​A Homily for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

+ “I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.”
These words of St Paul, proclaimed anew to us in the epistle of this holy Mass, echo down the centuries through the Church’s Sacred Liturgy calling each and every one of us who have received the gift of Baptism to that lowliness and meekness of which St Paul speaks, to that patience and forbearing with one another in love, to that desire and effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace amongst all the baptised which he insists is essential to the Body of Christ, the Church, united under one Lord, in one faith, through one baptism.

In passing—and in the light of issues current in the life of the Church—it is worth noting that unity under Christ in faith and through baptism is what St Paul is preaching, not uniformity. Baptism does not make us autonomous clones who must think and behave and who must worship in exactly the same way so as to appease the insecurities of certain authorities or to subscribe to ideologies that are simply not of the essence of the faith. It has to be said that the riches of diversity within the unity of the Church of God are a true gift of God—as we know only too well from the different cultural, liturgical, theological, spiritual and artistic expressions of the one faith that have grown up over the centuries in different lands and times wherever the Gospel has been preached and taken root. Unity does not require uniformity. The Body of Christ is not a Stalinist gulag where we must think and act in step according to the latest whim of any passing dictator. The unity in the Spirit of God preached by St Paul rejoices in the riches of legitimate diversity in the Church and does not forbid them or even consider them to be harmful in some way.

Returning to St Paul’s injunction to “lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called,” the Church gives us very clear instructions on how this is to be done through the juxtaposition of Our Lord’s response to the lawyer in the Gospel of this Mass: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment,” we are told. “And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”
There is plenty for each of us to be considering here, each according to the various circumstances in which God has placed us. But in doing so we would do well to note two things. The first is that God comes first, and our neighbour comes second. To put it another way, true love of neighbour comes from our love of God—not from some form of self-serving, utilitarian volunteer work that serves more to appease my ego (or bad conscience)—or that of a government or other institution—than truly to serve the other. No: social activism is just that—activism. Whereas the love of neighbour taught by the Gospel is an overflowing of our love of God.

And of course, just as it is clearly evident that we do not love our neighbour about whom we do not care or do anything to help, it is perfectly clear that we do not love God if we do not actually try to follow His commandments, the first of which is to worship Him. Just as the poor will starve if they do not receive aid, so too our souls will starve if we do not open them up to God’s life and grace by prayer, confession, participation in Mass on every Sunday and Holy day of Obligation, the worthy reception of Holy Communion, and so on. We need God as much as anyone needs food and drink. And when we are nourished thus, love of neighbour will overflow into true practical charity—a practical charity that we must exercise as much in monasteries as in our families, as in our workplaces and in our streets.

The second thing to notice about these commandments is that they do not give priority to love of myself. In a world where “I” am the centre of everything and where narcissism pollutes the very air we breathe this lack of egocentrism is as stark as it is instructive. I am first of all to love God and then I am to love my neighbour as myself, we are taught. I do not come first. My wishes or plans do not have ultimate priority. The love and honour of God do.

Indeed, as the whole of Christian teaching asserts and as its history demonstrates, most particularly in the lives of the saints, it is only in loving God first and in serving my neighbour that I find my true self. It is only by walking the path of self-renunciation that I find that “calling to which [I] have been called”. Only in renouncing myself and in embracing God’s Will do I find that fulfilment which enables me to prosper even amidst the exigencies, trials and numerous temptations of this life, and that opens the door for me to rejoice forever in the next.

“Lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called” St Paul insists. It is a tough call. We would all much rather lead the life we would prefer. But our baptism calls us to the love of God and of our neigbour, and our particular vocations call us to exercise this love in more specific contexts and manners—often in ways we find surprising or even seemingly beyond our capacities. Yet God is God and His grace is all-powerful. Let us open ourselves anew to that grace this morning, begging what we need so as truly to be able to “Lead a life worthy of the calling to which [we] have been called.”+