The
readings today are full of wonderful promises but the promises come at a
price. In the reading from the Book of Kings, the prophet Elisha
promised the Shunamite woman that she would have the son she dearly
wanted. But there was a price: not just the price of the hospitality she
so generously offered the holy man of God, but the heartbreaking price
of later having her son die in her arms, for that is how the story
unfolds. In the end Elisha did bring the child back to life but there is
enough heartache in that story to remind us that life’s blessings are
almost always mixed blessings. Promises come at a price.
In the gospel, Jesus promises that if we
receive him we will also receive the One who sent him, and that if we
offer even so much as a cup of cold water to one of his “little ones,”
we will be amply rewarded. But these promises come at a price, too: the
price that’s involved in putting Jesus in the first place – the very
first place - before all else: before self, before father or mother, son
or daughter, before our hopes or plans or dreams - for that is what
Jesus asks. We pay the price by taking up the cross, losing our lives –
being willing to let go. Of everything. Jesus says that is what we must
do if we are to find our lives. And that’s pretty scary, isn’t it? Is it
any wonder, then, that we try to avoid it? But if we do accept the grace
of God and let go, losing will, in the end, mean finding.
This is something I’m still trying to learn,
believe me, but in my ministry, it’s something I get to witness in
powerful ways. I think, for instance, of the privilege I had of walking
with a wonderful man as he battled cancer. He fought long and hard but
it was becoming clear that the battle was nearing its end. One afternoon
I walked into his hospital room to check on him. He greeted me warmly as
he always did and I asked him the predictable but maybe not so
appropriate question: “How are you doing?” “Ready to go home,” he said
with his characteristic smile, and eyes just misty enough to make the
smile believable. “Ready to go home.” But it wasn’t home with his family
that he was talking about. He went on to tell me that he had lived his
whole life for this moment and that he not only accepted it, he embraced
it. His words.
When I left his room that day, there were tears
in my eyes, but joy in my heart. Joy for him – knowing what God had in
store for him, joy for the privilege of knowing this good, faith-filled
man who ministered so beautifully to me. And here I thought I was the
minister!
My friends in Christ, there was
someone who really ‘got’ the gospel and embraced it in ways I can only
hope to. The promise of Jesus was very real to him and he was quite
willing to pay the price. He had discovered what losing one’s life in
order to find it meant. He had also discovered the meaning of today’s
passage from the Letter to the Romans: “We who were baptized into Christ
Jesus were baptized into his death…. If we have died with Christ we
shall also live with him.”
Dear friends, maybe that is homily enough for a
summer Sunday. Jesus demands a great deal, but never as much as he
gives. He must come first, it’s true – before all else - before self,
before family, before life itself. He doesn’t want half our heart, he
wants all our heart. He asks us to let go – to lose – everything, but
promises that, in the losing, we will be finding. Everything. Where
better to discover that than right here at the table of the Eucharist
where, time after time, “we proclaim the death of the Lord until he
comes.” But the death we proclaim turns out to be life. Life eternal!
Father Michael G. Ryan
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