HOMILY SUNDAY 13 – C

Responding to God’s Call

(1 Kings 19:16b, 19-21; Psalm 16; Galatians 5:1, 13-18; Luke 9:51-62)

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This Sunday could be called vocation Sunday as the reading are all about a call from God and a variety of responses, culminating in the ideal response that St. Paul presents in the reading to the Galatians.

The ideal disciple is one who responds to Jesus by keeping his command to love others as we love ourselves.

The two prophets, Elijah and his disciple, Elisha dramatize how radical our response to God’s call is meant to be. After a moment’s hesitation, Elisha responds by sacrificing his livelihood, letting go of his plans and dreams for his life, leaving it all behind and becoming a servant/disciple of Elijah.

Jesus in the gospel spells out the nature of that call. The totally non-violent God, revealed in Jesus Christ, is asking us to live and teach non-violence – a truth that the world still struggles to grasp. There was a man in Toronto who regularly wrote some of the Canadian bishops, urging them to promote a more radical, broad message of non-violence that goes beyond simply being anti-abortion, to promoting peace and justice and respect for all life, and above all, resistance to armed conflict in all its forms, especially in the Middle East.

Jesus goes on to underline the sacrificial aspect of discipleship. The disciple will have to surrender some of his or her plans to follow the Lord. Jesus also speaks of total commitment. This call is radical in that it demands everything of the disciple – there must be no other greater priority.

There is a story of farmyard animals who loved their master so much that they met one day to see what they could do for him in appreciation. The hen suggested they could give him a breakfast in bed of bacon and eggs. The pig replied that was fine for the hen, but for him it would be total commitment! Our response to God’s call would probably line up more with the pig in this story, as Jesus demands total commitment of us also.

A last characteristic of the call to follow him, for Jesus, is the command to proclaim the kingdom of God. This, in a sense, is the most basic element of following Jesus. That is what he was all about. He came to inaugurate a new way of life, the life of God in heaven, here on earth, right here and now. We are not only to proclaim this reign of God; we are to actively and whole heartedly, with our total being, do everything in our power, by word and action, to help realize that reign of God in our personal lives and in our interactions with all others. That is our raison-d’être as well.

St. Paul, in his turn, simply builds on all that Jesus has said and done. As disciples baptized into Jesus Christ, we have been set free from sin and selfishness. We are now free to love, and really love, in an agape kind of way. We are to love others as we love ourselves. We have every reason to have dignity and high self-esteem, for we follow Jesus, the Word made Flesh. We are now to live and act as he did, in total selflessness, giving of ourselves as he did. We are to do this not on our own, but through the power of the Holy Spirit, the presence of the Risen Lord within us. We do this because we are disciples of Christ.

Some years ago, there was a TV series entitled, “Thirty Something.” One episode went this way: A group of married men gathered for a social evening at a hotel. One of the men found himself attracted to the hotel manager with whom he had to deal all evening in terms of arranging food, music, and drink. She was attracted to him, too, and the romantic chemistry intensified. Finally, the moment came to part. The man stalled, thanking her again for her help. She, not wanting to lose the moment, asked him, “Would you like to get together again sometime?” The man hesitated, guiltily apologized for not being more forthright earlier, and did what few have the moral courage to do. Not without sweating a little blood, he said: “I am married. I need to go home to my wife.”

Ron Rolheiser is a noted Oblate spiritual writer. His father, perhaps the most moral man he’s ever known, used to say: “Unless you can sweat blood, you’ll never keep a commitment, in marriage, in priesthood, or anywhere. That’s what it takes!”

He was right. One of the great lessons of Gethsemane is precisely that. To keep any commitment, we have to sweat blood because, like Jesus in the Garden, there comes a time when we have to enter into a great loneliness, the loneliness of fidelity and of responding to a higher will and a higher eros. The lover in Jesus had to let go of some things. The same is true for each of us.

The Eucharist is itself a call to discipleship. We are empowered by God’s love in Jesus, through Word and Sacrament, to go out as disciples to love others as he has loved us, and as we love ourselves. In short, we are to go and be the disciples that Jesus is calling us to be.