23d Sunday of Ordinary Time
Collect
Christian Brothers,
Iona College, New RochelleSept. 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.
* See Carol Glatz, “Pope talks to Ontario bishops about
false sense of freedom, culture,” Catholic News Service, Sept. 8, 2006.
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