Homily for 23d Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
23d Sunday of Ordinary Time

Collect

Christian Brothers, Iona College, New Rochelle
Sept. 10, 2006

On the Sept. 7-9 weekend, we had some major province events at the Marian Shrine, about which I plan to blog when I finish writing the news stories and press releases! Here's an old homily.

“God our Father, … give us true freedom and bring us to the inheritance you promised” (Collect).

On this weekend when we remember terrible events and grievous loss—this morning I celebrated a 5th anniversary Mass in Mt. Vernon for the Scoutmaster of the troop whose I’m chaplain I am—it’s fitting for us to meditate upon the freedom given us by God.

Pres. Bush refers often to freedom as what we’re defending, what we’re promoting, what our enemies hate.  He readily attributes it to God as source and foundation.  Yet it’s not the same as the freedom for which we pray in today’s liturgy.  That freedom is linked to Christ, to redemption, to our eternal destiny.

Glorification of the Cross (Adam Elsheimer)

Jesus links slavery to the power of the devil and tells us the truth will set us free.  Paul holds that the Law enslaves us because no one can keep the law perfectly and thus the Law must condemn us; but grace sets us free.

It’s grace our prayer today refers to.  God the Father redeems us and makes us his children in Christ.  He forgives us and restores us to a healthy relationship with himself because Christ, whom the Father sent to us out of his infinite love, intercedes for us and links us to himself as brother and friend.  Satan’s power over the human race has been broken, and over us individually if we choose to belong to Christ our redeemer.

We pray to the Father for true freedom:  the freedom to choose Christ.  Those who’re enslaved by their passions, by their history of sin, by their love for the world, the flesh, and the devil, by their fear of surrendering self to God—aren’t free.  Any of us who is coping with a bad habit knows that very well.  12 Step programs begin with the admission of powerlessness and an appeal to a Higher Power—to God.  Of course in the liturgy we turn constantly to God and appeal always for help, for grace, for the empowerment that comes from surrendering ourselves to Christ, for the freedom to choose love, truth, justice, all that is good and virtuous.  Only the free can rise above their passions and sinful inclinations.

In our prayer we link freedom to our inheritance:  “Give us true freedom and bring us to the inheritance you promised.”  The inheritance belongs to God’s children, the brothers and sisters of Jesus, and we pray that God may bring us to it because we’ve used our freedom to choose God’s only Son, to choose the way of the Gospel that he’s marked out for us, the way of life, the way that leads to where Christ is.

Speaking to some Canadian bishops a few days ago, Pope Benedict lamented false concepts of freedom, concepts quite alive in Western culture.  The “freedom” to redefine marriage is false to human nature and to the structure of a sound society.  The “freedom to choose” destroys human beings and makes all forms of human life seem cheap and expendable.  The Pope speaks of “the truth of human nature” as part of the message of the Gospel.  Assuredly, trying to be what we are not isn’t liberating but enslaving.  Watering down the truth thru moral relativism lowers our aims, lowers our love for excellence and goodness—makes us less free.*

Of course it’s not only society that promotes false freedom.  Most of us are ready enuf individually to rationalize our behavior.  Someone in our house was speaking the other day of the old way of teaching moral theology and said that if you worked at it, you could almost have eliminated sin—because you could justify almost anything you wanted to do.  Well, we can look around and see a lot of that going on, and it’s not pretty:  drugs, violence in families, neighborhoods, and entire countries, adultery and abandonment, government and corporate corruption, etc., etc., etc.  Those who do such things may feel free, but the victims of such activity certainly aren’t free.  They are, rather, dehumanized.  Sometimes our personal behavior is dehumanizing too; it demeans our brothers and sisters.  If we’re not even aware of it, are we truly free?

So we ask the Father today to set us free, to lead us to recognize our need for redemption and to join us firmly to Christ in our minds, our hearts, our wills; to enable us freely to act like Christ in what we say and do, and so come with Christ to our heavenly inheritance.

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    * See Carol Glatz, “Pope talks to Ontario bishops about false sense of freedom, culture,” Catholic News Service, Sept. 8, 2006.