Father Rick Bolte's Homily

B:24th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Jesus seems to be telling us to do the impossible: loose our lives, take up our cross, and follow him.  Losing our lives doesn’t sound like something we’d really like to do and it seems like we’d have to live contrary to our natural instincts.  So what do we do with Jesus’ command?  We might like to think this is just meant for a few people but as we hear in today’s gospel, he calls both his disciples and the crowd together to give them this command.  We might like to imagine that Jesus doesn’t mean this too seriously except it’s repeated so often throughout the Gospels.

One approach people have taken is to see the call to carry one’s cross to mean that we need to face our daily troubles without complaining.  We certainly all have plenty of troubles that we feel burdened by.  Just to deal with them, and especially if we don’t complain about them, seems like challenge enough.  But how is that different than for anyone who is not a believer?  Everyone has difficulties in life and everyone has to face them.  Most people face them without complaining because they’ve learned that it is hard to have friends if all you do is complain.  If this were Jesus’ meaning, it wouldn’t be anything they weren’t already doing.

Sometimes we might imagine Jesus is calling us to some heroic task.  On an occasion when we are into our faith and wanting to follow Jesus more closely, we might try to follow Jesus by choosing even draconian means to take his call as literally as possible.  When we choose to be so heroic, we invariably fail.  We don’t have the strength to so drastically change our lives; our willpower isn’t that strong or enduring.  Our end result is to deem this command as impossible and to ignore it.

But Jesus’ command is neither irrelevant nor impossible.  It is about something we begin to learn in our families.  This is why the Second Vatican Council called the family the building block of the church.  Families are based on the love two people share.  It often begins with the assumption of mutuality as we expect to receive love as we give it.  We give of ourselves as we expect to receive in return.  In time the tit-for-tat connection is weakened as we have to choose to love without getting immediate response.  This response time is weakened even more with children.  In the first years of their life we love them though they are incapable of response.  As they get older their love varies but we are called to remain constant in our love.  We begin to learn a value of love that goes beyond the response of spouse or children.  We give of ourselves trusting we will receive in return though an equal response or a timely one is not guaranteed. 

Jesus says even sinners will give expecting to get a return.  We begin to learn the value of love that is more clearly of God as we learn to give without expecting a return.  This is how we lose our lives, pick up our cross, and follow Christ.  To love is to give of ourselves, to sacrifice our lives.  We are not in charge but each day God presents us with people whom we can love without expecting a return.  Our cross is to pick up that opportunity God gives us, to give a bit more of our lives each day, and so we follow the example of Jesus.