Set Free To Obey God with Love, Thirteenth Sunday (C), June 30, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Annunciation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Suffern, NY
Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
June 30, 2019
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 following text guided today’s homily: 

The Purpose of our Freedom

Yesterday we finished Religious Freedom Week in the Catholic Church in the United States praying for not only the protection of the right to religious freedom but also that all citizens will exercise that right and love and serve God in public and private. We are also preparing in the United States to celebrate Independence Day in four days, which is perhaps our country’s greatest national holiday, and an opportunity for us to focus on the meaning of freedom and to recognize what is required to remain free. That’s why it’s so providential that today, between both occasions, we are able to ponder freedom far more deeply with the help of today’s readings.

“For freedom, Christ has set us free,” St. Paul tells us today 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 a baby, by his teaching, by the sacraments he instituted, by 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.” He has liberated us in order that we may truly be free, but such freedom is not a given. That’s why St. Paul tells us, “So stand firm [in freedom] and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.” He 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 rather than to return to the slavery of sin.

The responsibility to stay free

About a decade 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 choose or 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.

The truth and love and Spirit necessary

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, 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.

St. 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 slaves. Some many in our culture are sadly confused about this. Some, we know, clamor that in the name of freedom, parents must have the ability to choose to end the lives of their own little children in the womb through abortion. Others say freedom means the ability to smoke as much marijuana as they want, or to be able to turn their back on their loved ones — their parents, their children, their spouses — or on immigrants, the poor and those in need. Other’s think it’s the ability to define themselves anyway they want — today I’m a man, tomorrow woman, today I’m white, tomorrow I’m black, no matter what the truth of one’s biology attests — as we’ve been seeing happen in our culture in which many are preferring to live in a make-believe unreality in which no one’s feelings are hurt rather than help people live in the truth. What so many fail to see is that such behavior contrary to the truth about things in one way or another enslaves them rather than liberates them and makes them happy. As St. Paul reminds us today, 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.

The intersecting mystery of freedom and obedience

In proclaiming this Gospel, priests and religious have a special responsibility. Priests promise respect and obedience to their bishop and his successors and freely make a gift of their freedom, paradoxically becoming more, not less, free interiorly through the obedience to God they give through their ordinary by entering into Christ’s priestly obedience to the Father. Consecrated religious similarly give this prophetic witness of true freedom. In Vita Consecrata, his beautiful 1996 exhortation on the consecrated life, St. John Paul II emphasized that through obedience women religious become conjugally united to Christ the Bridegroom in his obedience. “By accepting,” he writes, “through the sacrifice of their own freedom, the mystery of Christ’s filial obedience, they profess that he is infinitely beloved and loving, as the One who delights only in the will of the Father (cf. Jn 4:34), to whom he is perfectly united and on whom he depends for everything” (16). John Paul II stresses that obedience to God is “the source of true freedom” that allows us to become “progressively conformed to Christ, … learn detachment from externals, from the tumult of the senses, from all that keeps man from that freedom which allows him to be grasped by the Spirit.” (36) He says that the interior obedience of religious is a remedy for the false sense of freedom to do evil and the idolatry of exaggerated autonomy that create so much division in the world. “The obedience that marks the consecrated life,” he says, is “an especially vigorous way … reproposes the obedience of Christ to the Father and, taking this mystery as its point of departure, testifies that there is no contradiction between obedience and freedom. Indeed, the Son’s attitude discloses the mystery of human freedom as the path of obedience to the Father’s will, and the mystery of obedience as the path to the gradual conquest of true freedom. It is precisely this mystery that consecrated persons wish to acknowledge by this particular vow. By obedience they intend to show their awareness of being children of the Father, as a result of which they wish to take the Father’s will as their daily bread (cf. Jn 4:34), as their rock, their joy, their shield and their fortress (cf. Ps 18:2). Thus they show that they are growing in the full truth about themselves, remaining in touch with the source of their existence and therefore offering this most consoling message: ‘The lovers of your law have great peace; they never stumble’” (Ps 118:165).There’s much he says there, but I’ll highlight two things. First that freedom and obedience are correlative mysteries, that freedom is geared toward loving obedience of the Father, and obedience is the path to overcome slavery to ourselves and becoming truly free. The second point is that the way these two mysteries converge to set us free is through divine filiation, knowing that we are much loved sons and daughters of God who seek to respond to him with love, desiring and doing what pleases him.

