Christian Freedom

(13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

“For freedom Christ set us free; so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery,” writes St. Paul in the second reading today. The spiritual freedom we have in Christ is worth our reflection from time to time. On the one hand, freedom is one of the great gifts that we have in Christ, and one of the most important ways we recover—in Christ—the image and likeness of God in which we were created, and thus find our happiness and fulfillment. God, after all, is infinitely free, and by being free ourselves we imitate Him and share in His freedom. That’s why human beings always strive for freedom and why it makes us happy, because our hearts and minds are always reaching out for the ultimate, divine Love and Freedom of God. On the other hand, we always have to be on guard against the shallow and erroneous understandings of freedom that come from the world and from that mystery of human selfishness and frustration that Paul calls “the flesh.”

Some people think freedom is just being able to do whatever we please. Thomas Merton has a great line on this: “The mere ability to choose between good and evil is the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about it is the fact that we can still choose good.” (New Seeds of Contemplation, 27) Evil and sin make us unhappy by definition. So when I sin by deliberately choosing the bad, thereby making myself miserable—as well as all those who, by their immense charity, put up with me—I am exercising my unfreedom and my slavery to sin. The metaphor of exercise is pertinent, too, because our choices develop our habits and our habits determine what sort of person we become, whether better or worse each day. This is why it’s hard for the wisdom of this world to accept that real freedom is the ability to choose the good, not the false liberty of being able to do whatever we think we want.

This is also why, as St. Paul points out, spiritual freedom and love of neighbor go together. Forgetting about all of the nonsense fed to us by romantic comedies and the like, love is simply to desire the best for another, and to organize our behavior out of that desire. Love means making our life into a right effort for the good and flourishing of the people and earth around us. So, by loving our neighbor, we are seeking the good, and by learning to seek the good consistently we become free and happy. All of this we do in Christ; in fact, this is the very renovation of our humanity that we know as Christ’s Resurrection.

Lambs among Wolves

(14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

We continue today, friends, on the journey we began last week. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, and he sends his disciples ahead of him to proclaim the arrival of the kingdom of God. This is us, brothers and sisters! In our hearing of this gospel, we too are sent by the Lord to proclaim his kingdom to all who have ears to hear. This is our call, this is our vocation, and this is our God-given mission.

And as the Lord sends us out as the laborers for the great harvest of God’s kingdom, well, there’s good news…and there’s challenging news.

Let’s take the good news first. For one thing, this mission we have all received requires no more preparation or equipment than each of us already has. Jesus sends his disciples forth with nothing—no money, no bag. All they needed was the grace of God and the path that the Spirit of God would show them. And it’s the same with us. In order to follow the Lord we don’t need a degree, or an office, or a religious habit. All anyone needs is a little desire to be faithful to God. Nothing more. In fact, we are always sent with nothing so that we might possess God alone and depend only on him for everything we need. Rejoice then! You already have everything you need to live a life of perfect discipleship in Christ.

And God promises every good thing to those who follow him and let themselves be sent to proclaim his kingdom. As the prophet Isaiah proclaims in the first reading today, God “will spread prosperity over Jerusalem like a river, and the wealth of the nations like an overflowing torrent.” And this promise is ours as the heirs of all the promises God made to his people in the old covenant—as Paul says in the second reading today, we are the “Israel of God;” we who believe in Jesus as the Son of God are the New Jerusalem. And as we gather here as God’s people, as the “Israel of God” and as the New Jerusalem growing in the world, the prosperity of God’s grace flows over us in this Eucharist—the Precious Blood of Christ poured out in the new and eternal covenant.

So that’s the good news in our call to be disciples: we have all we need for the journey, and God will bless us abundantly in it. But there is also challenging news.

As Jesus himself admits in today’s gospel, sometimes people don’t want to hear our message. Sometimes we and our message of peace will not be received. And we all know this. The world around us, so driven by competition and greed, often does not want to hear the gospel. Dominated by the fear of terrorism and the crime of pre-emptive war, they don’t want to hear about the dignity of the human being. Committed to a culture of convenience and abortion, they don’t want to hear about the gospel of life that we Christians proclaim.

And we can all expect to experience difficulty, rejection, misunderstanding and all kinds of trouble as we fulfill our mission as disciples who proclaim the kingdom of God.

St. Paul was no stranger to this. In many places he catalogues the sufferings he endured for the sake of the Gospel: beatings, imprisonments, shipwrecks. And he points to what he endured in the second reading today when he says, “let no one make troubles for me, for I bear the marks of Jesus on my body.”

The word translated “marks” is stigmata. And we all know about the saints who had the stigmata like St. Francis or Padre Pio. They shared in the wounds of Christ. And yet Paul points out to us today that the sufferings he endured for the sake of Gospel mark him out as belonging to Jesus Christ.

And again, it is the same with us. Every suffering, every rejection, every misunderstanding that we suffer in our effort to follow the Lord and to proclaim his kingdom—these are all way in which we share in the very sufferings of Christ. In this Eucharist we receive the Body of Christ and we become what we receive. Our sufferings become his, and his become ours. Everything difficult we go through marks us for Jesus as our stigmata, our sharing in the sufferings of Christ. When we take up our cross, the Lord makes it his own.

And we know by faith that within the cross is the path to the new life of the Resurrection—a new heaven and new earth. Let us allow ourselves to be sent on our journey toward them today.