Homily, September 21

As long as we’re children of this world we’ll be slaves. What we’ve given ourselves to will become our master and what we crave of it will become our addiction. Jesus knew this, and thus our Gospel today. 

Because all of it, even the useful things of this world, are temporary. Honors will be forgotten. Riches will end up in another’s hands. Fame will drift from our grasp. Someone else will eventually own your house. And everyone will have their Ecclesiastes moment along the way, a time when they discover, like the wise teacher of old, that everything of this world is “vanity.” 

If all of your hope, if all your life is invested in this world then any disruption will be soul rending and catastrophic not because it truly is but rather because your heart is where your treasure has been placed. Jobs, status, love, beauty, power, wealth all will be revealed as “less than” and exposed as temporary things stored where thieves can steal them and rust and corruption are always a possibility. 

And then there’s death. Roman crucifixions were not just for the condemned but for the public as well, a way to stoke this ultimate fear for the cause of social compliance. Nothing has changed even today. The reality of death has turned us into soulless accumulators and people trapped in the moment.  Our fear of mortality and the baubles it takes from us have often taken us far away from everything that truly matters for the sake of the illusions our world offers as patent medicine for the fear of dying. 

This is why Jesus asks us to take up His cross and, like Him, voluntarily lose the lives we’ve been told are supposed to be in exchange for that which they were truly designed. We were meant to be children of God, of eternity, of a world so much different from that in which we live, a world whose values, meaning, and purpose are filled with the divine and whose citizens are transfigured by the light of heaven. 

To attain this we’re asked to die to everything temporal, mortal, and less. This is a difficult challenge our Lord presents us with. Yet emptying ourselves of these lesser things creates space for everything holy, bright, pure, and eternal.  Remembering this allows us to see beyond any given moment, even episodes of intense suffering, in an awareness that there’s so much greater, more, and holy available even in the face of death. If our Faith is correct you and I will exist eternally so what should we make of any given moment of this fraction of our existence and how should we live differently in the here and now? 

The great St. Polycarp, when threatened with execution by fire, calmly responded by telling the authorities that their short fire would be his deliverance from an eternal one. He wasn’t delusional. He knew what they were planning to do but he was also prepared to take up his cross and give away everything because he saw the larger story behind the immediate, the greater reality beyond the moment, and the eternal life just beyond the earthly horizon. This is the way of all the great martyrs and confessors of our Faith and it can, and should be, God giving us both strength and wisdom, ours as well.

No, we’re not delusional. We need things of this world to live in this world but we do not need to be captivated by them. We know that suffering will visit us. If our Lord was not immune how could we expect to be? Still, we know there’s a bigger reality beyond any given moment, even the painful ones, and even death and loss have been transfigured to the heart willing to become aware of the cross in an eternal and cosmic way.

The rest of the world may see a cross as punishment, as degradation, as meaningless pain followed by empty death. A soul illumined by grace, however, sees in it the death of death, the breaking of the power of sin and mortality, and the glorious freedom of being resurrected to a renewed way of existing in this world, a way filled with the life to come and eternity. 

This is the secret of how we can live and thrive even in a darkened world. This is the basis for how we take holy action in response to the hungers and struggles we see around us and within. This is how we become transfigured rather than degraded by the pain we see around us or the experience of it within. This is how we find life even when it may seem we’re losing all the temporary things our culture tells us to acquire to fill the empty spaces within where God should reside. 

The real question is “Have we had enough?” Have we played the game and grown tired of always falling short of the win? Have we bent and broken ourselves into contortions for things we can’t keep? Have we given precious moments of our life away for that which is carried into the wind seconds after it ends? Have we had a moment when we looked into the mirror and thought “Is this it?”

Perhaps only in that kind of moment when we’ve given up our lives for everything unreal, unholy, and temporal and felt the emptiness of it will we even think of listening to Jesus’ words and consider not clinging so tightly to that which will inevitably pass away while taking up His cross.

And could it be, though, that  when we do we’ll understand that perhaps Jesus was right all along and find, in that truth, the peace and freedom that nothing in this world can take away?