Seeking with Christ the Things That Are Above, 23rd Wednesday (I), September 11, 2019

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

• Throughout his Letter to the Colossians, St. Paul is confronting the Gnostic heresy that was undermining the true faith. Up until now he has charted out for them the path to make up in their flesh what is lacking in Christ’s sufferings, to experience the mystery of Christ in them, to walk in him, to be firmly rooted, built upon, and firm in faith in Christ. Today he advances the argument. The gnostics were dualists who believed that spirit was good and matter evil and so they had one of two attitudes toward the body. In some places, they tried to escape from the body through fasting and other ascetical practices; in other places, either because they didn’t think what they did in the body mattered or because they thought it was already evil, they just gave in to indulgence in food and wine, in sex and in other pleasures. St. Paul is addressing the second group today. It’s a passage we hear every Easter Sunday morning, “If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.” We have been raised with Christ, he communicates, through Baptism and that reality must be consequential in what we think about, what we choose, what we do. Our heart should be where our treasure is, and if our treasure is in God, that our heart should be seeking to hallow his name, to enter and advance his kingdom, to do his will. He reminds them of what happened in baptism as they were took off their clothes, were baptized, and the vested with a white garment symbolic of Christ’s virtues: “You have taken off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed, for knowledge, in the image of its creator.” They have put on the mind of Christ and are called to seek him. This is the path to life, to living “hidden with Christ,” to having Christ be “all in all,” even if the world doesn’t recognize it. But the resurrection that comes with living with the Risen Christ is preceded by both his death on Calvary and ours in daily life. It involves death to the old Adam in us, to the way we “once conducted” themselves. That’s why he says that in saying yes to God we’re saying no to other gods. “Put to death, then,” he says, “the parts of you that are earthly: immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and the greed that is idolatry. You must put them all away: anger, fury, malice, slander, and obscene language, … lying.” This is the choice a Christian makes. To die with Christ so as to live with him. This is the way Christ becomes our life. This is the means by which we are raised up to live hidden with Christ in God.
• To seek the things that are above, to ponder them and live them, is to treasure what Christ treasures, to yearn for his wisdom and to live by it. In today’s Gospel, Jesus reveals to us what is truly valuable — and it’s something contradictory to worldly standards. He gives us in the Sermon on the Plain a different version of the Beatitudes, which are a snap shot of his face. He tells us we’re blessed when, like him, we’re spiritually poor and find in God our true wealth; when we hunger, recognizing that material hunger helps to make us more dependent on and grateful for God’s providence in giving us each day our daily bread; when we weep in sorrow and reparation for our and others’ refusal to accept God and order our lives to him; when we’re hated, excluded, insulted and persecuted like Christ and the prophets, because that whole experience will help us to learn how to seek to please God rather than men. He tells us that we’re in danger when we think the real blessings are riches, food, gaiety, popularity, because those can often anesthetize us to living hidden with Christ in God, they can in fact become gods. To seek the things of God is to seek to live by the beatitudes just like Christ did. The beatitudes are perhaps the greatest expression of the contrast between thinking like God and about the things of God, and thinking like the world and about the things of the world.
• Because as Christians we seek the things that are above, because we strive after a happiness the world can’t give or rob, because we recognize that God does bless us through poverty, hunger, tears and persecution, we look at every earthly reality with a different perspective from those who are worldly. That impacts the way we look at the anniversary today of 9/11. How much evil was done 18 years ago, spawned by the hatred that would lead some to take the lives of 3,000 innocent people! But at the same time, we know that God seeks to draw good out of evil, and he drew so much good in the heroism of those who risked or gave their lives to try to save others’, in the care given by so many who waited for hours to give blood, in the prayers, care and concern extended to the families of those who died, and in many other ways. Blessed are those who weep and mourn, Jesus says, because they will be consoled. We pray in a special way that that consolation will be deepened today. We also pray that people will seek the things that are above, where we pray those killed 18 years ago today are hidden with Christ in God, that they may recognize that Christ brings good out of suffering and persecution, and seeks to help us find true wealth in him and definitive satiation at the eternal wedding banquet. And we pray for the conversion of terrorists whose hearts are focused on destruction and on so many of the vices St. Paul describes today.
• “If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above.” At every Mass, in the Preface dialogue, the priest says, “Sursum Corda” and the people reply, “Habemus ad Dominum.” “Hearts above!” and “We have [lifted them up] to the Lord. The Mass is the daily gift God gives us to help us to lift up our minds and hearts to Him, to fill us with his words, to reward our hungers, to receive our tears and console us, to meet us in our poverty needing him, and to strengthen us to remain united with him, hidden in him as he hides himself Eucharistically within us, even if and especially when we have to suffer for and with him. Here he wants to strengthen us so that through seeking the things that are above, we may come with him to live in that place that is above!