Fr. Eugene Lobo SJ –
Twenty Third Sunday of the Year September 04, 2022
Wisdom 9:13-18; Philemon 9b, 12-17; Luke 14:25-33
Today’s liturgy points us towards the economy of salvation. The word economy comes from the Greek origin tells us of household management. The economy of salvation tells us how God manages his household and how he places us into his loving care. All of us have an invitation to come closer to God and commit ourselves to him. But we have to balance our considerations and make decisions about our commitment, our self-control, and our detachment. In the Gospel of today, Jesus tells how much it costs us to be his true disciple and enter into his divine economy. What does it cost us to enter into the divine household? He makes strong demands of us so that we are prepared to remain true to him till the end. He asks us to put our commitments to him above all things including the family ties and remain close to him. He expects each one of his disciples to carry his daily cross and follow him. We have to count the cost to be with him.
Today’s First Reading from the Book of Wisdom tells us of man’s incapability of understanding the divine decrees. There are several finite and limited problems around us and we solve them only with divine help. The passage of today places before us five things. First of all, we as human beings are very limited in our reasoning because we lack Divine knowledge and understanding. Secondly, God sent the Holy Spirit to give us Wisdom. Thirdly, the Holy Spirit teaches us the way, the truth, and the life just as Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would teach us everything. Fourthly, through the Holy Spirit, we learn how to please God. Finally, through the Divine wisdom of the Holy Spirit, we are saved. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, we are born again.
Today’s Second Reading taken from the Letter of St Paul to Philemon we learn that Philemon had been converted through the efforts of Paul. Philemon had a slave by the name of Onesimus had run away and Paul converted him perhaps while in prison. Now, Paul was appealing to Philemon’s goodwill to welcome Onesimus back into his family. Onesimus may well have done wrong but it is clear that, with his conversion, he is now a changed person who can be trusted and relied on. Onesimus was obligated to serve Philemon in Christian fidelity.
The message from today’s Gospel is “the cost of being a disciple.” Jesus is on the road, going from village to village to proclaim the coming of the Kingdom of God. Here he speaks of true discipleship. A disciple is one who is learning or has learned from a master or teacher or one who follows the teachings prescribed by a master or teacher. The demands of discipleship require a total dedication on the part of a Christian. For some time now, large crowds had been travelling with Jesus. The time had now arrived for Jesus to sift those who were truly committed from those who were not. To make the choice and to discern, Jesus presents two parables. In the first parable, Jesus narrated that before someone builds a tower, he sits down and calculates the cost. If he does not have enough wealth to finish the tower, in all wisdom, he does not begin the project. Otherwise, he would be a laughing stock. In the second parable, Jesus said that a king going to war against forces that are far more superior to his, must carefully calculate the cost and consider his chances of winning the battle. So it is with Christian discipleship.
Counting the cost is a very important factor when it comes to conversion. The potential convert must decide if he will receive the Sacrament of initiation or Baptism as a condition of his membership in the Body of Christ, the invisible Kingdom of God on earth. He must decide if afterward, he will have the fidelity to remain righteous in the eyes of the Lord God. He must decide if he is prepared to commit his living faith in Christ on a daily basis until the end. Therefore a true disciple must forsake everything to follow Jesus. He turns around and says words that were quite shocking to his hearers and sound pretty harsh to us too: “If anyone comes to me without hating father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes, and his own life, that person cannot be my follower or disciple.” When Jesus said that His disciples must “hate father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself,” he means to have single-hearted devotion to Jesus.
In a parallel passage in Matthew we hear Jesus saying that whoever loves his father or mother more than Jesus is not worthy of him and whoever loves son or daughter more than Jesus is not worthy of him and finally whoever does not take up the cross and follow the Lord is not worthy of him.” The cross does not mean the cross Jesus carried but it the cross of our life, the pains privations, and sufferings. It is quite obvious from the overall context of Luke’s gospel that Jesus could not mean us literally to hate our parents, brothers, and sisters. Hate and the anger and violence that it produces are the product of fear. On the contrary, we are called to have love and compassion for every single person, irrespective of who they are or what their relationship may be to us.
Luke in the Gospel clearly tells us that the following of Jesus in the most radical terms would mean to find him in all persons. In following Jesus, we have to go with him the whole way and have to accept totally his way of seeing life and then putting that into practice in the way we live. A Christian is someone who desires, at any cost, the Glory of God and his own happiness in the Heart of Christ Jesus.
The essential condition for true discipleship demanded by Jesus was and still is total dedication, a total commitment of the self to him. It is a complete surrender to the call of the master. Therefore Jesus says that whoever is not with him is against him. To be a true disciple one must live the Christian life every day and the whole day. To be a disciple and follow Jesus is a life journey. It involves a total involvement in the causes for him. This is what Jesus wants to make us understand through the examples or parables he tells us today.
In the Gospel, Jesus makes other conditions to follow him, namely, self-control and detachment. We have yet another phrase here, namely, “hating our own life”. This is just an extension of the earlier part. Jesus wants our lives to be lived in total truth and love. Our lives are not to be determined and manipulated by attachments, desires, ambitions, or fears and anxieties which can become very much part of us. We are to live in total freedom. To be a true follower of Jesus a person must be ready to sacrifice even what is nearest and dearest to him if it comes between him and Christ.
This is a true story of Mother’s Sacrifice during the China Earthquake. After the Earthquake had subsided, when the rescuers reached the ruins of a young woman’s house, they saw her dead body through the cracks. But her pose was somehow strange that she knelt on her knees like a person was worshiping; her body was leaning forward, and her two hands were supporting by an object. The collapsed house had crashed her back and her head. The leader of the rescuer team put his hand through a narrow gap on the wall to reach the woman’s body, cold and stiff. The team leader was driven by a compelling force knelt down and used his hand through the narrow cracks to search the little space under the dead body. Suddenly, he screamed with excitement,” A child! There is a child! “The team worked together, removed the piles of ruined objects. There was a 3 month’s old little boy wrapped in a flowery blanket under his mother’s dead body. The woman had made an ultimate sacrifice for saving her son.
Do you know the legend of the Cherokee Indian Youth’s Rite of Passage? His father takes him into the forest, blindfolds him, and leaves him alone. He is required to sit on a stump the whole night and not remove the blindfold until the rays of the morning sunshine through it. He cannot cry out for help to anyone. Once he survives the night, he is a MAN. He cannot tell the other boys of this experience, because each lad must come into manhood on his own. The boy is naturally terrified. He can hear all kinds of noises. Wild beasts must surely be all around him. Maybe even some human might do him harm. The wind blew the grass and earth and shook his stump, but he sat stoically, never removing the blindfold. It would be the only way he could become a man! Finally, after a horrific night, the sun appeared and he removed his blindfold. It was then that he discovered his father sitting on the stump next to him. He had been at watch the entire night, protecting his son from harm.