What It Takes to Follow and Proclaim Christ, 31st Wednesday (I), November 5, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Annual Retreat for the Priests of the Diocese of Charleston
Sand Dunes Resort, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
Wednesday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass for the Evangelization of Peoples
November 5, 2025
Rom 13:8-10, Ps 112, Lk 14:25-33

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• In yesterday’s Gospel, Jesus gave us a parable about the Church’s mission — to invite everyone to a great dinner, a joyous banquet — and likewise taught us how not to respond to that invitation. We saw that people excused themselves to care for their fields, oxen, and newly married wife, none of whom recognized the importance of the calling they were receiving.
• In today’s Gospel, Jesus doubled down on the point he was making in order that we grasp clearly the greatness of the call and the need to make decisive choices to put God in his proper place and order all other aspects of our life to him. This is stuff that every missionary to be effective must first grasp and live.
• Jesus does so in a dramatic way. St. Luke tells us that “great crowds” were traveling with him. He had fixed his face on Jerusalem (Lk 9:51) and was on a long way of the Cross; the multitudes, like the apostles, thought and hoped that they were on a triumphal procession for Jesus to be recognized as Messiah, to unite the people and to drive out the Romans. Jesus turned around to the crowds and didn’t say, “How nice of you to come!” Rather, out of love he challenged them — really challenged them out of love — to know what they were signing up so that they would be prepared to follow him all the way. He wanted them to count the cost of discipleship and be willing to pay it, knowing that to obtain the pearl of great price, to enter the banquet of the kingdom, wouldn’t come on the cheap. He tells us that to follow him as his disciple to salvation, we have to do three things:
  • First, we need to “hate” father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and  sisters. The Hebrew word for “hate” doesn’t mean “detest,” but rather “put in second place” or “knock down a peg.” Jesus, after all, calls us to honor our father and mother, not despise them. But we have to make sure that they don’t become gods in our life, that if there is ever a choice between what God is asking of us and what our family members are asking of us, that we say “God’s will be done” instead of “My loved one’s will be done.” And we need to remember that if we do “hate” them in this way, we actually will love them more because we will love them in God.
  • Second, Jesus says one needs to hate “even his own life,” “carry his own cross” and “follow” Him. We need to account Jesus’ life more valuable than our own, in imitation of him who deemed our life more valuable than His. This is the faith that led the martyrs to heaven. If we love our comforts, our life in this world more than we love God, then we won’t be completing the work of salvation because Jesus clearly taught us that to save our life we must lose it and that unless we fall to the ground and die like a grain of wheat we won’t bear the fruit of salvation.
  • Third, Jesus says one must “renounce all his possessions.” We must renounce the stuff that possesses us and then as good stewards use everything we have and are for God and his service, giving of ourselves together with our things for God and others, because if we cling to possessions we will not be able to fit through the eye of the needle to salvation.
• In buttressing the conditions of the completion of the work of our salvation, Jesus employs two analogies that point to the cost of discipleship. He says that to build a tower, we need to calculate the cost and get the proper supplies lest we not finish what we began. Likewise, to win a battle, we have to know whether we have the resources to defeat the enemy. In building the tower toward heaven, among the supplies we have to have is detachment from ourselves, our loved ones, our possessions and our life. In fighting against the twenty thousand troops of the evil one, we have to divest ourselves of whatever will hinder us in battle, whatever earthly desires the devil can use against us. We won’t be able to finish what’s been started unless we count and pay the cost, knowing that in the biggest picture of all, this is the wisest and greatest deal in life, the treasure worth more than everything else. We also need to know that Jesus never calls us to something — especially something this hard — without providing the means necessary to do it. His help, however, doesn’t eliminate our sacrifice, but it does make the sacrifice lighter and sweeter.
• Today in the first reading, St. Paul tells the first Roman Catholics and all of us about the cost that needs to be paid, about what we’re really signing up for if we follow Jesus. It’s a clear continuation of what we pondered yesterday in meditating on the 20 ways he described we needed to “let [our] love be sincere.” Today he says, “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another.” Not only is this a statement against amassing financial debt — words that are very important today in a culture that doesn’t save but charges beyond their means on credit cards, and borrows way beyond our means as a national government  — but it is a reminder for us that we do have a debt to love one another. Loving one another is not a good suggestion by Jesus. It’s not even just a command. It’s a debt to pay, it’s a real duty, it’s something we owe others. This might seem strange at first to think we owe everyone a debt of love, but when we take seriously Jesus’ words that whatever we do for the least of our brothers and sisters, we do to him (Mt 25:31-46), then it’s easier to understand, if still hard to do: because we owe a debt to Jesus for everything — for our life, our salvation, our gifts, etc. — we pay that debt in the way we love each other. St. Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, wrote in Love and Responsibility that the other is someone before whom the only worthy response is love. This debt is paid, first, in keeping the commandments. Today St. Paul lists the “second tablet” of the Decalogue, focused on love of neighbor, reminding us that the “one who loves one another has fulfilled the law” and “love is the fulfillment of the law.” Jesus said something similar in St. Matthew’s Gospel when he reminded us that all the law and the prophets, including obviously the Ten Commandments, hinges on the love of God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and the love of our neighbor as we love ourselves.
