Completing the Tower and Winning the War, Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), September 4, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
September 4, 2022
Wis 9:13-18, Ps 90, Philemon 9-10.12-17, Lk 14:25-33

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• As we begin this new academic year and many of you begin this big new phase of your life as an undergrad, transfer or graduate student here at Columbia, Jesus in the Gospel speaks to us with two memorable images about what we could call “starting with the end in mind.” Before starting to build a tower, he says, we need to make sure we have enough bricks to complete it. Likewise, before the first battle is waged, we need to know that we have enough troops to win the war. It’s important advice in any endeavor. Students need to know, for example, that they will have enough time to complete their work, enough sleep to focus, enough credits to graduate. Jesus was applying those metaphors to what it takes to be a faithful student of us. The word disciple in Greek, as many of you know, means student, and the Latin word for student comes from the word for “zealous.” To be a true student of Jesus the Master means to be filled with love for the Teacher and the subject matter and Jesus gives three conditions in the Gospel to see if we’re that type of student, to determine if we’re sagely beginning with the end in mind, to help us know whether we’ve got the bricks to finish the job and the troops to fight the good fight. The conditions are challenging, but Jesus regularly challenges his disciples in the Gospel. Besides, when have Columbia students ever backed down from a challenge?
• The first condition is to love God above every reality. Jesus says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” In order to understand what he is saying here, we have to grasp the Hebrew term for “hate.” It doesn’t mean to “detest” but to “put in second place.” Jesus, after all, calls us to honor our parents, not hate their guts. If he calls us to love even our enemies then we are certainly called to love our siblings. The point of Jesus’ expression is that he must be our greatest love, our supreme good. To be a good student of the Master, a disciple of the Lord, we must love him more than we love ourselves or our loved ones. Jesus cannot just be a part of our life but the center. If we love others more than him, if we love our life more than him, we won’t have enough fuel in the plane to cross the Atlantic.
• The second condition concerns our willingness to suffer for him who suffered all for us. Jesus says, “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” To be a faithful student of the one who saved us on Calvary, we need to be prepared to suffer out of love for him and others; otherwise, we will not be able faithfully to fulfill the journey of the Christian life. The clearest example of this is the martyrs, who were prepared to die rather than to sin, who were prepared to embrace the Cross all the way because they knew that the Cross would unite them to Christ. But we see this as well in Christian doctors, medical students and pharmacists who refuse to take part in any way in any practices that harm or take life, even if they might suffer professionally; we see this in people who stick up for Christ and his teachings even when they suffer derision as a result at university, work or in their families; we see this in those who sacrifice money and time to care for others and for the mission of the Church. If we’re not willing to endure suffering, if we run away from the cross rather than seek to embrace it together with Christ, then we won’t have what it takes to follow Christ all the way, uphill, through Calvary to heaven.
• The third condition is meant to help us find and place in Christ our real treasure. Jesus says, “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” This seems to be a shockingly challenging condition, but Jesus was driving at something he had said elsewhere in the Gospel. “No one can serve two masters; for he will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other” (Mt 6:24). He then gave that sentence a clear practical application: “You cannot serve both God and money” (Mt 6:24). Unless we give up our love of money, unless we make the choice not to serve money, unless we sever the cord of being possessed by our possessions, unless we become detached from them and use them for God’s kingdom, then, he says, we cannot be his faithful follower. We cannot help but think here of the Rich Young Man, who, when presented by Jesus with the path to true fulfillment through giving up what he owned, bestowing the money on the poor, storing up treasure in heaven and then coming after him, chose his stuff rather than Jesus. Jesus says that we cannot be his disciple unless we’re prepared to choose differently from the Rich Young Man, unless we’re ready to use all that we have to obtain the pearl of great price. Otherwise we will be vulnerable to valuing Jesus less than thirty pieces of silver and we won’t have the courage to trade everything else we have to obtain his kingdom.
