Homily: September 4, 2022, Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

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Chapter 9 in the Book of Wisdom is titled ‘Prayer for Wisdom’. The pages of this chapter are the most well used in my Bible, because my mother used to tell me when I was younger, that by reading this chapter every day, I will become wise in life.

And so I did, I read this chapter every day, I could even memorise every word of the Malayalam version, but did I grow wiser. I didn’t think so because simply reading it will not make me wise, only God can.

Today’s first reading began, “Who can know God’s counsel, or who can conceive what the Lord Intends?”

And it ended with, “Who ever knew your counsel, except you had given wisdom and sent your holy spirit from on high?”

Yes, we can pray for it and ask God to grant us wisdom. God’s plan for humankind is great and wonderful, yet we can never fully understand His intentions and plans, unless we have wisdom from the Holy Spirit. 

What is God’s intention for us? What is His plan?

The words of Jesus in today’s Gospel struck me much, “if anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple”.  

Is Jesus telling us to hate our loved ones, our family and to abandon them, if we want to follow Jesus?

Somewhere in the other Gospel texts, didn’t Jesus tell us to love our enemies?

Didn’t Jesus love His mother so much that even as He was dying on the cross, He made sure His beloved disciple took care of her?

We need wisdom to understand this.

We must never forget and never ever doubt that God is love. He is the source of true, perfect, eternal love. So, our loving God will never tell us to hate anyone.

But no human person fully understands love. On our own, we do not know love. The love that we have between human to human is imperfect, twisted and self-centred. The only way for us to truly know love, is to first, receive the love from God, and then to love Him with our heart, our mind, our soul.

When we are filled with God’s love, the perfect love, and when we know how to love Him, we will know how to love others.

That is why Jesus’ commandment of love is that we love one another as He has loved us. We must love others, the way He loves. To be His disciple is to follow the way He loves.

How does He love?

By laying down His life for others, by giving Himself totally and unconditionally, by dying to self.

In Mathew chapter 5, we read, “Why should God reward you if you love only the people who love you?” (Mathew 5: 47) That is our human way of loving.

Dying to self means to surrender what I desire for myself, to let go what is precious to me, to give up what I love… so that I desire only what God desires, I hold precious only what is precious to God, I love only what God loves.

And then, we will truly know how to love our mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, no longer with our own imperfect love, but with the perfect love that comes from God.

To love in our own way, there is always a limit to how much we are willing and able to give of self for the good of the other.

To love in God’s way, there is no limit, there is no condition, there is no stop, there is always the extra mile, always more to give, until we empty ourselves.

So you think that since you go to church, you are involved in ministries, you help the poor, you avoid sin, and that is loving God, loving others?

Sister Agnes was already leading a holy life, she was obedient to her superiors and doing a good job teaching the young believers, but when God called her to give up her comfortable convent life and to go the extra mile, to embrace the poorest of the poor, to die to her self, she went. She became Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

All the saints we know, did the same. They did not lead a holy life as they wished, their lives were holy because they lived as God wished.

That is the wisdom of true love.

Are you ready to go the extra mile for God?

Amen.

Fr. Nivin Scaria 

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