Thirty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B; St. Ann's parish.
So, I’m not trying to
make excuses, but I think this is a really hard gospel passage to preach on. I
was discussing this with a friend earlier this week and he asked me, “what’s it
about?” I replied, “it’s Jesus telling us to love each other and love God.” “Well,
that sounds like good advice,” he said. And I have to disagree. I don’t think
it’s good advice. “Use lemon juice to erase yellow highlighter in a book,” or “dryer
lint makes a great fire starter”: those are examples of good pieces of advice
(you’re welcome by the way if you didn’t know that); simple instructions
designed to solve a problem by adding a new piece of knowledge to your
collection. “Love each other and God” isn’t like that. I think it would be a
wonderful outcome; if all of us left this place more ready to actually
love each other, the rest of humanity, and God more whole-heartedly (and, we
should add, whole-bodiedly, whole-mindedly, whole-spiritedly), that would be probably
the best of all possible outcome. But I don’t think simply being told to love
more is going to get us there.
So, thanks be to God (and I mean that literally) Jesus has more than advice to offer. He has himself. He has himself to offer and he has offered himself. We’ve been hearing from the Letter to the Hebrews over these past few weeks as our second reading, and one of the brilliant things about this letter is that it provides us with an incredible way to think about what happened on the cross, a way that is at best hinted at in other books of the New Testament. To almost any bystander, the crucifixion must have looked like a complete failure for Jesus and for his message. Remember that so many of his disciples didn’t even dare to be bystanders; they ran away, so convinced were they that this was an abject failure. Roman power was killing their beloved teacher and Lord. The resurrection, then, seems like this wonderful success, this witness to the fact God can reverse any failure, that there is always hope, even in the face of death. And that’s a great message. But the author of the letter to the Hebrews looks again at the crucifixion and says: that was no failure. I know that might look like Rome winning and Jesus losing, but we can look at it another way. Rather than looking at what others are doing to Jesus, let’s look at what he’s doing, reframe this narrative by looking at him as the subject here, not the object. Let’s stop thinking “Rome killed Jesus,” and start thinking instead “Jesus offered himself; Jesus offered himself for us.” So, what does that make him? Not just victim, but also priest.
The idea of Jesus as the fulfillment of
priesthood is not totally absent in the rest of the New Testament, but it receives
its fullest development in Hebrews. At the heart is the reconceptualization of the
cross as Jesus’ priestly work of perfect sacrifice. Hebrews also affirms that
Jesus continues to act in a priestly way by praying for us. He lives forever to
intercede for us.
So, Jesus does not just have advice to offer. He
has himself to offer, which he has done, and he has his prayers to offer, which
he is doing. Given all of this, he also has teaching, he also has this call or
summons to love. For his prayer for us is that we become like him. Part of his
prayer for us is that we pray like him and that we offer sacrifice like him.
All of us at our baptism have been baptized into Christ, priest, prophet, and
king, and hence have been given priestly, prophetic, and royal dignity and
duty. The ordained priesthood exists to serve the baptismal priesthood, which
is primary. Everything we offer, if offered in the right spirit, can be a true
sacrifice offered to God, often offered through another person. If we take time
out of our day to listen to another’s problems, that’s a sacrifice we can
offer. If we forgive someone their wrongdoing, that’s a sacrifice. If we pray
or fast for another’s needs, that’s sacrifice. If we simply offer a joyful hymn
of praise, that’s sacrifice.
When we reach the Eucharist, we will pray that “my
sacrifice and yours” will be acceptable to God. Each of us takes all the
sacrifices of our past lives, our past week in particular, and offers them in a
special way to God whenever we participate in Mass. And God presents to us anew
the sacrifice of Christ and joins our sacrifice to Christ’s, feeding us with
the fruit of that one sacrifice, re-presented in unbloody form on the altar,
that we might be strengthened to keep on offering, to keep on loving.
Being told to love won’t make us love, but being
loved just might. Loved people love. Jesus must have so rejoiced to see that
this scribe who asked him questions finally got it, when so many of his
disciples kept failing to understand anything. Think of the joy he must have in
heaven when we gather here and when we live what we are called to outside of these
walls. Jesus has been and keeps on praying for us. Let us pray that we might come
to share in that joy.
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