I can't, You can

Sunday, September 4, 2016

The Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

The Gospel passage today (Luke 14:25-33) is a difficult one to listen to or read because it contains the words of Jesus, the Stern Teacher. “If you cannot renounce all your own possessions, hate family, and take up your cross and follow me, you cannot be my disciple.” Thanks be to God.

As our preacher this morning (Father Mathias, O.S.B.) pointed out, this hardly sounds like Good News, and we aren’t left in a condition where we really mean it when we pray “Thanks be to God.” Or can we?

Since this also happens to be the very day when Mother Teresa is canonized, we have before us the example of someone who did live the Gospel message in all its exacting fullness, and so we are left feeling even more inadequate and unworthy. This is a good day to spend time repeating the Jesus Prayer and mean it: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

And yes we are unworthy, inadequate, resistant, perhaps even spiteful in the face of the reality that we fall so far short of the things that Jesus asks of us, no matter how much good we may do, no matter how many little (and sometimes petty) sacrifices we may sometimes grudgingly make. There is still so much more that can be done, so many habits of mind and tongue and body that we have not yet left behind, so much selfishness that seems to reside in our very genes and that trips us up and so often reminds us of just how petty we can be, and how addicted we are to things that don’t really matter, to things that  may keep us from God at times, and to things that we know lie outside of what little sense we can make of God’s great plans for us in His great love.

And that is as it should be: in and of ourselves, we are inadequate. If we rely on our own resources, we will always come up short, we will always fail, we will always be left feeling far from God and far from the Kingdom that He continually offers us . . . if only we could . . .

Ah! There’s the catch. “If only we could,” but the truth is that we can’t. This reminds me of one of my favorite brief prayers, one that I encourage you to use today and always. It is only 4 words, but it sums up much of the Christian anthropology: “I can’t, you can.”

God is the one who makes us into the image of His Son, in His own ways and in His own time, and as it says on so many coffee mugs, God isn’t finished with us yet. Thank God. We come away from today’s Gospel feeling crushed and defeated until we realize that we are meant not to live lives based on our own strength and our own heroic capacities, but rather on the grace of God and the love that He continually pours out upon us that makes up in all ways for what is lacking in us. That is the great joy, great peace, and great hope of Christian reality and we cannot exist without it—but we don’t have to.

And when he directs us to “take up our cross,” in addition to whatever trials and pains and sufferings we have loaded on our backs as we make our way through this world, we might also add the knowledge that without his grace we are hopeless, helpless and hapless.

Saint Teresa of Calcutta’s life was so filled with that grace that it overflowed from her to the lives of countless destitute and miserable men, women and children throughout the world and will still do even  more now that she is no longer limited by earthly limitations. St. Teresa, Mother, pray for us all, because we are so aware that even we who have so much are still so destitute in what is truly needed, and still sick and helpless in our own human conditions. Amen.