The 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 20, 2015

Click here to listen to this homily (mp3 file)

     We are in the middle of a seemingly endless lead-up to another presidential election. There are almost enough candidates between the two parties to field a couple of football teams, each candidate making claims, counterclaims and promises that few believe will ever come true. In the midst of all this, it’s refreshing to hear the kind of straight talk and unvarnished truth-telling that we get from Jesus in today’s gospel.

     We got it last Sunday, too, when Jesus first spoke to his disciples about his impending suffering and death.  Peter didn’t like what he heard, but Jesus didn’t on that account back down or soften his message. On the contrary, he put Peter and his disciples on notice that not only would he suffer and die but that they, too, if they wanted to be his followers, would have to take up their own crosses and follow.

     Jesus reinforces the message about suffering in today’s gospel.  The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands,” he says, “and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.”

     Any way you look at it, Jesus was not running for public office!  Jesus was on a mission – a mission to preach the good news of God’s kingdom. But that news didn’t always sound so good.  It included serious challenges that many didn’t want to hear, challenges many rejected because the idea of a kingdom involving anything other than power and prestige, grandeur and glory, made absolutely no sense.

     But we get all this.  We know that the kingdom Jesus came to preach and bring about was about service, not sovereignty. Even so, we forget. Like the disciples in today’s gospel who fell into petty arguments about who among them was the greatest, or like the community St. James addressed in his Letter which was the second reading, we can find ourselves playing power games – jockeying for position, getting ahead by putting others down, toying with the truth for personal gain. Is it any wonder that this pattern in our personal lives ends up becoming the pattern in the public square, too?  The tone and the content of current electoral politics are a good case in point, but they’re certainly not the only one.

     Of course, we can find all this in the Church, too, when  ambition takes over, or when people with power and position act more like powerbrokers than pastors, ruling by decree with no room for dialogue or discernment.  What a welcome contrast to all that is Pope Francis, whose presence in our country this coming week will be a refreshing reminder of what true leadership looks like. In so many ways, Pope Francis is the living embodiment of the servant leadership of Jesus who didn’t just talk about being “the last of all and the servant of all” but who actually became the last of all and the servant of all!

     When you think of it, it makes sense, doesn’t it, that our world, so starved for models of good, honest, credible, and inspiring leadership is actually paying attention to Pope Francis?  Not everyone in our world, of course – not even everyone in our Church – but any way you look at it, Pope Francis, in more ways than we can count, is giving humble, selfless, honest leadership a good name, a very good name!

     We should pay attention. As followers of Jesus, humble service is in our DNA, but how quickly we can forget our genealogy!  How quickly we can forget that the kingdom of God has a different measure of greatness – a different pecking order entirely - from what society at large tends to embrace -- or should I say, what society too easily settles for?

     In today’s gospel, when Jesus took that little child in his arms he wasn’t playing games and he wasn’t playing the baby-kissing politician on the stump, he was teaching a most profound – and, yes, most confounding – truth about God and God’s kingdom.  It’s not about power, it’s not about position, it’s not about control, and it’s not about lording it over others. It’s about doing what Pope Francis is doing: becoming poor with the poor, little with the lowly. It’s about doing as Jesus did: Jesus who “emptied himself,” becoming one of us, Jesus who knelt before his disciples to wash their feet, Jesus who gave his very life that we might have life.    In the words of today’s gospel, it’s about becoming “the least of all and the servant of all.”  And, my friends, the Eucharist we will soon receive makes it all possible!

     Father Michael G. Ryan