Calculating the Cost of the Christian Life … and Paying It, 31st Wednesday (I), November 3, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Martin de Porres
November 3, 2021
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:

• Today in the Gospel Jesus does something extraordinary. 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 crowds, like the apostles, thought or at least hoped that they were on a triumphal procession for Jesus to be recognized as Messiah and unite the people 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 would never come on the cheap. 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 our family members 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, or husband or wife, or children are asking of us, that we say “God’s will be done” instead of “My loved ones’ 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 directly 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, we have to have the supplies — most notably detachment from ourselves, our loved ones, our possessions and our life — to finish the job. 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 the cost and pay the cost, knowing that in the big picture, this is the wisest and greatest deal in life, the pearl and 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, but his help doesn’t eliminate our sacrifice; rather it just makes it 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 would have pondered yesterday — if it weren’t All Souls Day — in meditating on the 20 ways he describes 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, or borrows way beyond our means as a national government (although not so relevant among those who have taken the vow of poverty!) — 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 his and 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 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 when he reminded us that all the law and the prophets, including obviously the Ten Commandments, hinge on the love of God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and the love of our neighbor as we love ourselves. Jesus reminded us of this truth on Sunday in the Gospel passage we had from St. Mark.
• Today it is good to examine, honestly, how we are 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 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 a few.
  • 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. Jesus as God loves a cheerful giver, so he loves an affective lover, friend, Christian self-giver.
• Someone who followed Christ in this way, who learned and paid the cost of discipleship, who loved sincerely with affection and sacrifice and paid his debt of love to the full, is the holy one whom the Church celebrates today, St. Martin de Porres (1579-1639). He was a Dominican lay brother in Peru, who because he was the mulatto son of a Spanish knight and a black freed-woman, experienced various humiliating sufferings out of racism growing up. But filled with love for Christ and his neighbor, he eventually entered the Order of Preachers and humbly served as their barber, surgeon, wardrobe-keeper and infirmarian. He wanted to bring God’s love outside the monastery, too, and extend the care he was giving to his Dominican brothers to everyone else, as if all of Lima were his monastery. He cared for the sick. He helped establish an orphanage and foundling-hospital. He distributed the convent’s alms each day of food to the poor and sometimes, with God’s help, multiplied it. He cared for all the slaves brought to Peru from Africa. He went out after the lost sheep and trained people in the same care of the poor so that together with them they could dramatically help the poor in their circumstances. He’s the patron saint of social justice because he was giving not just out of charity, but out of a sense that the poor are owed better than what they normally receive. Because Christ valued them so much, he wanted to value them at that same level and help them recognize their own dignity. He wanted them to recognize that Christ had invited them to share their lives with him in this world — as he entered poor to share the lives even of the poor — and to help them to share with him eternal riches. He saw Christ in each of them and sought to give Christ what he deserved. He was filled with sorrow and anguish at their suffering and, with the Lord’s help, sought to do what he can. We prayed at the beginning of Mass that we might follow him on this Christ-like path: “O God, who led Saint Martin de Porres by the path of humility to heavenly glory, grant that we may so follow his radiant example in this life as to merit to be exalted with him in heaven.”
• To strengthen us to love by the standard to which he calls us, 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 choose to 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, in imitation of St. Martin de Porres, pay that generosity forward in the affectionate, verbal and nonverbal way we imitate his agape and philia toward each other.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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