Fully and Freely Responding to the Lord’s Call to Follow Him in a Eucharistic Life, 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), June 26, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Francis de Sales Chapel
Archdiocese of Oklahoma City Pastoral Center
Retreat for the Sovereign Order of Malta
Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
June 26, 2022
1 Kings 19:16,19-21, Ps 16, Gal 5:1.13-18, Lk 9:51-62

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

The text that guided the homily was:

• In just over a week, we will celebrate Independence Day, which is perhaps our country’s most notable national holiday, and gives us an annual opportunity to focus on the meaning of freedom and to recognize what is required to remain free. That consideration is all the more relevant after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision on Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood. Those overturned decisions had established, or reinforced, a notion of freedom that asserted that older, stronger, more politically influential people should have the right to choose even to kill smaller, totally vulnerable, voiceless human beings at the same stage of development each of us once was in our mother’s wombs. Casey had even asserted, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” an understanding of freedom that we now see harming individuals and our society as, for example, some think we are free to redefine our sex and have everyone else in society support that decision. That’s why it’s so providential that today that we are able, with the help of the readings the Church gives us on this 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, to consider what freedom truly is. This consideration of freedom is also essential for us to learn how to live a truly Eucharistic life as we finish this retreat and enter more deeply into the Church’s Eucharistic Revival.
• “For freedom, Christ has set us free,” St. Paul emphasizes in the second reading from his letter to the Galatians. With those few words, the apostle points to two of the most crucial truths for us to grasp in the Christian life: what Christ gained for us and what our freedom is for. All that Jesus has done for us — by entering the human race as an embryo, by his life, his teaching, the sacraments he instituted, his enormous suffering, gruesome death and glorious resurrection — was to set us free, free from the power of sin and from the death to which sin always leads. But that liberation by Christ has a purpose: Christ has set us free “for freedom,” so that we might live in the “glorious freedom of the children of God” (8:21), so that we might love others as he has loved us, fulfill our vocation to become holy as he is holy, merciful as he is merciful, and perfect as he is perfect, growing fully into his image and likeness. He has liberated us in order that we may truly be free, but remaining free and growing in freedom are not a given. Many misuse their freedom to enslave themselves, by becoming addicts, for example, to drugs, or to pornography, or even to getting our own way all the time. That’s why St. Paul tells us, “So stand firm [in freedom] and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.” Christ has opened up the prison cell and led us out into the light, but now we need to use that great gift of freedom to continue to follow him more and more into the light rather than to return to the self-imposed darkness of the servitude of sin and egocentrism.
• Several years ago when I was pastor of St. Anthony’s in New Bedford, MA, one Sunday there was a new parishioner sitting all alone in the front pew. He was a short guy wearing a tank top with huge muscles and tattoos all over his arms. You could tell readily that he really hadn’t been to Mass in a while; he was constantly looking over his shoulders to learn from those behind him whether he should stand, sit or kneel. At the end of the Mass, when he came to greet me, I stuck out my hand and he just gave me a big hug and introduced himself. “Father, my name is Sunny and I just got out of ten years at Cedar Junction [Massachusett’s maximal security prison] and I’m serious about never going back there.” I told him that he’s off to a good start by coming to Mass and asking God for his help and then we had a nice conversation about how he could form good habits. Sunny knew that the rate of recidivism among inmates was very high and he didn’t want to be among them. But it was really hard for him to use his freedom appropriately. I had many OSV pamphlets about various aspects of the faith and he said which he should take to learn more over the week. I brought him before them, explained what some of them covered, and invited him to choose the one about which he was hungriest to learn. He was paralyzed. He couldn’t make a choice. He told me he hadn’t been given a choice for a decade and didn’t know what to do, begging me to select one for him. He was now exteriorly free, but not interiorly free. He struggled to use his freedom to form the new friendships and virtues necessary to stay out. And after a couple of months, as happens with many who are released from prison, out of weakness he got back involved with the crowd that had gotten him into trouble the first time, violated his parole and landed back in jail. It’s a lesson for all of us, because spiritually to some degree we’re all recidivists. Christ has set us free but we need to take advantage of the gift of that freedom to follow him further and further away from the self-imposed imprisonment of sin. That’s the choice St. Paul tells us we all face, whether to “stand firm” or to “submit again to the yoke of slavery.” The choice is to follow Christ freely or to squander our freedom and return to slavery.
• This points to the fact that there is a great responsibility to stay free, to develop and grow our freedom and not submit again to the yoke of the slavery of sin. How do with strengthen ourselves in freedom and remain free? There are two things we must do.
  • The first is to love. St. Paul tells us that our freedom is meant to be used to “serve one another through love, for the whole law is fulfilled in one statement, namely, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Our freedom is ultimately so that with self-mastery we can give ourselves to others in loving service.
