TWENTY-THIRD SUNDAY HOMILY IN ORDINARY TIME YEAR C
Wis 9: 13-18 Phl 9f., 12-17 Lk 14:25-33
The Price of Being a Christian
The World’s Street-Smart Wisdom vs. God’s; Commitment, Self-Control, and Detachment.
1st Reading – Wisdom 9:13-18B
13 Who can know God’s counsel, or who can conceive what the LORD intends?
14 For the deliberations of mortals are timid, and unsure are our plans.
15 For the corruptible body burdens the soul and the earthen shelter weighs down the mind that has many concerns.
16 And scarce do we guess the things on earth, and what is within our grasp we find with difficulty; but when things are in heaven, who can search them out?
17 Or who ever knew your counsel, except you had given wisdom and sent your holy spirit from on high?
18B And thus were the paths of those on earth made straight.
Responsorial Psalm – Psalms 90:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14 AND 17
R. (1) In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge.
3 You turn man back to dust,
saying, “Return, O children of men.”
4 For a thousand years in your sight
are as yesterday, now that it is past,
or as a watch of the night.
R. In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge.
5 You make an end of them in their sleep;
the next morning they are like the changing grass,
6 Which at dawn springs up anew,
but by evening wilts and fades.
R. In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge.
12 Teach us to number our days aright,
that we may gain wisdom of heart.
13 Return, O LORD! How long?
Have pity on your servants!
R. In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge.
14 Fill us at daybreak with your kindness,
that we may shout for joy and gladness all our days.
17 And may the gracious care of the LORD our God be ours;
prosper the work of our hands for us!
Prosper the work of our hands!
R. In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge.
2nd Reading – Philemon 9-10, 12-17
9 I, Paul, an old man, and now also a prisoner for Christ Jesus,
10 urge you on behalf of my child Onesimus, whose father I have become in my imprisonment;
12 I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you.
13 I should have liked to retain him for myself, so that he might serve me on your behalf in my imprisonment for the gospel,
14 but I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that the good you do might not be forced but voluntary.
15 Perhaps this is why he was away from you for a while, that you might have him back forever,
16 no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a brother, beloved especially to me, but even more so to you, as a man and in the Lord.
17 So if you regard me as a partner, welcome him as you would me.
Alleluia – Psalms 119:135
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
135 Let your face shine upon your servant;
and teach me your laws.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel – Luke 14:25-33
25 Great crowds were traveling with Jesus, and he turned and addressed them,
26 “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.
27 Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.
28 Which of you wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion?
29 Otherwise, after laying the foundation and finding himself unable to finish the work the onlookers should laugh at him
30 and say, ‘This one began to build but did not have the resources to finish.’
31 Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with ten thousand troops he can successfully oppose another king
advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops?
32 But if not, while he is still far away, he will send a delegation to ask for peace terms.
33 In the same way, anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.”
Homily
The ancient Romans easily found a sufficient figurative connection between commerce, theft, and eloquence to place merchants, thieves, and orators under one and the same deity the god Mercury. Whether this connection between merchants, thieves, and orators is correct or not, we leave it to you to judge. But in our day one thing is sure. Every one —business—person, thief, or orator; doctor, lawyer, rich man, poor man, beggar man, or thief — has to find out if he is willing to pay the price to come ,under the god he says he serves.
The great crowds (v. 25) surrounding Jesus in today’s Gospel passage contained the exultant, sensation seeking people streaming from the streets and alleys of the towns —the poor, the crippled, and the blind (v. 21). They thought Jesus was on the way to an empire; he knew he was on the way to the cross. They thought discipleship had no costs; he, now on his way to Jerusalem to suffer and die, was aware of its demands.
He had to say something to put them straight. People had to know what they were getting themselves into. So he gave three conditions for following him — putting commitment to him above everything else, including family ties; maintaining self-control; and developing detachment from possessions. Those are the opposites, then and now, of worldly people — who go for lack of commitment, self-indulgence, and attachment to all you can lay your hands on.
To sift through the complex demands, both before Christ’s time and after, we need a wisdom from above. Today’s reading from the Book of Wisdom tells us that. At the time this book was written, about a hundred years before Christ’s birth, the Jewish community at Alexandria in Egypt, the place where it was written, lived in a world where different religions and philosophies were vying for converts. The devout Jew felt out of place in that world. To counter that feeling, this book taught that there was no need to envy other ways of life. Commitment to God, even when His plan lay beyond our understanding, is the true way to wisdom.
The name that had been connected with wisdom was King Solomon. The author of this book presents part of his version of Solomon’s prayer for wisdom (vv. 1-18). Solomon wanted to build a magnificent Temple to God. The text suggests a question: How can anyone perform a task like that without that wisdom that was with God when He set about the work of creation? The answer given is that no one can arrive at God’s counsels without wisdom (W. 13—18).
Some would question Solomon’s wisdom on two grounds. First, he had 700 wives ‘and 300 concubines, and some men have problems with one wife! And second, his method of constructing the Temple was monumentally unwise. He funded the Temple’s construction with massive new taxes and forced his subjects into labour — but exempted his native southern region of Judah from both taxes and labour. This led the nation to split along its ancient north-south fault line into Judah in the south and Israel in the north.
With regard to the first of Jesus’ conditions for following him — putting commitment to him above everything — anyone who would become an intimate disciple must have the wisdom to prefer Jesus’ kingdom to his family, and even to his own life (v. 26). In return, the kingdom promises life more fully; it transforms the commitment into a new, personal fulfilment. Many people like the promise but not the price. Just as it is possible to be a bearer of lectures without being a student, a listener to homilies without being a deer of the word, and a taker without being a giver, so it is possible to be a listener to Jesus without being a committed follower.
