Homily for the 22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time
I
was in Wal-mart the other day and I saw a bunch of families buying back to
school supplies. I can't believe it's already back to school! Watching the kids
pick out notebooks and lunchboxes I thought about choices, the choices we make,
the way that life is full of choices: like the choice of a lunchbox, when I was
kid, the choice was clear- Star Wars lunch box. Or the choice of notebooks. Or
the choice of whether or not to grow a beard.
Life
is full of choices. What choices are your confronted with today? Are they
choices associated with going back to school? The choices of who your friends
are? The choices of what to wear? The choices of where to sit on the bus or in
the cafeteria? Maybe you finished school a while ago, maybe you have different
choices to make. Maybe they are big important life choices? Choices about work,
career, family. Whatever they are, we all have choices to make, life is full of
choices. But the most important choice you will ever make is to choose Jesus
Christ, and to pick up your cross and follow Him. But what does it mean to
choose Jesus and pick up your cross and follow him?
Does
God want us to suffer? I don't think so. Suffering was never his plan for us.
It is the result of sin. We suffer because we live in a world that is opposed
to God’s love, opposed to goodness and life, opposed to the Truth. It wasn’t
because God is mean, but because of sin, that Jesus told his disciples he must
suffer. Because he was choosing the Truth, Jesus knew he would be attacked,
persecuted, afflicted and murdered. The darkness hates the light. Jesus accepted the Cross. He accepted it at
the consequence of his choice to do the will of God.
To
follow Jesus and take up the Cross means to do the same: to put God first, to
live for him alone, to not let anything or anyone come between us, to not be conformed
to this age but to be transformed. Each day we are given an opportunity to
become more and more the person God is calling us to be. And when Jesus says to
us that we must daily follow him and take up our Cross he doesn’t mean that we
need to go looking for ways to suffer or ways to make our lives more difficult.
What he means is that daily we have the choice to be faithful; daily we have
the choice to live in the Truth, and to offer our lives as a living sacrifice
of praise and worship.
The
Cross is the result of doing the will of God in a sinful world. It is the
consequence of the choice you make to live the kind of life that God wants you to
live, in the Truth, in Love, unreservedly, unconditionally, regardless of the
consequences. To accept the Cross means to do what is right, even when it isn’t
easy; it is the choice to do what you know in your heart you must, even if it is
unpopular, or if it means that others will reject you or even hurt you.
My
brothers and sisters, life is full of choices. And the most important choice we
will ever make is to choose Jesus Christ and pick up our crosses and follow him.
This is not a one-time choice, something we do once, it is the daily choices we
make to do what is right, to live in the Truth, to be faithful, regardless of
the consequences. Life is full of choices. Will you choose Christ?
