Calculating the Cost of Love to Be Jesus’ True Disciples, 31st Wednesday (I), November 8, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity
November 8, 2023
Rom 13:8-10, Ps 112, Lk 14:25-33

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• In yesterday’s Gospel, Jesus told a parable about how to respond to his calling us into his kingdom, which he describes as a joyous banquet. But he said that in response to the invitation, people excused themselves to care for their fields, oxen, and newly married wife. The moral is that often we do not recognize the value of the calling we’ve received and act according to that value. In today’s Gospel, Jesus doubled down on the point he was making in order that we grasp clearly the greatness of the call and the need to make decisive choices to put God in his proper place and order all other aspects of our life to him. He does so in a dramatic way. St. Luke tells us that “great crowds” were traveling with him. He had fixed his face on Jerusalem (Lk 9:51) and was on a long way of the Cross; the multitudes, like the apostles, thought and hoped that they were on a triumphal procession for Jesus to be recognized as Messiah, to unite the people and to drive out the Romans. Jesus turned around to the crowds and didn’t say, “How nice of you to come!” Rather, out of love he challenged them to know what they were signing up for if they were prepared to follow him all the way. He wanted them to count the cost of discipleship and be willing to pay it, knowing that to obtain the pearl of great price, to enter the banquet of the kingdom, wouldn’t come on the cheap. He tells us that to follow him as his disciple to salvation, we have to do three things.:
  • First, we need to “hate” father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and  sisters. The Hebrew word for “hate” doesn’t mean “detest,” but rather “put in second place” or “knock down a peg.” Jesus, after all, calls us to honor our father and mother, not despise them. But we have to make sure that they don’t become gods in our life, that if there is ever a choice between what God is asking of us and what our parents, husband or wife, or children are asking of us, that we say “God’s will be done” instead of “My loved one’s will be done.” And we need to remember that if we do “hate” them in this way, we actually will love them more because we will love them in God.
  • Second, Jesus says one needs to hate “even his own life,” “carry his own cross” and “follow” Him. We need to account Jesus’ life more valuable than our own, in imitation of him who deemed our life more valuable than His. This is the faith that led the martyrs to heaven. If we love our comforts, our life in this world more than we love God, then we won’t be completing the work of salvation because Jesus clearly taught us that to save our life we must lose it and that unless we fall to the ground and die like a grain of wheat we won’t bear the fruit of salvation.
  • Third, Jesus says one must “renounce all his possessions.” We must renounce the stuff that possesses us and then as good stewards use everything we have and are for God and his service, giving of ourselves together with our things for God and others, because if we cling to possessions we will not be able to fit through the eye of the needle to salvation.
• In buttressing the conditions of the completion of the work of our salvation, Jesus employs two analogies that point to the cost of discipleship. He says that to build a tower, we need to calculate the cost and get the proper supplies lest we not finish what we began. Likewise, to win a battle, we have to know whether we have the resources to defeat the enemy. In building the tower toward heaven, among the supplies we have to have is detachment from ourselves, our loved ones, our possessions and our life. In fighting against the twenty thousand troops of the evil one, we have to divest ourselves of whatever will hinder us in battle, whatever earthly desires the devil can use against us. We won’t be able to finish what’s been started unless we count and pay the cost, knowing that in the biggest picture of all, this is the wisest and greatest deal in life, the treasure worth more than everything else. We also need to know that Jesus never calls us to something — especially something this hard — without providing the means necessary to do it. His help, however, doesn’t eliminate our sacrifice, but it does make the sacrifice lighter and sweeter.
• Today in the first reading, St. Paul tells the first Roman Catholics and all of us about the cost that needs to be paid, about what we’re really signing up for if we follow Jesus. It’s a clear continuation of what we pondered yesterday in meditating on the 20 ways he described we needed to “let [our] love be sincere.” Today he says, “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another.” Not only is this a statement against amassing financial debt — words that are very important today in a culture that doesn’t save but charges beyond their means on credit cards, and borrows way beyond our means as a national government  — but it is a reminder for us that we do have a debt to love one another. Loving one another is not a good suggestion by Jesus. It’s not even just a command. It’s a debt to pay, it’s a real duty, it’s something we owe others. This might seem strange at first to think we owe everyone a debt of love, but when we take seriously Jesus’ words that whatever we do for the least of our brothers and sisters, we do to him (Mt 25:31-46), then it’s easier to understand, if still hard to do: because we owe a debt to Jesus for everything — for our life, our salvation, our gifts, etc. — we pay that debt in the way we love each other. St. Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, wrote in Love and Responsibility that the other is someone before whom the only worthy response is love. This debt is paid, first, in keeping the commandments. Today St. Paul lists the “second tablet” of the Decalogue, focused on love of neighbor, reminding us that the “one who loves one another has fulfilled the law” and “love is the fulfillment of the law.” Jesus said something similar in St. Matthew’s Gospel (which we heard ten days ago at Sunday Mass), when he reminded us that all the law and the prophets, including obviously the Ten Commandments, hinges on the love of God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and the love of our neighbor as we love ourselves.
• How are we doing in paying that debt to everyone we meet? We often think that we are loving others by the simple fact that we wish them good things or don’t hate them, but love is a sacrifice of ourselves for the good of the other as other, and we need to ask ourselves whether, when we look at each other and at others in general, we find ourselves in a real debt of love for them that we feel impelled from within to pay. Just like St. Therese Lisieux, each of us is called to be love in the heart of the Church, to love others with the love with which Christ has loved us first, and to do this concretely. There are lots of ways that we could apply this to our lives, but I’d like to focus on three.
