Humbled Exalted, Exalted Humbled

October 28, 2007

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

by Rev. Joe McCloskey, S.J.

The prayer of the lowly pierces the clouds; it does not rest till it reaches its goal, nor will it withdraw till the Most High responds, judges justly and affirms the right. God indeed will not delay. Sirach 35:17-19

But the tax collector stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven but beat his breast and prayed, 'O God, be merciful to me a sinner.' Luke 18:13

Piety

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory,
my understanding, and my entire will.
All I have and call my own.
Whatever I have or hold, you have given me.
I return it all to you and surrender it wholly
to be governed by your will.
Give me only your love and your grace
and I am rich enough and ask for nothing more.

St. Ignatius, from the end of the Spiritual Exercises

Study

http://www.usccb.org/nab/102807.shtml

We all have our moment of humility. What good can I possibly do against such widespread chaos? It is honest humility when we try to do the little we think we can do. Sometimes we are pushed beyond what is our self-perception. We find companions of our labor and with others it is possible to do more than what we could do if we only took the sum of the efforts of each individual. Where two or three together in the name of the Lord, the possibility of so much more is what birthed Religious Communities and secular communities too. The Lord promises his presence to those who gather in his name. For this it is important to discern what is to be done with others and to dream what otherwise might seem the impossible dream. We are called to go beyond ourselves.

How many times I have listened to people telling me that they do not deserve God’s love even when they realize that no one deserves God’s love. Justice gets confused with love. We deserve justice. No one can deserve love because it is always a gift beyond understanding or merits.

God is love and God forever loves. So the limit on God’s love is what we are willing to accept. And we can all too easily be scared by God’s love as if he was setting us up for something beyond our strength. To rely on God is to accept his love. The catch on God’s love is the Cross of Christ. John 3, 16 tells us that Christ’s cross is the greatest of all possible loves. It is something we could never have dreamt up. It is the inscrutable love of God that has its finest expression in our lives when we take up our crosses to follow Christ.

God’s love continues to be reflected in the Church by the unmerited sufferings of our lives that we accept in his name. We spend our lives discovering how what we put up with for the sake of those we love unites us to the suffering of Christ in a special way because we become more like Christ.

Action

So we go up to pray like the tax collector of our gospel of today. We ask God to be merciful to us sinners. God is calling us to face honestly all that is wrong with our world. Like Christ we must fill up what is wanting to the sufferings of Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church. We have the chance to live our lives with a world-wide meaning when we accept what is difficult in our lives for the sake of our world. Like Paul we must be poured out like a libation and finish the race we are in to share the love of God in all our environments. We are called to be updates of Christ by what we suffer for the sake of each other. That is the makeup of the great saints.