Freedom to follow Christ generously, promptly and decisively

In the Gospel today, we see three scenes that help to illustrate what true freedom is and what it is for. These were people who wanted to follow Jesus, who wanted to respond to his perpetual summons to “come, follow me,” 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 person told Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go,” but Jesus wanted him to be clear about the cost of discipleship: “Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Jesus was saying that anyone who 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.

Next Jesus explicitly called a man to follow him but the person replied, “Let me first go and bury my father.” It’s important to note that there’s no indication that his father was dead or even about to die. What is more likely is that the man was a first-born son who in Jewish culture would be the one responsible for caring for his father in old age. Therefore, what this man was basically saying was, “Jesus, my father is more important than you and I’ll come to follow you in ten, twenty, thirty or more years when my father is no longer here.” Jesus’ reply, “Let the dead bury the dead” is an indication that anyone who doesn’t have God in the center is to some degree already dead and that to have life, we need to make the choice to follow Him who is the Way, Truth and Life. Jesus wasn’t telling this man to break the fourth commandment to honor his father and mother, but to keep the First Commandment — to love God above every other love — in order better to keep the Fourth.

A third person told the Lord that he would follow him, but he first wanted to say goodbye to everyone. 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. That’s why Jesus gave him, and us, a crucially important principle: “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.” Jesus was calling him and all of us to set our hand to the plow and to look at what we’re gaining rather than what we’re giving up, 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.

Pope Francis earlier today in St. Peter’s Square pondered these three episodes. “Jesus’ decision is radical and total, and those that follow Him are called to measure themselves against it The evangelist presents three personages to us today — three cases of vocation, we could say — which bring to light what is required of one who wants to follow Jesus to the end — totally. The first personage promises Him: ‘I will follow you wherever you go’ (v. 57). He is generous! However, Jesus answers that, unlike the foxes that have holes, and the birds that have nests, ‘the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’ (v. 58) — Jesus’ absolute poverty.  Jesus, in fact, has left the paternal home and given up every security to proclaim the Kingdom of God to the lost sheep of His people. So Jesus has shown us, His disciples, that our mission in the world cannot be static but itinerant. … The second personage that Jesus encounters receives the call directly from Him, but he answers: ‘Lord, let me first go and bury my father’ (v. 59). It’s a legitimate request, based on the Commandment to honor one’s father and mother (Cf. Exodus 20:12). However, Jesus replies: ‘Leave the dead to bury their own dead’ (v. 60). With these words, willingly provocative, He intends to affirm the primacy of the following and of the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, even over the most important realities, such as the family. The urgency to communicate the Gospel, which breaks the chain of death and inaugurates eternal life, doesn’t admit delays but calls for promptness and availability.… The third personage also wants to follow Jesus but he has a condition: he will do so after having gone to take leave of his parents. And he hears the Master say to him: ‘No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God’ (v. 62). The following of Jesus excludes regrets and looking back, but requires the virtue of decision. To follow Jesus, the Church is itinerant, she acts immediately, in a hurry and resolute. The value of these conditions set by Jesus — itinerancy, promptness, and decision — doesn’t lie in a series of “no’s” said to good and important things of life. Rather, the accent is put on the main objective: to become a disciple of Christ! A free and conscious choice made out of love, to return God’s inestimable grace.”

Today Christ looks on us with love and calls us to follow him and 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 sin and death. Rather than gratifying the desires of the flesh, we come near to be nourished by Jesus’ flesh and blood, which strengthen us to make a total commitment to him who here gives himself totally to us. As Jesus calls us anew to follow him now, let’s do so with free, committed, total love and cheerfulness. Doing so is the most important decision we’ll ever make and the path to solidify, secure and expand our freedom.

The readings for today’s Mass were: