Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and countless angels in festal gathering, and the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in heaven, and God the Judge of all, and the spirits of the just made perfect, and Jesus, the Mediator of a new covenant, and the sprinkled blood that speaks more eloquently than that of Abel.

He is saying, that the People of Israel -- even Moses himself -- were rightly terrified by the awesome events on Mount Sinai when God gave the Law to Israel; how could anyone, therefore, fail to be humbled now by the much greater glory of our present liturgy which is, as it were, knocking on the portals of the heavenly Jerusalem where there are gathered myriads of angels, the Church of the firstborn enrolled in heaven, and the spirits of the righteous made perfect? How, above all, could anyone fail to hear, refuse to listen to and obey, the voice which speaks with the majesty and authority of Jesus the Mediator and the supremely awesome glory and power of God the eternal Judge?

But, wait a minute, it might be objected, we don't see anything of all that; we only see the Church in our day, with good and bad members, the Church with a past history replete with traces of glory but also so full of warts that you can easily give your whole attention to nothing else but wart-watching if you were so disposed.  We don't see anything other than that.

Precisely, that is all a surface glance can perceive; but as we heard earlier, God loves and reveals His secrets to the humble, and such humble ones, to whom God reveals His secrets through the gift of faith and the grace of the Holy Spirit, are those thereby enabled to recognize -- beneath the very ordinary outward appearances of Mother Church -- that hidden splendour of the city of the living God, where Jesus Himself, and all the blessed in Him and with Him, are to be seen bathed in the glory of God the Father.

Today therefore, we have before us texts recommending humility before God;  texts that show us how far and how frightfully pride can lead us astray, as the first reading could have also quoted:

There is no cure for the proud man's malady.

Such a person hears Jesus' words in the Gospel and, remaining on the surface of the words, decides that they smack of hypocrisy; and, being proud, is unwilling and unable to ask, to search for, to seek, the true meaning.  Pride speaks secretly in his heart telling him that he is not one to be hoodwinked, he can understand what he reads well enough, and the words he has heard are hypocritical, typical of so much religious preaching and practice.   

Proud people today look at Mother Church in that way.  They see only what they can recognize: pride, lust for power, and all the other warts which, alas, do indeed make up part of Mother Church here on earth.  But, as we have said, they cannot perceive, they are blind to, the inner reality: the presence of divine beauty, truth, goodness and power, lying just below the human covering of frailty and failure.  St. Paul explains this truth most clearly for us (1 Corinthians 2:14-16) and, in so doing, shows us the glory of Mother Church when he tells us:

The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.   But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one.  For "who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him?" But we have the mind of Christ.

People of God, by the grace of the Spirit given to Mother Church we do, indeed,  have the mind of Christ.   That Spirit, however, can only produce fruit in our lives if we humbly allow ourselves to be led by Him along the way of Jesus to that heavenly feast at which human pride has no place.

Finally, Jesus, in telling the Pharisee, His host, how best to choose guests for any lunch or dinner he might want to give, surely gives us also an important insight into our own invitation to heaven brought to us at His Father’s behest by Jesus Himself:

      When you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind.

People of God, such were we before the Father called us and Jesus redeemed us.  Let us therefore humble our human pride before God as -- in, and together with, Jesus -- we now offer ourselves and our most heartfelt worship and praise to God in the liturgy and sacrifice of Holy Mass.  Here, there is, already, a banquet prepared for us at which Jesus serves us and bestows upon us His own Most Holy Body and Precious Blood, thereby refreshing and deepening the Gift of His Most Holy Spirit, Who is to dwell and, indeed, abide in us, gradually forming us here on earth until, ultimately, we are able -- fittingly and fully -- to participate in the eternal liturgy and banquet of the family of God in His Kingdom.  Let us, therefore, receive Holy Communion with humble and trustful hearts; and let us pray that the Holy Spirit might form us, in and with Jesus, so that we may attain, not to places higher or more prestigious than those of our neighbours, but to seats as close as possible to the God and Father Who is the source and centre of all our longings and aspirations.