Homily for the Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Threefold Movement Of Discipleship

Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR

Homily for the Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

St. Alphonsus Catholic Church, Brooklyn Center, MN

Sunday, September 3, 2023

We Christians love the juicy and delicious aspect of Christianity. We love to hear about Jesus’ mastery over the forces of nature. As I was coming of age, his great miracles of healing and deliverance were hyper-stressed in sermons. As you would expect, this hyper-emphasis on the miracles of Jesus gave birth to a new teaching that presents Jesus as a wealth creator, an investment banker, as someone you must go to if you want to be rich. Do you want to be wealthy? Come to Jesus, prosperity preachers will say. And when you come, sow hefty seeds and hefty tithing. Embarrass God with your large donations. Shake the kingdom of God with your offering and then watch as God opens the heaven and allows wealth to rain on you. This deviant theology teaches that God rewards faith and hefty tithing with financial blessings and riches. Two American televangelists, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker are the fathers of this kind of theology. Till date, prosperity gospel is still part and parcel of many charismatic movements in Christianity. What’s wrong with prosperity theology and preaching? Among other things, the idea of self-denial and the cross is hardly talked about. It over-emphasizes financial blessing, worldly comfort and physical wellbeing. Material riches and wealth are seen as proof of a person’s uprightness. If you are wealthy, it means you are upright and God is blessing you. But if you are not, something must be wrong with you. 

But in today’s Gospel, Jesus says something that counters the central claim of prosperity theologians and preachers, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” Prosperity theology is not about denying oneself, rather about gaining everything. Prosperity preaching is not about carrying the cross, rather it is about avoiding it, and going after the crown, cheap crown as I call it. It is about using hefty tithing and seed sowing to avoid the cross. I get it! The issue of denying oneself is almost a foreign term to us. We don’t think in terms of denying ourself. We think in terms of denying ourself of something. That means, I can’t have candy, I can’t have drink etc. But to deny oneself is to make God, and not self, the absolute center of one’s life. Jesus is not asking us to deny “what we are,” but “what we have become.” Each of us is an image of God, that means we are something very good, as God himself said immediately after creation. We are wired for God, so said St. Augustine. We are created for God. God created us to know him, love him and serve him in this world and live with him forever. Sadly, we live as if we are created for pleasure, prestige, wealth, power, and fame. Our human dignity is contingent in the very fact that we are created by God. Unfortunately, we are resting our dignity on worldly goods. Therefore, what we must deny is not “what we are,” but “what we have become.” We are not to deny that which God has made, but that which we ourselves have made by misusing our freedom— the evil tendencies like pride, greed, lust, wrath, gluttony, envy and sloth. St. Paul calls this disfigured image, “the earthly image,” in contrast to the “heavenly image” which is the resemblance of Christ. 

Denying ourselves is not a work of death, but one of life, of beauty and of joy. It is also a learning of the language of true love. Think of two young people who love each other. But they belong to different world views, two different nations, and speak completely different languages. If their love has any chance of growing and surviving, one of them must learn the language of the other. Otherwise, they will not be able to communicate and their love is most likely not going to last. This is how it is with us and God. We speak the language of the flesh, God speaks that of the Spirit. He speaks the language of love, and we speak the language of selfishness. For us to truly live, we must speak God’s language of love. Denying oneself is learning the language of God so that we can communicate with him and communicate with each other. You won’t be able to say yes to the other unless you are willing to say no to yourself. You lose nothing good denying yourself. Your being increases in the measure that you give it all away. 

What does it mean to take up one’s cross? Believe me, we have a very cosmetic view of the cross because we have seen it for so long as a religious symbol. But for the first nine centuries of the Christian dispensation, artists couldn’t depict the cross, because it was so gross, so gory, and too brutal. The extreme violence we see in Mel Gibson’s movie titled, “Passion of the Christ” only came close to the actual nature of the cross and crucifixion, but never the accurate depiction of a Roman crucifixion. Oftentimes people likened the cross to an illness, or to a bad marriage, or financial problems or to any difficult situation they are into. They attribute any heavy burden they are carrying as the cross. But that’s not what Jesus meant. The way of the cross is the way of death. It is to die to that image of yourself you have invented. It is to die to that image that is not the image of God. It is to die of that image you have become— selfishness, pride, arrogance, hatefulness, divisiveness, unforgiving soul, morally bankruptcy, larger-than-life-view of the self etc. and rising up with Jesus, through Jesus and in Jesus our Lord. Your cross is not about things; we are not talking about hurts and pains. We are talking about the willingness to die to self in order to find life again in service of God and others. At the Gethsemane, Jesus prayed, “…not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). Carrying your cross is letting the will of God be done in your life. What do you think is God’s will? What does God want from us? Relationship! But not for God’s benefit but ours. God does not need anything. 

Far from seeking power and position— I’m going to be the head and not the tail; far from pursuing wealth— I will be the giver and not the beggar; far from running after honor— let my enemies live long and see what I will be in the future; far from seeking the reward of pleasure— I am made for divine health and will never suffer; far from chasing after a destiny changer, discipleship involves a threefold movement: denial of self, taking up the cross, and following after Jesus.

God bless you!