24th Sunday Year B - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2009

When I hear Jesus in today's Gospel say, if any want to be disciples of mine, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me, my first reaction is to feel awkward, vulnerable, perhaps, even, ashamed.

I don't have a cross. My life is a song.  I see pictures, and hear stories, of the poverty and the oppression of so many people in other countries and I have it so easy.  I know that there are so many people closer to home, here in Australia, who suffer - victims of violence in their own families, kids unfairly picked on in schools, partners suffering the heart-break of broken or breaking marriages, people of homosexual orientation made fun of, judged, picked on, sometimes beaten up.

I have it so easy.  Not that there haven't been disappointments over the years, but Take up my cross! Where is it? And there have been on-going struggles – the kind of things Jesus was referring to when he said, for those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the Gospel, will find it.

At the time that Mark was writing his Gospel, Jesus' comment was for some literally true.  That's hardly the case for us but the call to be disciples consistently, thoroughly, can mean a metaphorical dying to self.

Accepting the call to be disciple involves openness to loving our enemies, loving our neighbour, even simply loving each other. Jesus was talking about genuine loving, of course - not just getting on with, or avoiding or ignoring people.  Perhaps, most of us would claim we have no enemies - but we all have people we don't agree with, we feel awkward with, who annoy us, who think and behave differently, who vote differently, who have a different sense of what the Church should be like. We can try to let ourselves off the hook by saying, “There is a difference between loving and liking.”

Where does Jesus stand with that? How would you feel if he said that he loved you, but no way did he like you? Then there are those who have hurt us deeply, deliberately. Genuinely to love these people can be simply beyond us. But it's not beyond God and us. God can free us up to do what we can't do by ourselves.

Jesus can, and wants to, share with us his freedom to love anyone, to forgive anyone, even to like them. He does it by loving us – because his love (perhaps anyone's love), once genuinely believed and accepted, changes us. His love achieves what our will-power can't.

I believe that the desire and the capacity to love others begins by letting God love us – unconditionally. It sounds simple. We probably want it. But we rarely let it happen.  We shall know we are getting somewhere when we notice ourselves not condemning ourselves so spontaneously as we learn simply to notice what we are up to, and then gently begin in smile at ourselves – as we do with those whom we truly love.

Once that begins, we shall probably also notice something similar happening in the way we start to relate to everyone.