September 22, 2024

Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Cycle B

Wisdom 2:12, 17-20; James 3:16-4:3; Mark 9:30-37

One of the earliest memories that I have was when I was four years old. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. Although they were supposed to start their moon walk a little earlier that same day, it actually started with them opening the hatch at 9:39 pm Central Time, the time where it was where I grew up in Nebraska. This was a truly historic event, and much of the world was glued to their TVs as it was broadcast live. However, the historic importance of this event was lost on a four-year-old who was up way past his bedtime. To be honest, my memory is not of the date and time – that I had to look up for this homily – my actual memory is wanting so very badly to go to sleep. Because my parents told me this was important, I tried to stay awake and look at the grainy black and white video feed, but it was a lost cause. I kept falling asleep, and finally my parents gave in to the inevitable and sent me and my three-year-old brother to bed.

I want to use this historic moon walk as an example of human attention. Almost everyone who was able at the time followed these events closely. Not me – I was four – but those who were older and understood the significance of what was going on did. But then there was another one, and it was not as widely followed. And then another one, and another one, and another one. By the time the sixth and last one, Apollo 17, occurred, interest was down substantially. Something similar happened with the space shuttle program. The first one was a big deal, and then they became routine. Unless there was a major failure, such as the shuttles Columbia and Challenger, they weren’t front page news anymore if they were news at all.

I think this example helps us understand something important that is going on in the Gospel today. In last week’s Gospel, we had Jesus predicting his passion and death and telling his disciples that they too will need to take up their own cross. If you remember, Peter was shocked and resistant to this news, which resulted in the rebuke from Jesus: “get behind me Satan” [Mark 8:33]. That was in Mark chapter 8. Today, we read from chapter 9, and again Jesus predicted his passion and death. This is no longer big news, and the disciples don’t say anything. There will be a third prediction in chapter 10, and after that one James and John will immediately ask if they can sit at the right and left hand of Christ in heaven [Mark 10:35-37]. In other words, the disciples, as is human nature, have become used to what Jesus is saying and it seems to have lost its significance to them.

The question before us then is: we here today are also disciples by baptism, and so, is there still significant to us that Christ bore the cross and asks us to bear one as well? Especially those of us that have been Christian all of our lives, are we so used to hearing about these events and teachings that they have lost their ability to move us to action? Are we spiritually falling asleep, not wanting to take on the burden of the harder aspects of the Christian life? Are we phoning it in?

The biggest problem a mature Christian faces is a growing complacency with what one has accomplished and where one stands. Well, that’s actually the biggest problem anyone faces in life, where the motivation to do anything seems to ebb over time. And it often takes a major crisis in one’s life to wake one up to a gradual drift into mediocrity. There is an old saying: Don’t sweat the small stuff. And this is a good saying, as far as it can help someone to try to avoid distractions from the big stuff. And unless you were employed in the space program, it was perfectly OK if you didn’t follow this closely after it lost its intense interest, freeing up time to focus on other things. However, our relationship to God and neighbor is not small stuff. It’s the biggest of the big stuff. I think this is why the Church, in its wisdom, wants us to come to Mass every week: to keep this front and center in our lives. It is so easy to lose sight of our relationship to God. However, coming every week can contribute to a sense of routineness. It is up to not let this happen.

Christianity is difficult. Anyone who claims that they have mastered it is – let’s be generous – incorrect. I received an email from the Director of the Diaconate this week, and he quoted a lay retreat leader named Mari Pablo. She said: “Being Catholic is not easy. If you think it is, you’re probably not doing it right.” I think she is spot on. And yet that is what we are called to do and do right, all the various teachings that are contained in scripture. And some of them are difficult. In fact, in today’s Gospel, the real difficulty of one of Christ’s teachings may be hard to see. When Jesus points to a child and tells us, “Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me” [Mark 9:37a NABRE], he is not using the child as an example of purity, or sinlessness, or anything of that sort. Young children were considered burdens up to the time when they were capable of work. It was actually legal for a father in the Roman Empire to kill a child, or to sell a child into slavery for money. Why would someone take care of a child that was not their own? At least your own kids might take care of you when you were old, but an orphan? So Christ uses the child, like he points to others who are helpless – like widows, the poor, the leper – to tell us that it is our job to care for them. We must love others no matter how helpless they are, no matter how incapable they are of paying us back. And this is just one of the many things that Christ means when he tells us to pick up our cross and follow him.

So today the Gospel is calling us to make sure we keep the correct priorities in life, the priorities that Christ has taught us. Our love of God, our commitments to our spouse and family, and of course that priority that Jesus spoke about most during his ministry, the love of neighbor as demonstrated by our active support of the poor and the helpless. If we’ve allowed any of these to slip in priority, then we have an obligation to realign our lives back to our baptismal commitments. We cannot allow ourselves to fall asleep on the job, the most important job we have while we are here on this side of the Kingdom of God.

As we continue with our Liturgy of the Eucharist, may our communion with God and one another bring our priorities closer to that of Christ. Let us all have the strength and courage to realign our priorities to those of God and not to those distractions that the world keeps dragging us towards. We pray as always for the strength to be true Christians.