Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
By Rev. Joe McCloskey, S.J.
“…[W]hat is within our grasp we find with difficulty; but when things are in heaven, who can search them out? Or who ever knew your counsel, except you had given Wisdom and sent your holy spirit from on high?” Wisdom 9:16-17
I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that the good you do might not be forced but voluntary. Philemon 14
Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. Luke 14:27
Fill us at daybreak with your love, that all our days we may sing for joy. Make us glad as many days as you humbled us, for as many years as we have seen trouble. Show your deeds to your servants, your glory to their children. May the favor of the Lord our God be ours. Prosper the work of our hands! Prosper the work of our hands! (Psalm 90:14-17)
Studyhttp://www.usccb.org/nab/090907.shtml
Our piety stands out in the fullness of God’s plans for us accepted and lived out in the way we embrace the crosses of our lives. When all is going well, most of us hardly notice God in our lives. Consolations are the gifts of God accepted and enjoyed all too often without reference of them to the giver of the gifts. Who can figure what the plans of the Lord are for us. It is easy to say that God picked the world where we would make the choices we do in our freedom. What gives us pleasure is all too easy to choose. Common sense keeps us as far away from difficulties as we can be. Wisdom in our choices of life is what the Holy Spirit brings us. Our path of life needs to belong to God’s plans for us. Turning our gifts of life back to God is the living of Wisdom.
Paul, a prisoner for Christ, gives us a wonderful example of how to surrender what gives us pleasure for the sake of others. Paul does not hold unto the services of Onesimus, whose father he had become in his imprisonment. He wanted the good his friend was doing for him to be voluntary. The challenge of our study of our lives and what we should be doing is to uncover the plan of God for ourselves. God’s love for us makes our choices free. God does not ask anything of us more than our love. God teaches us through the life of his son to live our lives for the sake of others. Selfishness is replaced by selflessness when we companion Christ in our lives.
Action
The great actions of our lives shine out in the way we renounce all our possessions. Our gospel of today challenges us to love God more than the people who are most important to us in life. Jesus says it starkly; “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” We are called by God to make Christ more important to ourselves than any person or thing. We are called to take up our crosses and follow Christ. The big question of the spiritual journey is whether there is anyone or anything I am not willing to give up for the sake of following Christ more closely.
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