Temporary enthusiasm isn’t enough. The true disciple can’t act on impulse, but only on a carefully considered programme of involvement. To teach that, Jesus told two stories. The first, about a man who wanted to build a tower—overlook to protect his vineyard (W. 28-30), dealt with private life. The second, concerning a king about to march (vv, 31f), pertained to political life.
Concerning private life today, everyone knows that if a youth wants to become a doctor or a lawyer, he or she must be committed to long hours of study. Concerning public and political life, examples of failure of wise commitment abound. In the closing days of World War II, for example, one of the reasons why the Soviet Union was able to occupy Eastern Europe and cause the long Cold War was that the Allied planners for the Normandy invasion hadn’t wisely committed General George S. Patton’s Third Army beyond the French beachhead, and the army ran out of gas and ammunition halfway across Europe Currently commitment leaves much to be desired. On a personal level, we don’t seem to realize sufficiently that commitment is the foundation, the bedrock of any genuinely loving relationship. Anyone who is truly concerned for the spiritual growth of another knows, consciously or instinctively, that he or she can significantly foster that growth only through a relationship of constancy. While deep commitment doesn’t guarantee the success of the relationship, it does help more than any other factor to assure it.
On the level of societal commitment, daily we see pictures of people throughout the world, especially children, so starved because of wars or natural disasters that they have arms like splinters and ribs pressing out of near-transparent flesh; infants with beads and bellies grotesquely large for their shrunken torsos; mothers numb with grief waiting for their babies to die in camps that look like garbage dumps; and seemingly weightless little bodies being carried to shacks that pass for morgues. In other situations of random and massive slaughter, people step over corpses that lie in the streets of mined cities.
In what passes for the international community, shouldn’t it be possible to be committed to plans such that when these horrors occur we can immediately come to the aid of the distressed and be present for them? In our national community, shouldn’t we be more committed to alleviate the human victims of hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and other tragedies? Are we sincere about our commitment? That word “sincere” means to be “without wax” {sine cera). Ancient actors’ masks were made of wax.
About Jesus’ second and third conditions for following him —self-control and detachment — today’s Second Reading makes good points. It is the only reading in all the liturgy from this shortest (25 W), very touching, and very personal letter of St Paul. It illustrates a self-control and detachment that are not cold and aloof, but warm. Addressed to a rich Christian slave-owner named Philemon, it is a compassionate intercession by one Christian, Paul, in behalf of another, Philemon’s slave Onesimus.
To understand this reading, it helps to know the story behind it. Because there were at the time ’60 million slaves in the Roman Empire, fear caused the citizenry to make the laws concerning them strict. Runaway slaves could be punished by torture, death, or both. Philemon’s slave Onesimus had stolen something from his master and run away. Onesimus was therefore in deep trouble. Now in jail in Ephesus, he was to be returned to Philemon as soon as possible. Anyone who harboured him would be liable for any loss that his master suffered.
It happened that Onesimus was put into the same jail as Paul. Paul converted, instructed, and baptized him, and the two had become close. That made it necessary for Paul to do some assessing. Should he, for example, condemn the very institution of slavery? He couldn’t accomplish much by doing that. He was in jail, and condemning slavery would only make matters worse. Should he command Philemon as a fellow Christian to accept his servant Onesimus back? He clearly hadn’t the authority to do that.
No, Paul’s appeal to Philemon would follow the advice he gave elsewhere, as in his “hymn to love” (1 Cor 13). In the 25 verses of his letter to Philemon there are four references to love, plus two to Paul’s heart. Paul appealed to Philemon to look at his slave in a new way (v.10). By baptizing him, Paul had given Onesimus spiritual birth; the Jews looked upon spiritual birth as being more important than physical birth. For Christians, baptism establishes a new and radical relationship between Christians before which all others, including that of master and slave, give way in favour of a new kinship in Christ.
Paul wasn’t a fuzzy—headed bleeding heart denying the wrong Onesimus had done. And though Paul, a lonely missionary, would have liked to keep Onesimus for himself (v. 13),- he deferentially acknowledged the master‘s right, and would do nothing without Philemon’s consent (v. 14). Christianity doesn’t have as a purpose to help people run away from their past. Christians are to face their past and overcome it. Christianity isn’t escape from self. It is conquest of self.
In the entire affair, Paul saw the hand of providence (v. 15). This was because both slave and master were now through baptism adopted sons of God, and therefore brothers (v. 16). Considering Philemon’s high social status, this tender and compassionate appeal may have been hard for him to recognize — but then he, and all good Christians, are expected to be open to new vistas. Although it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the human race showed that it realized that slavery is the evil thing that it is, slavery’s death-knell had been sounded when a slave-owner was requested to treat his slave as a brother on the grounds of religious love.
All of us who face the invitation of God’s grace have to balance the costs and make decisions about our commitment, our self-control, and our detachment. In the process, we have to ask hard questions. Are the demands of the code of morality that accompanies the Christian creed too hard for us? Would it be better to follow the pleasures of self-indulgence? In the tension between the wisdom of this world and the wisdom of God, should we compromise with a presiding deity who, like the Roman god Mercury, will cover all our options? In answering, let us remember that, in the end, our choices form us. And the reason why wise people still choose to follow Jesus, despite the price, is that, all things considered, that means choosing life over death.
