Homily for 18th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
18th Sunday of Ordinary TimeAugust 2, 2009
Eph 4: 17, 20-24
For the Ursulines at Willow Dr., New Rochelle

“Put away the old self of your former way of life, … and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth” (Eph 4: 22-24).

Once upon a time, we Salesians used to have a big, solemn ceremony about two months into the novitiate year, in which our so-called “clerical” novices were invested with their religious habit, to wit, a cassock and Roman collar, and our coadjutor brother novices were given a simple medal of Don Bosco to wear over their white shirts with their black suits and black ties. As each future cleric received his cassock, the provincial would speak to him those words of St. Paul—in Latin, of course: “N.N., exuat te Dominus veterem hominem cum moribus et actibus suis, et induat te novum hominem, qui secundum Deum creatus est in iustitia et sanctitate veritatis.”



Unfortunately, the future lay brothers received no such exhortation; they were just told to receive the sign of their vocation—in Latin, which they had never studied, tho I presume the phrase was at least explained to them.St. Paul, however, isn’t addressing clerics or novices but the Christian faithful of Ephesus: men and women, young and old, laity and deacons and presbyters—everyone. Everyone who has been baptized has put on Christ Jesus, has agreed to put away his or her past actual sins and past corrupting desires, and has committed him- or herself to living a life of continuing conversion: continuing “renewal in the spirit of your minds,” which means in context not just one’s mind or intelligence but also one’s heart and one’s will.

For the Christian has been created anew by the redemptive action of Jesus: “created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.” God originally created human beings in his own image, but they corrupted that image by deliberately choosing sin. Now Christ’s disciples have chosen to respond to an invitation from the Father thru Jesus and had that divine image restored in them thru Baptism, thru the Eucharist, thru the gift of the Holy Spirit. And they have to continue to respond, continue the work of conversion.

We know well enuf how tempted we are to duck righteousness or justice by yielding to our corrupting desires: to selfishness and possessiveness, to greed and laziness, to anger and pride, to casual rather than heartfelt prayer. We know well enuf how tempted we are to fudge the truth, which Paul links with holiness and Benedict XVI with charity: to tell tales about our neighbors, to make excuses for ourselves, to convince ourselves that black is white if black is what we want at some given moment.

A lot of us are like the little boy who was overheard praying: “Lord, if you can’t make me a better boy, don’t worry about it. I’m having a real good time like I am.”

All that, of course, is how the Gentiles live, says Paul—meaning the pagans, those who don’t know Jesus Christ or his Father and don’t care about moral conduct. That kind of life isn’t consistent with the teaching of Jesus, not consistent with true discipleship.

The earliest nuns and monks committed themselves to conversion of life. The three traditional vows came later. Conversion meant a “personal transformation whereby a person lives by a profoundly new assessment of what is important and valuable,” and more particularly, values a “union or friendship with God.”* To that end, they lived lives of prayer, silence, penance, and solitude. When solitude gave way to living in community, the practice of brotherly or sisterly charity became even more important in this discipline of conversion, of personal transformation, of “putting away the old self” with its corruptions and deceitful desires and “putting on the new self” as exemplified by Christ.

Sounds simple; but it’s hard to do, day in and day out, as we well know. So it requires a constant renewal of our commitment, a daily nunc coepi, as I believe Blessed John XXIII regularly reminded himself: “Now I begin,” or “Now I start (over again).” The purpose of our lives of chastity, obedience, and poverty and of life in common is to guide us on the way of Christ, toward greater union and friendship with him, toward daily conversion. It’s what our religious life is all about. More basically, it’s what being a follower of Jesus is all about.

* Mark Miller, “conversion,” in The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, ed. Richard P. McBrien (San Francisco, 1995), p. 366.