Homily for
Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time
October 21, 2018
Suffering Before
Glory
It’s a
well-known fact that in order to accomplish anything good, there will be
sacrifices involved. To win at sports takes the discipline of exercise. To
excel at school means long hours hitting the books. To succeed in your career
means working hard and continuing to improve. And to possess the joys of
everlasting life takes the Cross.
This
Gospel directly follows one of Jesus’ predictions of His own Passion. He had just told His disciples that He was
going to be rejected and crucified, and the very next scene shows James and
John wanting glory. Oh, they had faith that He would be King – but they wanted
the Kingdom without the Cross.
So Jesus
brings them back down to earth. “Can you drink the cup that I will drink?” He
asks – the Cup of His sufferings and trials. And He asks that same question to
us – do you want the glories of Heaven? Do you want to enjoy God for eternity?
Then are you willing to embrace the Cross as the path to Heaven? There is no
other road to the Lord except the royal road of the Cross.
Let me
illustrate some crosses that followers of Jesus must endure:
First,
the suffering of denying your desires. St. Augustine was a saint who lived a
very sinful life during his early years – he had a live-in mistress out of
wedlock and pursued pleasure and fame with abandon. But even after his
conversion, he found it difficult to say “no” to his old sins. Famously, he
once prayed, “Lord, give me chastity…but not yet!” It was only through grace
(and a whole lot of self-denial) that he was able to overcome the desire for
lust. What is it for you that you must deny? Lust? Greed? Gluttony and eating
too much? A desire to be the center of attention? An unhealthy desire for
praise, or for money? A worship of sports? To be a disciple is to suffer the
denial of these sinful desires.
Second,
the suffering of loneliness and misunderstanding. Many people will question and
doubt a follower of Jesus. Do you really
have to skip the baseball game to get to Mass? Why don’t you go out drinking
with the rest of us? You really don’t watch “Desperate Housewives”? You believe
in the sanctity of human life from conception until natural death? Just
recently I was Googling a priest-friend from seminary, to see what he was up to
these days, and one of the first responses that came up was a letter to the
editor about him, calling Fr. Michael a “poor, narrow-minded bigot” for
believing that marriage was between one man and one woman. Recently you may
have seen that the President of France was criticizing women who chose to have
large families, saying that it was impossible to be both successful and open to
life. What an insult to those parents who are choosing to be generous with God!
This misunderstanding and even rejection, from family, friends, and society as
a whole – is to be expected if we are truly faithful to the Gospel.
Third, embracing
the sufferings of everyday life – and lifting them up to the Lord. I think of
the example of St. Bernadette Soubirous. She is best known as the saint who saw
the Blessed Mother at Lourdes in France, where Mary appeared to her several
times and caused a stream to flow from the rocky mountainside with healing
waters. But St. Bernadette’s holiness is not simply because of seeing Mary. She
also united her many, many sufferings to Jesus. She was always a sick child,
suffering from asthma and other illnesses, and after she saw Mary and entered
the convent, she developed a painful cancerous tumor on her knee. Many of her
friends urged her to go to Lourdes, so that she could perhaps be cured by the
miraculous waters. But she responded, “My business is to suffer, because here
on this earth there is no love without suffering.” All of her pains, her
humiliations, just the daily sufferings of being human – she united all of that
to Christ’s Cross so intensely that she said one time, “Jesus, I do not feel my
crosses when I think of Your Cross.” We too can take the aches and pains, the
insults and misunderstandings, the humiliations and the stress and struggles –
and we can look at Jesus’ Cross and say, “Lord, I offer this to You who
suffered for me!”
One
might say, with all of the sufferings of following Jesus, why bother? Because,
as St. Paul says, “The sufferings of the present time are as nothing compare to the glory to be
revealed in us.” As St. Maximilian Kolbe said, “For Jesus Christ, I am prepared
to suffer still more.” We embrace the Cross, but we keep the Resurrection in
view. Glory and suffering are always
united in Christianity.
So do
not be afraid to embrace the three Crosses, that we may all share in the glory
of the Resurrection.
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