  • The second condition is the truth. Jesus tells us in St. John’s Gospel: “If you keep my Word, then you will know the Truth and the Truth will make you free” (Jn 8:32). To stay free, we must live according to the Truth, the truth about right and wrong, the truth about who we are made in God’s image and likeness, the truth about our calling to a life of loving communion with Him and others. Freedom is not the ability to do whatever we want, wherever we want, whenever we want, with anyone we want, without the interference of anyone we don’t want. It’s not the power to pretend that we are God, determining good and evil, trying to change our nature or even deciding over life and death. Freedom, rather, is the capacity to act in accordance with the truth about who we are in God’s image and likeness. It’s the ability to live with virtue, the self-mastery that allows us to become whom God created us to be as images of him who is both love and truth. Since “the truth will make [us] free,” Jesus not only revealed to us so many truths about him, about ourselves, and about the real, real world he has made, but he has become the incarnate Truth so that we might unite ourselves to the genuine freedom of our Liberator and has sent the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Truth to lead us into all truth (Jn 16:13) so that we might become more and more free.
• Paul tells us in today’s passage that the fundamental choice we have to make in life, the litmus test for whether we will strengthen and expand our freedom or diminish and lose it, is dependent on whether we choose to live by the Holy Spirit or live according to what he calls “the flesh,” which means living dominated by rather than controlling our lower instincts. The more we choose to live by God, by the truth he has revealed, by self-discipline and responsibility and care for others, the more free we will be. The more we abuse our freedom to live apart from God and his truth, the more we will voluntarily squander our freedom and became enslaved. As St. Paul reminds us, the purpose of freedom is not to enable self-indulgence, self-definition, and life according to the flesh, but rather for love and responsibility to live in accordance with the truth that Christ has revealed to us. This is the Gospel we’re called to live and proclaim, to set people free and make people happy.
• More than 20 times in the Gospel, Jesus says the words, “Follow me!” Each of us has received that calling from Jesus. It is an appeal to our freedom. The biggest, most important decision of our life is to use our freedom to make a real commitment to follow Jesus along the path out of slavery, the path of real freedom and love, the path that leads to happiness, holiness and heaven, precisely the path he has charted for us and wants us to follow. We know that those who are the real heroes in life have used their freedom to follow Jesus on this path. That’s what 11 of the 12 apostles it. It’s what Mary Magdalene did. And that’s what the Blessed Virgin Mary did. We know that many others used their freedom to refuse to follow Jesus. We see this tragic decision in the Samaritans in today’s Gospel, who would not welcome Jesus at all into their town because he was preparing to go to Jerusalem (where he would die for their sins!). We see it in the many Scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees who used their freedom to conspire to murder Jesus. We see it in Pontius Pilate and Herod who, instead of using their freedom to protect a man they knew was innocent, used it to have him crucified. We see it in the Rich Young Man, who when given a choice to grasp onto the hand of Jesus who wanted to lead him to perfection, instead chose to grasp on to his many material possessions. We see it in all those disciples of Jesus who, as soon as he revealed to them the mystery of the Eucharist, decided that the teaching was too hard to endure and abandoned him.
• In the Gospel we have several examples about the use of freedom that should hit close to home. These were people who wanted to follow Jesus but who felt bound by something that they let prevent them from making the commitment to follow him fully. In their case, it was not sin that enslaved them, but good things that they had made idols that prevented them from following the one true God.
• The first man ran up to Jesus and said, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus had come into the world to make disciples and so we would have expected that this man’s desire to follow Jesus would have filled Jesus with joy. Instead, Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Jesus wanted him to know the price of discipleship, especially at a time in which messianic expectations had hyped up the Jews to think that the Messiah would kick out the Romans and set up a political administration in which there would be plenty of patronage. Jesus wanted the man to grasp that to follow him wherever he went meant to go after someone who was basically homeless, to value him more than one’s own home and one’s own bed, to realize that he wouldn’t even have what foxes and birds take for granted. Jesus was saying that anyone who freely decides to follow him needs to know that it’s not going to be a comfortable or easy life, but a life of self-sacrificial love and the embracing of a daily Cross. We don’t know what decision this man made, but the context implies that he preferred having a pillow than choosing to follow a pillowless Redeemer. We, too, need to ponder the radical nature of God’s call. Are we willing to follow Jesus wherever he goes? If he asks us, like God asked Abraham, to leave our own native place at 75 and go to a place he would eventually show us, would we follow him, or would we value our home, our bed, our old habits more than we do the Lord?
