Sunday of the Twenty-third Week of the Year, C -- September 5, 2004

    Just the other day, I read a news article about a Fr. Frank, an older Jesuit priest, who was saying that the Church is out of touch with the 21st Century. This is true, the good father expounded, especially in the area of morality. After all, a lot of people are leaving the Church these days for any number of reasons, but many are leaving, this priest clearly implies, because the Church will not change her moral teaching. Modern people, especially young people, Fr. Frank tells us, are just not interested. Fine, I say. Then let them follow their interests. And years from now, after following these interests, perhaps they will again turn to the Church who will still be here to help them pick up the pieces of their very sad lives. Meanwhile in stark contrast to such priests as Fr. Frank, we have, of all people, Jesus Christ. Yeah, He was a real crowd pleaser, always eager to accommodate His teaching to attract the largest number of followers as possible, always eager to be in touch with the times, earnestly desiring to be up-to-date and entertaining. Like in today’s Gospel reading, where Jesus is being followed by a big crowd of people, and then, all of a sudden, as the Gospel hints, He wheels about to face His would-be followers: “If anyone comes to me without turning his back on his father and mother, his wife and his children, his brothers and sisters, indeed his very self, he cannot be my follower. Anyone who does not take up his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”
    Obviously our Lord was just not at all interested in numbers, in keeping the crowds around Him by accommodating His views to theirs. But He is interested, desperately interested, in each human soul before Him, in seeing that person transformed into His genuine disciple, transformed, then, into His likeness by following Him. It was as if our Lord were saying to those there with Him in today’s Gospel, “You are following me, but you do not know where I am going. Yes, I am on my way to Jerusalem, the Holy City, but not to sit in the seat of power. I go there not to climb the stairs of the palace but the hill of Calvary. I make my way to Jerusalem not to claim anything for myself, but to renounce myself, to renounce myself and give myself to God the Father, to renounce myself so utterly and fully that it can only be accomplished by offering up my life, by pouring out my own life. Do you go with me now? Have you counted the cost?”
    In a sense we can look at our Savior’s life (and His death and resurrection) as one repeated reversal, the reversal of all that Adam and Eve had done. After they had sinned, Adam and Eve blamed others for their fall; Jesus willingly bore the blame of others. Adam reached for and grasped the forbidden fruit; Jesus, when tempted in the same manner, turned his back on it. Adam and Eve, mere creatures, said, “I will be as god”; Jesus, God Himself come in human flesh, emptied Himself of all the prerogatives of divinity. Adam exalted himself; Christ humbled Himself. Adam, a mere mortal, vainly sought to live forever as divine; Jesus, though in personhood divine, chose to die as a man. Everything that Adam would claim for himself, Jesus Christ would renounce. Adam claimed that which was not his and lost so much; our Lord, as the New Adam, renounced all for our sake and gained everything. The Resurrection is proof of that.
    So what are we to renounce? Amazingly, only that which is not ours. And that, my dear brothers and sisters, is everything, including our very selves! We are not our own. There’s the struggle, there’s where we have to count the cost, there’s where we pick up the cross, the instrument of our liberation; for only in renouncing ourselves, letting go of what is not ours, only in that is the struggle then over, the crucifixion finished, having done its work.
    Oh how the modern age rails against all this! For today’s forbidden fruit, all dressed up so convincingly as new and promising, is the same as in the Garden of Eden -- that false claim that would have me believe that I am my own; that satanic deceit that would tell me that every claim made upon me is prison for me; that lie that freedom is autonomy, no strings attached, especially not strings of accountability to God. I AM GOD, this false claim would say, not a creature. Such a nightmare of delusion is all that Christ is demanding that we renounce in order to follow Him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.
    For there is no freedom like the freedom of living in reality, living without delusion. We -- our whole universe -- our very existence is pure gift, kept in being by a lavish maintenance of love, redeemed by God’s own free action in Christ and promised a new life in this world and in eternity, the glory of which can only be hinted at in the greatest of art, music and poetry. And we dare claim autonomy?
    So we are asked to renounce a lie, a bad dream, a perversion. And yet how difficult it is! Perhaps looking at it openly in the light of the Gospel helps us to edge our way up to the cross. But how difficult to give up that forbidden fruit. That’s why the choice -- after counting the cost -- the choice of following Christ is -- and can only be described as -- a kind of death. Death to what can never be: a mere creature living, truly and really living, without his or her Creator.
    And yet the fruit is dangled before us constantly, the lie made so convincing, making the death we must undergo all the more difficult. Until, until we remind ourselves that the great and eternal, the infinite giving-over, the divine renunciation has already been accomplished. “It is finished,” were Jesus’ last words on the Cross of Calvary: not just His physical life, but His mission, the work the Father had given Him to do, that reversal of Adam’s folly. “It is finished,” now and for all time. Accomplished is that divine renunciation that makes ours even possible.
    The Second Vatican Council called for a more active participation of the faithful in the celebration of the Holy Mass: well, here it is. For the Mass takes its whole meaning from that divine self-giving at Calvary; the Mass is that self-giving of God renewed through all ages in the Eucharist. And you are to join your self-renunciation, your offering up of yourselves and all that you have, even as the priest offers the body and blood of the Lord. That’s the participation called for by the Council, an intelligent, free and joyful, giving of oneself over to God, even as God renews His self-giving to us in the Eucharist.
    But I’m afraid. Yes, it is a fearful thought, to contemplate such a radical action. We ask ourselves what’s on the other side of such a renunciation? Everything that Adam lost by grasping, everything that the human race has always longed for in the depths of our hearts, all that can really give lasting happiness, what can best be described as the Resurrection of Christ from the dead. For the renunciation we are asked to make and renew each day has an empty tomb in its wake and freedom beyond it in this life and finally the glory of eternal life as its fruit.