We are in what feels to me like an endless
run-up to the elections and I’m guessing that most of us have had it
with polls and pundits, claims and counterclaims, fake facts, fact
checks, and all the other things that have come to characterize our
political campaigns. In the midst of it all, it’s refreshing to hear the
straight talk and unvarnished truth-telling that we get from Jesus in
today’s gospel. “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands and
they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise
again.”
We got a similar message last Sunday when Jesus
first began speaking to his disciples about his impending suffering and
death. Peter, you recall, 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 all of his disciples on notice that not only was he going to
suffer and die but that they, too, if they wanted to be his followers,
would have to take up their own crosses and follow. They would have to
lose their lives in order to save them.
Any way you look at it, Jesus was not running
for public office! Far from it! Jesus was on a mission – a mission to
preach the good news of God’s kingdom. But it was news that didn’t
always sound so good. It included serious challenges that many didn’t
want to hear, challenges many rejected out of hand because the idea of a
kingdom without 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 can forget. Like the disciples in today’s gospel who fell
into petty arguments about who among them was the greatest, or like the
community James addressed in his Letter in 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.
And this is completely antithetical to the gospel that Jesus preached
which is all about truth and humble service.
In today’s gospel, when Jesus took that little
child in his arms he wasn’t playing games or playing the baby-kissing
politician on the stump, he was teaching a most profound truth about God
and God’s kingdom. It’s not about power, it’s not about position, and
it’s not about lording it over others. If it were, why would Jesus have
emptied himself, becoming one of us? Why would he have knelt before his
disciples to wash their feet? No, in in the words of today’s gospel,
God’s kingdom is about becoming “the last of all and the servant of
all!”
For over eleven years now, Pope Francis has
shown the world what servant leadership looks like. It looks like him.
And that’s been true from the day he was elected. You remember how he
appeared on the balcony of St. Peter’s, bowing low and asking for our
prayers and even our blessing; and how on the following day he returned
to the hotel he’d been staying at to pay his bill, traveling across Rome
in a lowly Fiat; and then, there was his decision to abandon the papal
palace – and a number of the perks and privileges, fashions and fanfare
typically associated with the papacy. From the get-go, Pope Francis has
shown us the humble face of Jesus, walking alongside his flock and
shepherding with mercy and gentleness, inspiring us to be our best
selves and never to take shortcuts around the gospel.
My friends, two weeks from now - in Rome - Pope
Francis will convene another meeting of the Synod. Bishops, lay leaders,
sisters and priests from around the world will sit together at round
tables to listen to each other’s stories and to engage in dialogue – not
in order to make big decisions about so-called ‘hot button’ issues in
the Church – there will be time for that in the days ahead; no, simply
to carefully and prayerfully discern the voice of the Holy Spirit and in
doing so, to discover a whole new way of being Church, a Church in which
the Holy Spirit speaks to and through not just a privileged few but to
and through all the baptized. This is Pope Francis’ great dream for the
Church and over the past two years many of us had a chance to be part of
it, part of something that, ever so slowly, is beginning to change the
way we do things as church!
My friends, I do believe that, thanks to the
leadership and example of Pope Francis, the Church is coming to
experience the “wisdom from above” that the reading from the Letter of
James talked about: wisdom that is “peaceable, lenient, docile, rich in
sympathy and kindly deeds.” It’s that kind of wisdom - and only that
kind of wisdom - that will bring about true renewal, and a great new
awakening in the Church!
Father Michael G. Ryan
|
|