• It’s tempting to try to soften Jesus’ three conditions, as if he really didn’t or couldn’t mean them literally, because they are so challenging to our human weaknesses. We’re tempted to try to reduce the price tag of the faith, as if Jesus were running a Yard Sale and we can haggle the cost down to something we think a price worth paying. There’s a beautiful scene in the 2020 film A Hidden Life about Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, in which he’s helping a painter in a Church where’s he sacristan during the Nazi occupation in Austria. The painter was depicting what he called “comfortable” images of Christ with halos that were easy to look at, because, he said, the people in the pews look up and imagine that if they lived in Jesus’ time, they wouldn’t have done what the other did, they wouldn’t have clamored for Jesus instead of Barabbas, they would have defended him. The painter added that in Austria under the Nazis, Jesus has many admirers, but few true followers, because Christ’s life is demanding and most people don’t want to be reminded of those demands, especially in the context in which fidelity might be costly, as it was in Blessed Franz’s life. That scene points to the truth that there’s no such thing as a “Christianity on the cheap,” in which we’re somehow able to have God and our other gods, too. It’s pointing to the truth that it’s not enough to be a “fan,” or a “groupie,” a Facebook friend or Instagram or Twitter follower of Jesus. To be Jesus’ disciple, to enter into his kingdom, requires a challenging and decisive choice. One has got to be willing, as Jesus says elsewhere, to “pluck out one’s eyes,” “to cut off one’s hands” if that’s what it takes to follow him (Mt 5:29-30). We have got to be willing even to lose our life, because it is only the one who loses his life who will find it again in God (Mk 8:35). Unless we have a clear idea of the cost of discipleship and are prepared to pay it, Jesus implies, we’ll compromise on our faith and won’t be able to complete the journey of the Christian life. With great love, authentic spiritual fatherhood, and trust in us, Jesus wants to help us reflect on what means it’s going to take to achieve the end and to will those means.
• And Jesus reminds us that while there is always significant cost to our discipleship, the rewards are so much greater. Jesus promised us as much elsewhere in the Gospel after Peter asked him, “Lord, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?” Jesus responded, “Truly I tell you, … everyone who for my name’s sake has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields” — almost the very words he gives in today’s first condition — “will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life” (Mt 19:29). There’s no greater promise than that! As we count the cost of discipleship and with God’s help pay the price, we know that in return we will receive Christ, who is the pearl of great value and the treasure buried in the field, worth sacrificing all we are and have to obtain!
• As we begin this new academic year, Jesus puts this challenge before us, of the bricks and battle plan we’re going to need to keep, grow, and pass on the gift of faith he’s given us. And the Church puts before us a great example. This morning in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis beatified Pope John Paul I, who was pope for just 33 days in 1978. I’m old enough to remember him and to remember the buzz his short papacy created. He was called, almost from the outset, the “smiling pope,” because he was always full of joy, telling stories, embracing children who had run up to sit with him as he was giving a speech. He had plenty of sufferings in his life, including a serious heart condition that he basically kept secret, but which ended up taking his life at 65. Pope Francis, however, said about him, that “Jesus asks us [to] live the Gospel … not halfway but to the full, … [to] live the Gospel, live life, with no compromises,” and “our new Blessed lived that way: in the joy of the Gospel, without compromises, loving to the very end. He embodied the poverty of the disciple, which is not only detachment from material goods but also victory over the temptation to put oneself at the center, to seek one’s own glory.” He didn’t reluctantly follow Jesus, begrudgingly preferring him above everyone and everything else including in times of hardship, but rather “with a smile, Pope John Paul managed to communicate the goodness of the Lord.” We ask the new blessed to help us to help us remain faithful to Jesus like he was, but to live our faith with contagious joy, to live it with a smile, not looking to what we give up but looking rather to the treasure we receive.
• That brings us Jesus’ awesome, super-compensatory self-gift in the Holy Eucharist. The Eucharist is the fruit of Jesus’ leaving his Father’s side in heaven, his carrying the cross, his renouncing all earthly possessions, his “hating” even his own life, so that we might have life to the full, starting even in this life, here at Columbia. The Mass is where Jesus strengthens us for the battles of life and gives us sturdy bricks, day by day, to become a temple with a high bell-tower capable through its peals of bringing others to worship God alongside us. The Mass is where Jesus, the Master, comes to teach us, and to feed us with the only nourishment he deemed worthy of our souls.

The readings for this Sunday were: 

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