Luke 14, 25-33 Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time. August 8th, 2013
Last week’s readings were very much about the virtue of Humility; and so were also about it’s opposite vice—pride. A good concise definition of pride is, “doing your own will." We don’t have to feel prideful in order to be prideful; if we do our own will, very simply we are prideful. However, if pride is doing our own will, then, Humility is simply doing God's will.
Today’s Gospel reminds us that each day when we wake up, if we listen closely and humbly, we can hear Jesus asking us to be his faithful disciples to a greater degree than we were yesterday. Are we willing to put our love and obedience to Him before anything or anyone? For example, will we love Jesus today even more than our closest loved ones, our father, mother, wife, brothers and sisters, children and even ourselves? This brings up three important points of what it entails to be a faithful disciple of Christ in our everyday life.
First, being a faithful disciple of Jesus entails a daily struggle. Practically, this struggle begins the very first thing in the morning when we wake up. Do we put our love for God first in our day? We struggle with getting out of bed and we struggle even more to do that first act of adoration of our day. Our minds can quickly turn to other things- like “I’ve got to get everyone else up and breakfast prepared.” “What time is that first appointment of the day?—augh, better to hit the snooze alarm just one more time...at least!
How quickly our minds can become filled with the preoccupations of our day. These things are important, but in spite of them, will we love God first and put Him first in our day? Instead of these things, the very first thing our minds can focus upon, immediately when awakening, is on God. We can then make the sign of the cross and get out of bed quickly, falling on our knees in order to make the first act of our day an act of adoring God saying, “O God Creator of my soul, Father of my soul, I adore Thee and I love Thee, please help me to adore Thee and love Thee more this day.” We have to start off each day right by putting God first if we are to keep Him first throughout our day—first things first. This first act of our day, which only takes a few minutes, can end by quickly praying a prayer to our Lady and our Guardian Angel before we get up and get physically ready for the day.
We can then end our day as we began it, humbly on our knees. There we ask the Holy Spirit to help us for just a few minutes each night to truthfully examine our day, to examine those times in which we failed to put God first by fulfilling His Holy Will, namely our sins; and also to examine those times in which we carried out, albeit in our poor way, God’s Holy Will, so that we can thank Him and give Him the glory for the good work He has accomplished through us. We ask the Holy Spirit then to point out for us what specific thing He wants us to work harder on tomorrow, with His assistance of course. We follow by making an act of contrition, saying a night prayer to our Lady; and then, as the very last thing done before climbing into bed, we humbly bow our selves in body and souls before God with another act of adoration, saying a prayer such as the Glory Be or the adoration prayer we started our day with…God Creator of my Soul, Father of My Soul, I adore You.
Second point: When we realize that being a faithful disciple of Jesus entails daily struggle, we also understand that we must pick up the cross that Jesus gives us each day. Jesus never promised us Christians a rose garden, especially one without thorns. All of us have some sort of suffering in our lives and these are our cross that we must carry daily. Some crosses are big, many are small; perhaps, ours is an illness, or an illness in the family. Maybe it’s troubles in the family- the children are misbehaving, a relative in trouble. Or maybe it’s the daily troubles at work- that bothersome coworker, a heavy workload. Perhaps it’s being out of work, or maybe just the humdrum and contradictions of everyday life.
Whatever our sufferings may be, they are something that God has allowed in our life in order to make us into great saints, that is great friends, faithful disciples of Jesus. We can carry any cross if we do so for love of Jesus and for the salvation of souls; he will help us if we daily pray to Him…we can then say, not, why me? But rather, Why not me?”.
And the third point, when we understand being a faithful disciple of Jesus means daily carrying our cross, we also discover that we must also daily renounce all of our possessions if we are to follow Him. However, before we can do so, we must first understand what it means to renounce all of our possessions. Not that we give up everything we own, but that we don't put any of it before God and His Holy Will; and that we detach our heart from anything that does. Humility of soul is what we are talking about rather than a lack of worldly goods.
And so, possessions are anything, anyone that might separate us from God. The list can be long. We immediately think of material goods. The question we can ask ourselves to see whether or not something posses us is, “do I possess this thing or does it possess me?” Does it possess me to the point that my heart is more attached to it than to God? Our world is so full of materialism and consumerism that it is a struggle to not be possessed by the things of this world.
But possessions are more than just material things. We especially need to get rid of our greatest of all possessions, as I said before, the possession of our own will. We cannot do the any of the three points I just mentioned until we sacrifice our will; again this is at the essence of what it means to carry one's own cross. We love to have things our own way in the many events of everyday life. Interiorly, we can all sometimes act like spoiled children; “It’s my way or the highway.” Instead, we sacrifice my way for God’s way, by making daily sacrifices for love of God and others, for our family, for our parish family, and for our larger family the Church. In this we discover, that what really counts in this life, the path to true fulfillment, security and joy, is not the fulfillment of our personal desires, but he fulfillment of God's will. Fulfilling God's will in our life is only that which will fulfill our personal desires fully.
So to review the three points to following Jesus more faithfully: First each and everyday, we must make an act of adoration to God, in which we give to Him all that we are and all that we have. And in those things, which are most difficult to let go of, those things that hold possession over our hearts, we ask the Holy Spirit to slowly help us to renounce them. And finally we accept and carry our cross with great love for Jesus and for our neighbor out of our love for Jesus..
These three points can be summed up with this fact, that ultimately, being a true discipleship of Christ involves sacrifice; that is, surrendering ourselves fully to Christ. This is what love does it sacrifices, surrenders it's will, itself, for the sake of the other, for love of the other, in order to be one with the other!!! When we surrender ourselves in sacrificial love to Christ we are not destroy.
Unfortunately the world today really only understands sacrifice in a negative way, as a way of destruction. Not at all. As Pope emeritus Benedict tells us, Sacrifice to God doesn't entail destruction or non being; its not throwing ourselves or our being thrown into a volcano in order to appease the gods. No, sacrifice to God is rather, self surrender; or better yet, it is total abandonment to an all-good and all-loving Father. It entails a way of being. We give ourselves totally to God, freely and with trust, so that we are no longer separated from Him; we no longer live for ourselves, but for Him alone, for His Holy Will which is Love and Mercy itself!
Only when we lose ourselves for God, is it possible to find ourselves. True sacrifice transforms us; when we freely surrender ourselves to God, far from losing anything, we become like God, one with God, we share in God's own nature, which is the nature of love; far from being destroyed, we become fully who we are meant to be and desire to be
It goes without saying then that the supernatural help we need to carry these three points out in our lives comes only from frequent and worthy reception of the Sacraments and through intimate daily prayer. And so do we seek the strength of His grace frequently through the Sacraments of the Church, especially the Holy Eucharist and Confession? Do we spend intimate time with Him in prayer daily, especially that most efficacious of prayer, which is prayer before His truly presence in the Holy Eucharist either at Holy Mass or outside of Mass before the tabernacle or during times of Eucharistic adoration?
Let us turn to the most perfect of all the Disciples of Christ for help, the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our sacrifice of self is offered here at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. She will help us to surrender ourselves to God and to His Holy Will, all in union with the Sacrifice of Her Divine Son, which becomes truly present here on this sacred altar. She will, if we ask her, obtain from Him the grace we need to live our life offering, each and every day in all areas of our lives, thus becoming like her, a faithful disciples of the Lord, bringing God's healing love into the midst of our broken world.
Our Lady, mother of the faithful disciples of the Lord, today is your birthday, we give you our hearts, pray for us. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment