Jesus’ Call To Seek True Greatness, 25th Sunday (B), September 22, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 22, 2024
Wis 2:12.17-20, Ps 54, James 3:16-4:3, Mk 9:30-37

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

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• We are made in the image and likeness of God. Therefore, he has created us to be great. This is expressed powerfully at the beginning of Eucharistic Prayer IV, in which the Church prays, “We give you praise, Father most holy, for you are great and you have fashioned all your works in wisdom and in love. You formed man in your own image and entrusted the whole world to his care, so that in serving you alone, the Creator, he might have dominion over all creatures.” God is great, formed us according to his image, and gave us the world so that we become great like him through serving him and exercising and sharing in his dominion. When God calls us to be holy as he is holy, merciful as he is merciful, perfect as he is perfect, he is summoning us to be, in short, like him, and, therefore, great like he is great.
• The problem for us after the Fall is that this call to spiritual greatness can be diverted or suppressed. The last thing that the evil one wants is for us to become truly like God. He instead wants to tempt us to pretend that we’re gods ourselves or to convince us that we are so corrupted that we would never become like God, so why should we even try. The evil one, in other words, wants to pervert our zeal to become like God or take that zeal away altogether.
• That’s why today’s readings are so important. We see the ugliness of ambition gone bad. We also see how Jesus delineates the way he has come to purify our ambition, so that we might become truly great as he created us to be, redeemed to be, and sent the Holy Spirit to help us to become. This is important for us to grasp because we live in a culture in which so many strive to make the Guinness Book of World Records, sometimes even for the silliest of things, and don’t strive to be inscribed in the eternal hall of fame. Insofar as at Columbia, we are surrounded by many who are ambitious for worldly things — for possessions and worldly riches; for honor, fame, degrees and influence; for pleasure and the things, experiences and even persons who can provide it; and for power and for the exalted positions where it can be exercised — it is so important for us to learn from the Lord how to be truly great. For even if we obtain every form of worldly greatness but lack the greatness to which God calls us, everything we have will ultimately be in vain, but if we fail to achieve what the world thinks is important but become great in what matters to God, then everything will be worth it.
• Let’s begin with ambition for greatness gone bad. We see it on ugly display in today’s Gospel. Last week, as you recall, after Peter confessed Jesus to be the Messiah, Jesus described to him and the apostles the type of Messiah he would be, that he would “suffer greatly, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days.” Today, as they were journeying from Caesarea Philippi in the north back to Galilee, Jesus returned to the theme. He stated, “The Son of Man is to be handed over to men and they will kill him, and three days after his death, the Son of Man will rise.” His upcoming betrayal, crucifixion and death were obviously very much on Jesus’ mind and he wanted it clearly on the apostles’ radar, too.Jesus was about to become the fulfillment of the prophecy of the Book of Wisdom from today’s first reading, when he, the Just One, would be beset and reviled because in his goodness he was obnoxious to the envious, because his very being reproached them for their transgressions of the law. Just as the Book of Wisdom foretold, he would be tortured and condemned to a shameful death, in fact, the most shameful death of all, crucifixion.
• We would have expected, when Jesus was talking about this to his twelve closest friends, his companions who had spent the previous two years doing everything with him, that they would have been concerned, and specifically concerned about him. Instead of asking him any questions, listening to him, or consoling him, they started, rather, arguing about which one of them was the greatest. This wasn’t an isolated incident, but a disturbing pattern. Whenever, in fact, Jesus spoke about his upcoming crucifixion, it seemed always to bring out the worst in the apostles.
  • As we saw last week, when Jesus told them about it for the first time, St. Peter, the newly named rock, took Jesus aside and tried to rebuke him. In St. Matthew’s recollection, he said to Jesus, “No such thing should ever happen to you!,” thereby earning for himself the worst name change in Biblical history, the name Satan, for trying to lead rather than to follow Jesus, for thinking not as God thinks but as human beings do, for essentially denying that suffering and death, even Jesus’, could be salvific.
  • Later, when Jesus would announce yet again that the chief priests and the scribes would condemn him to death, deliver him to the Gentiles to be mocked, spat upon, scourged and crucified, James and John, two of the three closest of the disciples, came up to him and immediately asked him to do whatever they asked. Then, without wasting any time, they told him what they wanted: to sit one on his right and the other on his left as he entered his kingdom. The other apostles were outraged at their chutzpah, not because of the way they were trying to use Jesus, not because they were tone deaf in bringing their petition to him when they did, but because they beat them to the request for the spots they all openly desired but didn’t have the temerity to request.
  • And perhaps the worst example occurred during the Last Supper. After Jesus indicated to them, “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me,” the apostles got into yet another dispute over which of them was the greatest. Rather than thinking about who would be the despicable traitor who would imminently sell Jesus out, they were more concerned to the point of argumentation about who among them would be numero uno. They did not recognize at the time that, because their flesh was weak, all of them would end up betraying Jesus within hours at his arrest in the Garden. They didn’t recognize that they were already betraying him during the Last Supper.
