Homily for the
23d Sunday of Ordinary
Time
Sept. 4, 2022
St. Francis Xavier,
Bronx
Ursulines, The
Fountains, Tuckahoe[1]
“Whoever doesn’t carry his own cross
and come after me can’t be my disciple” (Luke 14: 27).
Jesus’ words today aren’t designed to attract
followers. They’re decidedly
unattractive, repugnant even. Who wants
to hate his family “and even his own life”?
Who want to be put to death by crucifixion?
We’re so used to seeing Jesus on a cross in our churches and probably in our homes that we hardly notice him or his cross. In practical terms, the cross has lost its meaning for many of us.
In Jesus’ time, crucifixion was the
most shameful, degrading, painful death that the Romans could devise. Our word excruciating comes from crux,
“cross.” Death by crucifixion was
reserved for slaves, pirates, highway robbers, and rebels. If you’ve seen the movie Spartacus,
you may remember the final scenes in which 6,000 of the defeated rebel slaves
were crucified along the Appian Way for 120 miles—not only as punishment for
their crime but as a frightful warning to all travelers.
And Jesus tells us we must take up our
own crosses and follow him if we’d be his disciples. 1st, that points to his own fate—following
him to a cross, hardly an inducement to join his disciples. 2d, he refers to his “disciples,” people who
learn from him, people who take him as their teacher. Is the cross the message we are to learn?
As we listen to the rest of today’s
gospel, we hear these words in a wider context.
Jesus is telling us to make a serious commitment, to consider carefully
what we’re undertaking, like a builder or a military commander (14:28-32). (That’s not the only part of the Gospel that
Vladimir Putin missed.) Jesus is telling
us that following him has to be an absolute priority. Choosing Jesus as 2d-best isn’t the road to
eternal life.
Someone has said that the key to a
happy life is J-O-Y: Jesus, others,
yourself, in that order. In much of our
lives, that means self-renunciation, death to ourselves, death to our own
wishes, preferences, comfort, objectives.
Think of the sacrifices that parents make for their young children.
The cross is present in our lives. Sometimes it just shows up. Sometimes it’s a choice we make because we
choose to be disciples of Jesus. Even
when it just shows up, we can choose to accept it for Jesus’ sake (“offering it
up,” as the sisters encouraged us in elementary school), or we can rebel
against it.
E.g., who likes being stuck in traffic on the Cross Bronx? When that happens, we can accept that, even if unhappily, as a share in Christ’s cross and proceed with patience; or we can curse under our breath, honk our horns, try to cut someone else off.
Or we may have health issues. I’m a diabetic; it was a shock to be told
that years ago, and I wasn’t happy. It’s
a penance—a cross—to forgo pizza, fried chicken, and Chinese food, all dietary
no-nos. All of us of a certain age have
our medical issues, our painful joints, and our piles of pills that link us to
Jesus’ cross if we’ll say yes.
And we all have moral challenges. Forgiving someone who’s wronged us (as St.
Paul asks Philemon to do in regard to his escaped slave Onesimus), praying for
our enemies, resisting an urge to gossip or verbally attack someone—those are
crosses. Being honest and upright in our
words and in our work is sometimes a cross.
Practicing chastity in our thoughts and our actions is sometimes a
cross. Helping someone in need sometimes
is inconvenient—a cross. “Whoever
doesn’t carry his own cross and come after me can’t be my disciple.”
Sometimes we have to choose (or reject)
the cross in a social or public sense.
We might think of St. Thomas More, who resisted the pleas of his wife
and children to agree with Henry VIII’s adulterous remarriage and creation of
himself as head of the Church in England—and so St. Thomas and others forfeited
their lives: “If anyone would come after
me, he must even hate his own life.” We
might think of the many Christians in Nazi-occupied Europe who risked their
lives, and sometimes lost them, to hide Jews.
We might think of thousands of Christians who have been sent to
Communist “re-education” camps in Eastern Europe, China, and Vietnam.
Today, we in Western society—in the
U.S. and Canada, in Europe and Australia—are challenged to choose truth over
lies in public policy. I just read an
interview in which a Ukrainian doctor who now lives in Los Angeles told a
journalist: “Nobody wants to be part of Russia.
The value system is very different.
Something that we, I think, as Ukrainians share with the West is the
idea that truth is important in itself.
If you think human life is important, truth is important.” He goes on to speak of the Western
ideal—which is rooted in Christianity, I note—that government exists to serve
its citizens, whereas the Russian “ideal” is that people are to serve the
government.[2]
This doctor mentions the value of human
life as a truth. That actually echoes
our Declaration of Independence, which states as a self-evident truth that our
Creator has bestowed upon us all an inalienable right to “life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.” Too many
politicians, media, and makers and shapers of our culture discard that truth in
favor of empty phrases like “right to choose,” “reproductive health care,” and
“it’s my body.” They never address what
their choice is, that someone else’s body is involved, that killing a human
being is not health care. It’s all lies.
It’s also a lie that God created sex
for our personal indulgence and not for the giving of oneself to another person
as a generous act of love and for the formation of families. The truth is that God’s gift of sexuality is
directed toward man-woman marriage; the rest is untruthful, at least in part. We lie to ourselves if we think that we can
impose our own truth upon creation.
So it takes courage and it involves the
cross to resist the political and cultural bullies who want to impose
themselves upon us in regard to abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism. Sometimes it also takes courage to defend
God’s creation in the face of a throwaway culture that doesn’t care about the
environment, the climate, natural resources.
In his weekly audience last Wednesday, Pope Francis appealed to all of
us “to stop our abuse and destruction” of the Earth, which is groaning under “our consumerist excesses.” For most of us, it will be a sacrifice to cut
back on our consumption of the Earth’s resources.
The Earth is our common home, as the Pope often says. But it’s not our final home; as the late, great Vin Scully said, “This isn’t the last stop on the train.” In today’s collect, we prayed “that those who believe in Christ … may receive an everlasting inheritance.” We hope that thru a share in Christ’s cross we’ll be joined to Christ in the resurrection, in eternal life.
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