• How are we doing in paying that debt to everyone we meet? We often think that we are loving others by the simple fact that we wish them good things or don’t hate them, but love is a sacrifice of ourselves for the good of the other as other, and we need to ask ourselves whether, when we look at each other and at others in general, we find ourselves in a real debt of love for them that we feel impelled from within to pay. Just like St. Therese Lisieux, each of us is called to be love in the heart of the Church, to love others with the love with which Christ has loved us first, and to do this concretely. There are lots of ways that we could apply this to our lives, but I’d like to focus on three.
  • First, if we’re really loving others, do we ever tell them we love them? Jesus himself said to us during the Last Supper, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you,” and he wants us, having been loved by him, to say to others, “Just like Jesus loves me, I want to love you” and “I love you with the love of Jesus.”
  • Second, if we’re really loving others, we’ll be making willing sacrifices for them. Jesus’ love led him to lay down his life for us, and all love is a reflection of that basic nature of love, which is a willingness to say no to ourselves to say yes for another, to do all that we morally can for another. St. Paul is saying we have a debt that leads us to sacrifice for others.
  • Third, if we’re really loving others then, as St. Paul said yesterday, we’ll be doing so “with affection.” It’s not enough to sacrifice. God wants us to sacrifice from the heart, not just “paying a debt” that we owe to someone reluctantly, but with passion freely doing something for someone we either naturally or with effort want to treat with great warmth. God loves a cheerful giver, so he loves an affective lover, friend, Christian self-giver. I love the story of St. Therese’s treatment of the curmudgeonly old sister whom nobody really cared for, and how, through loving her with affection, she changed for the better in her relations with everyone. To me, it seems obviously that that old sister was just wanting for real human love, for friendship, for agape, for the love of Christ mediated through his Mystical Body. Everyone needs that. Our brother priests need it. Our faithful need it.
• We can and should, moreover, interpret this debt of love in a missionary key. If love of neighbor as ourself is the summary of the second tablet, if essentially the golden rule is the measure of our behavior, to do unto others what we would want our neighbors to do to us, would any of us, knowing what we know, experiencing the meaning of friendship with Christ, even want our neighbor to fail to share the faith with us?
• Pope Francis spoke about this in Evangelii Gaudium in what I think is one of its most powerful passages. He reminds us that the primary reason for evangelizing is the love and salvation of Jesus that we have received, urging us to greater love of him. “What kind of love would not feel the need to speak of the beloved, to point him out, to make him known?” Evangelization responds to that expectation. “We have a treasure of life and love that cannot deceive, and a message that cannot mislead or disappoint.” And therefore he says that our motivation flows from love and appreciation. He says, “We are convinced from personal experience that it is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known him, not the same thing to walk with him as to walk blindly, not the same thing to hear his word as not to know it, and not the same thing to contemplate him, to worship him, to find our peace in him, as not to. …We know well that with Jesus life becomes richer and that with him it is easier to find meaning in everything.  This is why we evangelize.” Just as we would never want someone to withhold the great gift of our faith from us — despite the loving challenges Jesus gives us in the Gospel — so we want to share that wealth, that love, that friendship with Jesus.
• To strengthen us to love by his standard, Christ himself comes as Love incarnate to make his abode in us and help us from the inside. This is where we get the resources to build the tower and win the war. This is where we unite with him in praying for all our family members, where we bring our crosses and receive his strength to yoke ourselves to him by means of them, to die to ourselves so that he may live, and to detach ourselves from worldly goods to find in him our treasure. In the Psalm we prayed, “Blessed the man who is gracious,” who “lavishly he gives to the poor.” Jesus graciously and lavishly gives himself to us each morning in our poverty. He says by this gift “I love you” with all I am and have, and then he sends us forward as missionaries to love not just like that but together with him.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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