• To get a sense of the ugliness of the apostles’ egocentric jockeying for position, imagine that a father came to his children and told them that the doctor had just given him two weeks to live and, instead of consoling him, instead of even showing that he cared about him and would be sad to see him die, they immediately shifted the attention to who would get the house, the car and the investments. That’s what was happening in these scenes. It’s significant that the apostles only began to argue about which one of them was the greatest after Jesus predicted his betrayal, suffering and death. It suggests that, as soon as they heard Jesus’ words about his death, their minds and hearts turned immediately to which one of them would be in charge after he was gone. It’s ridiculous, sad and disgusting.
• These were all examples of what St. James would describe in today’s second reading as “jealousy and selfish ambition,” flowing from “coveting” and “envy” that leads us obsessively to “ask wrongly” in order to satisfy our “passions.” The apostles were seeking their own interests, not those of the Lord. They were using him, not loving him. Selfish ambition, jealousy, envy, coveting, the apostle says, can totally corrupt not only our relationship with others, leading as St. James indicates, leading to all types of “conflicts,” “fights” and even on a global scale “war,” but it can also corrupt our relationship with God, in which God doesn’t even hear our prayers because we’re asking for things according to our worldly “passions,” begging God to satisfy our desires for pleasure, power, possessions and honor, rather than to hallow his name, his kingdom to come and his will be done. What happened with the apostles, and what was happening among the first Christians to whom St. James was writing, is a perennial warning to the Church, to the disciples of every age, to us at Columbia, today. Just as he did for the apostles, Jesus has told us over and again that he will be betrayed, mocked, tortured, and ignominiously crucified and on the third day raised. It’s no longer a foretelling but a fact. If it were ugly for them to elbow each other for worldly advancement, ignoring the reality and meaning of Jesus’ upcoming passion, death and resurrection, how much uglier is it for us now to remain only at the level of worldly desires. The Son of God became man was crucified not so that we might ambitiously seek the things of this world like everyone else does. He died and rose so that we might live a new life, in the world but not of it, seeking first the kingdom of God and God’s holiness, recognizing that everything else of true value will be given us besides. He was murdered on Golgotha and rose not so that we could be mediocre in faith and in life, but so that we could be great.
• It’s important to remember that Jesus never tried to eliminate his followers’ ambition as if all ambitious is selfish and jealous. Rather, he sought to purify their worldly ambition and direct it toward true greatness. There’s a huge difference between a passion for self-aggrandizement and a holy zeal for the things of God and his kingdom. Saint Paul told us in his First Letter to the Corinthians, which we heard at daily Mass on Wednesday, “Strive eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts,” and said that those supreme endowments are not things like prophetic words, faith to move mountains, or heroic feats of enduring suffering; they are faith, hope and especially a charity that is patient, kind, not arrogant or rude. The patron saint of conversion from worldly ambition to holy ambition, in my opinion, ought to be Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. Prior to the Battle of Pamplona in 1521, when he had his leg shattered by a cannon ball, he vainly sought worldly honor on the battlefield and in the royal courts. After convalescing for many months, studying the life of Christ and reading the lives of many saints, he recognized the vanity of his previous pursuits and was filled with a sacred ambition and asked, “Why can’t I do what” Saint Dominic and Saint Francis have done? He became, instead, ambitious to do everything for God’s greater glory. We don’t have to wait for a cannon ball to strike to experience the same conversion.
• In today’s Gospel, Jesus told the apostles that the path of holy ambition was that of cruciform self-giving: “If anyone wishes to be first,” he stated, “he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” To be great we must excel in loving service. To illustrate exactly the type of selfless service he was describing, lest we interpret it according to our comforts, he took a child and said, “Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me.” An infant is someone who cannot reward us, or even thank us, for changing his diapers, or feeding or clothing her. A baby will not even remember later the sacrifices we’ve made. We cannot engage with an infant in a quid pro quo. While it’s true that whenever we love, we receive more than we give, and that those who love children receive so many blessings in return, Jesus’ point is that we need to love those who cannot reward us. That’s the type of service we’re called to give. That’s the kind of ambition to which we’re supposed to aspire. An ambition not for the first place in the eyes of the world but the first place in the eyes of God, one in which we’re not just not envious of others’ success but out of love try to help others succeed.
• There’s a second way that the evil one tries to disfigure the image of God in us and the divine call to live up to the greatness of our image. He doesn’t just try to pervert it to selfish and worldly ends, but he also tries to extinguish it, normally through the vice of sloth or acedia, whereby little by little we lose all ambition good and bad, natural and supernatural, until we basically begin to waste our life away with no goals at all. Some stay in their bedrooms playing videogames or scrolling through social media, or smoke one joint after another, or hope to just live off parents or others with no desire to get a job or make a useful contribution. Their parents, grandparents, siblings and true friends all just want them to find something, almost anything, for which they’ll leave the darkness of the cave for the light shining in the world. But sometime the evil one can try to extinguish ambition by convincing people that it’s a bad thing, a selfish thing, even sinful. We see this sometimes in the Church when people begin to regard all ambition as a failure in humility. In religious communities, people with particular talents who would like to use them for the Church are treated as if they are proud or seeking to be singular. I once had a bishop who thought that my hard work and zeal to spread the faith were basically just selfish ambition and made me a bad priest.