• The second scene involves a man to whom Jesus said, “Follow me!” But this man replied, “Lord, let me go first to bury my father.” When we hear this, we can presume that the person’s dad had just died and he just wanted to go home for the funeral and then immediately return. The text doesn’t say that, however. What’s much more likely was that the man’s father was very much alive and might live for decades still. What the interlocutor was likely communicating was, “Jesus, I’d like to follow you, but my father comes first. As soon as I’ve fulfilled all of my obligations to him, then I’ll come and be with you.” Jesus’ reply was powerful: “Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.” As Jesus would say a little later at the raising of Lazarus, he is the Resurrection and the Life and everyone who lives and believes in him, even if he dies, will live (Jn 11:25-26). For us to become alive in the most important sense of all, we need to be in a living relationship to him. If we’re not following him, if we’re not allowing his life to reign within us, we’re dead, even if all our corporeal vital signs are healthy. He was calling this man to become fully alive through following him who is the Resurrection and the Life. He was giving him a choice between life and death, between living and dying even while breathing. Jesus doesn’t call most people to make a strict choice between him and their family members. He calls us, after all, to honor our father and mother and wants the family to be an image of the Church and the communion of persons who is God. Burying the dead is and will always remain a spiritual work of mercy. But at the same time, Jesus is reminding us that he must come first, so that our family life will become the life of the living rather than the walking dead. Our vocation is to a new type of familial life that will last forever and Jesus wants us to seize it, as he called this man in the Gospel.
• The third scene is another that involves the family. After being summoned by Jesus, this person replied, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home.” It’s certainly not evil, like Elisha in today’s first reading, to want to say farewell to friends and family — as if he would never have had a chance to do it in the future! — but what this man was doing was conditioning his response, putting following Christ behind human considerations, and failing to recognize the unbelievable privilege of the invitation he had just received. Jesus, who could see what was in the heart of the one with whom he was speaking, grasped what the request symbolized: the person was oblivious to the greatness of the request he had received to follow Jesus. He was placing human respect, human courtesy, and family above that summons. Very likely Jesus also suspected that this man’s family members might have objected to his leaving them behind to follow Jesus fully. So Jesus said, “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the Kingdom of God.” He was saying, “Don’t look to what you’re leaving,” but rather, “Look ahead to what you’re gaining, to the work you’re called to do with me.” He was focusing on the urgency of the work of the kingdom against the tendency to procrastinate on fixing our face and our heart with Christ on his saving work. He was calling him and all of us to look at him and follow him along the path of freedom, faith and felicity, rather than peering backward toward yesterday’s treasures. He’s calling all of us to use our freedom to make him the true priority of our life.
• And so today as we finish our retreat at the beginning of the US Church’s three-year Eucharistic Revival, let’s respond to God’s help to make some commitments to put our hands to the plow and not look back, to follow him not half-heartedly but with our whole mind, heart, soul and strength, to stay with him not out of cold, bitter duty but out of trusting, cheerful love. Let’s make the resolution to put our hands to the plow and follow Christ in prayer without looking back, committing ourselves to give more time to him in prayer more than we devote to various diversions. Let’s make the resolution to put our hands to the plow and follow Christ to the altar, following him with all our mind and heart in the readings, to pouring ourselves into the prayers and the hymns. Let’s make the resolution to put our hands to the plow in his call to make our life truly Eucharistic, washing others’ feet, making ourselves the servant of all, and caring for the poor, sick and needy with Christ. Let’s make the commitment to put our hands to the plow and follow Christ by cooperating with the Holy Spirit in sharing with others the truth about Christ make truly present for us on the altar. Let us, in short, make the resolution to put our hands to the plow and follow Christ in uniting our whole life with Him without looking back to our old way of doing things, without looking back to the yoke of slavery, but living in the glorious freedom of God’s children. Today, as I give thanks to God on my 23rd anniversary of priestly ordination, I freely renew the commitments I made on the day of my ordination and ask your prayers that I may be continue to follow Jesus with the determination, priority and urgency he desires and to be his instruments to help others do the same. As we prayed in the Psalm, with words that the Old Testament priests used to recite, the Lord is my inheritance, “my allotted portion and my cup,” who “holds fast my lot,” who “counsels me,” “exhorts me” even in the middle of the night, and how rich I am!
• Today Christ looks on each of us with love and calls us to follow him by joining our hands to his in plowing the fields for a harvest. He calls us to use our freedom wisely to allow ourselves to be led by the Holy Spirit, and it is here that the Holy Spirit has led us, so that we might behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world and liberates us from slavery, sin and death. Rather than gratifying the desires of the flesh, we come near to be nourished by Jesus’ flesh and blood, the wondrous sacrament that strengthens us to make a total commitment to him who here gives himself totally to us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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