Homily 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time

If we are truly joined to Jesus through strong faith, love, and relationship, then we are also taking part in His suffering and death, but also His resurrection. There is no separating this kind of intimacy, we must be willing to take on the suffering we are called to in this life, and eventually die, but if we are strong in our bond, then rise also to eternal life with Him. We are not intended for this world, despite everything we are constantly told and bombarded with in terms of life’s comforts and pleasures. These very same comforts and pleasures are actually chains that bond us more to this world than to allow us to move toward eternal life in the next. The more we partake of these secular pleasures and focus our efforts and attention on them, the less we are focused on doing what our Lord calls us to do in this life. Our attention is drawn away from humble service to Him, and to our brothers and sisters around us. We sometimes instead become addicted to this world and seek its pleasures to the point where we stop seeing the need of those around us. We can gravitate toward the things that are attractive to us and become blind to the marginalized, the forgotten, those with needs that can only be met through our intervention and help. It’s easy to do, we naturally gravitate toward the attractive, toward the easy, and toward things that bring us gratification. It’s a weakness that we all share and must guard against. If we can get past our inclination toward this short term gratification, and discover the joy and fulfillment of putting our efforts toward taking care of God’s children, and taking on this life’s sufferings so that we are giving them up to Jesus as an offering that bonds us closer to Him, we can become just as oriented toward this way of living. What is more, unlike the life focused at secular pleasures, we can have the assurance of that we are striving toward the grace of eternal life in the next.

The words in today’s Gospel seem very difficult to grasp, we are called place the very things that we often equate with our deepest love – our parents, spouses, and children, behind our relationship with God. Yet it is not as counterintuitive as it might first appear. We need to always keep in mind, who gave us these blessings to begin with. Who is the source of every good thing we have or love? We were not granted these things by accident, nor even by our own workings, we were given the most precious of these by God alone, and so it is fitting that in our gratitude we place Him before all else. That is not to say we are called to no longer love those around us, no, we are simply called to place things in the proper order and to always acknowledge their source, and to that end show proper deference and love. Even our very selves should be placed well back on the list. God gave us life, He made us who we are, and all that we are surrounded by, and have accumulated and achieved is due to His graciousness to each of us. Think about it for a minute, yes we can work hard for things, yes, we can strive toward achieving goals, but in the end, could we really do any of this without His help and intervention and granted grace? I’ve heard it said very often, that if we want to achieve good things in this life, we must “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” and work hard toward our goals, and to a point this is true. What we cannot forget, is that without God’s help, there are literally no bootstraps for us to pull ourselves up by, nor is there the resolve of will or the work ethic to drive us forward. Literally, the very breaths we take, each and every one of them is a gift that is provided by God. So, when we hear it said that we should place all of the things we treasure second to our Lord, can we really argue with that? In our true form, that which was intended from the beginning, we are to find our only satisfaction in doing His will. If we strive, in our current fallen nature, we can still latch hold of that grace-filled inclination, and bond closer to Christ, and to what we were truly intended for, and in this find the true happiness and peace that we all seek, and so few of us ever really find.

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