• Jesus, however, routinely returned to greatness and described the characteristics of genuine Christian greatness. It’s clear that he wants to be truly ambitious for the things of God, to strive eagerly after the greatest spiritual gifts. Jesus mentions in the Gospels the path to greatness four different times. Let’s examine briefly these four complementary paths so that we might become great according to Jesus’ categories.
  • First, Jesus wants us to be great in faith. He praised the Syro-Phoenician mother and the Roman Centurion for their great faith and longed that all in Israel would emulate it. All the more, he wants us, his Christian followers, to have great faith, to be great in believing in him and what he says and does, great in entrusting our whole existence to him.
  • Second, Jesus wants us to be great in humility. In response to the disciples’ question, “Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven?,” Jesus called a child over and said, “Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.” To be “great in humility,” though paradoxical, is not contradictory. Just as a child is totally dependent on his or her parents, so Jesus wants us to become great in our filial dependence. The temptation is for us to think we don’t need God, that we’re self-sufficient. The chief sin of the prodigal son in Jesus’ famous parable was to treat the Father as if he were superfluous, or even as if he were already dead, so that he might get the inheritance immediately. The son forgot that a far more important treasure than half the father’s wealth was a relationship with him. Jesus indicates for us that the path to greatness is to become great in recognizing our need for, and receiving with gratitude, all God our Father wants to give. This is a greatness in humility we see in our Lady, who in her Magnificat, praised God for looking upon the “humility of his maidservant” while grasping, simultaneously, that “all generations will call me blessed.” Her soul, spirit and whole life were capable of magnifying and rejoicing in God precisely because of her humility. God wants us to be great in the same way.
  • Third, Jesus wants us to be ambitious in our total imitation of his self-sacrificial love. “Whoever would be first among you must be the servant of all,” he tells us today. He wants us to be the first to serve, the first to volunteer, the first to help when needed. Later on in St. Mark’s Gospel he spoke directly of the contrast between earthly and worldly ambition when he said, “You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk 10:43-45). He wants us to be ambitious to serve others not to be served by them, even to the point of giving our life to rescue them. After he washed the feet of the apostles during the Last Supper, he said: “I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master; nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them” (Jn 13). We have so many opportunities to become great through unselfish charity in this way. Jesus wants us to seize them. We’ll hear at the end of Mass about some of these opportunities to become great in this way.
  • Lastly, Jesus wants us to be great in living by his truths and passing them on to others. He tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, “Whoever keeps these commandments and teaches others to do so will be called great in the Kingdom of heaven.” Jesus wants us to excel by living the faith and sharing it by our example and by our words. We think of great missionaries like Saint Paul, the North American Martyrs, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, and others. We think about religious sisters and brothers who taught so selflessly generations of Catholic school students instilling within them the knowledge and love of God. We think about so many catechists who patiently pass on the faith to children, teens and adults. We think about parents, grandparents and godparents, who make it their priority to pass on the faith. We think about truly apostolic friends who seek to share with those they care about the faith they care about the most. Jesus wants his disciples to become great apostles, great missionaries, great friends, great priests and religious and great parents, by excelling in sharing our faith and inviting others to treasure it and come to true and lasting greatness by means of it.
• The great way we recalibrate our ambitions is to live a truly Eucharist life. In the Holy Eucharist, Jesus goes beyond what he did on Calvary. He humbles himself so much as to become our very spiritual nourishment, seeking to transform us on the inside so that with him, we may give our body and blood, our sweat and tears, all we are and have out of love for God the Father and for others. When we seek what Jesus teaches and gives us each day in the Eucharist, when we receive him as he deserves and desires, God can make us great not at others’ expense but precisely through our lovingly lifting them up. The Eucharist is where we learn to receive Jesus with love and in receiving him to recognize and receive him in children and everyone else whom he sends us. This Sacrament of Love teaches us how to love. And so, as we prepare to receive the fruits of Jesus’ betrayal, suffering, death and resurrection, let us ask our Eucharistic Lord for the grace to convert all our ambitions into holy ones, to fill us with a hunger for what really matters and to give us the help he knows to act on that holy ambition for the greatest spiritual gifts and with him change the world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1

Responsorial Psalm

Reading 2

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