  • First, if we’re really loving others, do we ever tell them we love them? Jesus himself said to us during the Last Supper, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you,” and he wants us, having been loved by him, to say to others, “Just like Jesus loves me, I want to love you” and “I love you with the love of Jesus.”
  • Second, if we’re really loving others, we’ll be making willing sacrifices for them. Jesus’ love led him to lay down his life for us, and all love is a reflection of that basic nature of love, which is a willingness to say no to ourselves to say yes for another, to do all that we morally can for another. St. Paul is saying we have a debt that leads us to sacrifice for others.
  • Third, if we’re really loving others then, as St. Paul said yesterday, we’ll be doing so “with affection.” It’s not enough to sacrifice. God wants us to sacrifice from the heart, not just “paying a debt” that we owe to someone reluctantly, but with passion freely doing something for someone we either naturally or with effort want to treat with great warmth. God loves a cheerful giver, so he loves an affective lover, friend, Christian self-giver. I love the story of St. Therese’s treatment of the curmudgeonly old sister whom nobody really cared for, and how, through loving her with affection, she changed for the better in her relations with everyone. To me, it seems obviously that that old sister was just wanting for real human love, for friendship, for agape, for the love of Christ mediated through his Mystical Body. Everyone needs that.
• Someone who learned how to follow Christ in loving this way, and has taught a century of Catholics how to love similarly, is St. Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880-1906), whom the Church celebrates today. She is someone who would come to account everything else as loss compared to knowing God. One of the most inspirational things about her is that she clearly wasn’t born a saint. She resisted following Christ to the point of self-sacrificial love to which he summons all of us. She didn’t want to pay the price of discipleship. She needed God’s grace to overcome a ferocious temper. Her mother and a confessor told her that, because of her strong personality, she would either become a terror or a saint. A big change took place with her first Confession at the age of seven. It brought her what she called her “conversion” and from that point forward she vowed, despite ongoing struggles, to become a “sweet, patient and obedient daughter.” As she was preparing for her first Holy Communion four years later when she was 11, a religious sister told her that her name, Elizabeth, meant “House of God” — actually it means “oath of God,” but the sister thought that the combination of “El” (God) and “beth” (house) was determinative despite the intervening letters (omnia in bonum!) — and that thought arrested her. She thought that she could not have such beautiful a name and not live as a house of God. Such a house could not abide someone who was prone to explosions and a source of trouble to others. She asked for the Lord’s help who came to dwell within and whose presence she grew more aware of and treasured. A great pianist and award winner at the Dijon Conservatory, she started to use her musical abilities for God’s glory rather than her own, by singing in two Church choirs. She would eventually say that she wanted to do all things for the praise of God’s glory. She began teaching Catechism so that others would share the same holy desire. She lived just 250 yards from a Discalced Carmelite Monastery and she wanted to enter there in order to serve God with everything she had, a response to a calling she discerned God had given her. She visited the convent when she was 17 and the superior there gave her a copy of a circular manuscript of a French Carmelite who had died just months before, and that first version of what would become St. Therese’s Story of a Soul had a big impact on her and her desire to grow in prayer. Her widowed mother resisted her vocation for several years in the hope that Elizabeth would finally fall for one of her many suitors, but finally relented enough to say that she would need to wait until 21. Elizabeth’s mom still hadn’t counted the value of discipleship that would make the cost seem small, but Elizabeth persevered and entered at 21, where she would grow in the love of God for five years, until she would die of Addison’s disease at the age of 26. Her life for Christ in the Holy Eucharist, as a house of God, led her to grasp that she could find and love him in the little things of each day, saying, “I find Him everywhere while doing the wash as well as while praying.” She became known as the “prophet of the presence of God.” Saint Elizabeth’s beautiful prayer about God’s dwelling within us in grace is contained for us in paragraph 260 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church describing how not only is God’s plan for us to enter into the perfect unity of the Trinity in heaven, but to become a dwelling place of God now. “O my God,” she prayed, “Trinity whom I adore, help me forget myself entirely so to establish myself in you, unmovable and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity. … Grant my soul peace. Make it your heaven, your beloved dwelling and the place of your rest. May I never abandon you there, but may I be there, whole and entire, completely vigilant in my faith, entirely adoring, and wholly given over to your creative action.” She accepted her own immense sufferings as a gift from God to bring about a union with Christ on the Cross and to allow her to join Christ in the salvation of souls, making up what was lacking in her of his sufferings for the sake of his body the Church. She wasn’t afraid to die, saying, “I am going to Light, to Love, to Life,” because in this world, within her, she was regularly communing with that same Light, Love and Life. Before Saint Elizabeth died, she said, “I think that in Heaven my mission will be to draw souls by helping them to go out of themselves in order to cling to God by a wholly simple and loving movement, and to keep them in this great silence within, which will allow God to communicate Himself to them and to transform them into Himself.” She wanted to lead them on the exodus of love out of the self toward God and others.
• To strengthen us to love like this, Christ himself comes as Love incarnate to make his abode in us and help us to love like him. This is where we get the resources to build the tower and win the war. This is where we unite with him in praying for all our family members, where we bring our crosses and receive his strength to yoke ourselves to him by means of them, to die to ourselves so that he may live, and to detach ourselves from worldly goods to find in him our treasure. In the Psalm we prayed, “Blessed the man who is gracious,” who “lavishly he gives to the poor.” Jesus graciously and lavishly gives himself to us each morning in our poverty. He says by this gift “I love you” with all I am and have, and then he sends us forward to love not just like that but together with him. We prayed in the Psalm, “His generosity shall endure forever,” and one of the ways it endures is when we receive his loving generously to overflowing and pay that generosity forward in the affectionate, verbal and nonverbal way we imitate his agape and philia in loving each other and fulfilling the new and eternal Covenant and the whole moral law.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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