Mass of the Holy Spirit

A.M.D.G.

September 9, 2007
Twenty-third Sunday of the Year ©

Wis 9:13-19
Phil 9-10, 12-17
Lk 14:25-33

Today's readings are the designated readings for the Twenty-third Sunday of the Year, but you'll have to admit that they're a pretty tough assignment for what is billed as the Mass of the Holy Spirit! The Mass of the Holy Spirit has been a traditional opening exercise at Jesuit colleges and universities for centuries, a time when we come together to ask God's blessings for the academic year that is ahead, and invoke the Holy Sprit, the spirit of God's wisdom, on the work of this university. Here I am before a congregation of students whose parents who are paying good money for a college education, and I'm supposed to say something about a line like this from the book of Wisdom: "For the reasoning of mortals is worthless, and our designs are likely to fail. ... We can hardly guess what is on the earth." Then there's a snippet from Philemon, the shortest book in the Bible to begin with: a note, really, from St. Paul to a friend, asking him to receive back a runaway servant who has converted to Christianity. Unless you know that, the passage doesn't make a lot of sense, and, once you do, there's not a lot more to be said! Finally, we have the gospel passage; one of the hardest and most uncompromising sayings of Jesus in the New Testament: "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." And I'm supposed to preach on this gospel one week after many of you you have said affectionate goodbyes to your moms and dads, brothers and sisters! To preach on a set of readings like this is a lot to expect, even from a Jesuit!

However, I suppose that my looking for sympathy over an assignment I don't like from a student congregation is rather like Colonel Sanders looking for sympathy from the chickens, so I'll stop complaining and do my best!

Scripture scholars tell us that the use of the word "hate" in the gospel passage from St. Luke is an instance of something called "Semitic hyperbole." The Aramaic language, in which Jesus spoke, had few ways of nuancing or qualifying a statement, so if you wanted to say, "You shouldn't love your parents too much or in the wrong way," you ended up saying, "you should hate your parents." The other thing scripture scholars say about this passage is that it is probably an instance of the parallelism often found in the gospels, such that self-denial, taking up one's cross and renouncing the normal ties of human affection imply each other and go together in Jesus' mind.

I'm not sure these explanations of Jesus' statement help much. We're still being told that the normal ties of human affection are called into question, relativized, even superseded, by the imperative of becoming Jesus' disciples. What could he mean by this? Because you don't have to live very long to realize that human relationships – friendship and love, and, in the present circumstances, the love between parents and children – are what makes life worthwhile and give it meaning, so that to talk about renouncing these relationships seems absurd and inhuman. Can Jesus really mean we are called on to do this?

Well, in the passage we just heard, Jesus uses some examples to explain his meaning. One has to do with the very practical matter of putting up a building or maybe building a house. The other has to do with military strategy, and is not without relevance, for example, to the debate over whether, from a strategic point of view, it was wise for the United States to invade Iraq: did we know what we were getting ourselves into? These examples seem to be about fitting means to an end, about the kind of practical knowledge that the Greeks called techne (when you freshmen read Aristotle you'll come across it!), about what in the Christian tradition we often describe as prudence, or practical virtue. If you're an athlete, you know, in an example favored by St. Paul, that in order to win an athletic contest, you have to train. Young people today, whether they're into athletic competition or personal fitness, understand the significance of training, sometimes in very sophisticated ways.

So I think we understand something about the importance of discipline, or, to use an old-fashioned word from our Catholic spiritual tradition, of asceticism, in reaching our goals. And, in the present context of your college studies, all of the terms I have been using - techne, prudence, discipline and asceticism - will have their place. For there is a discipline, and, indeed, an asceticism, in studies and in the intellectual life: and even, if I may suggest, a kind of self-denial. You will never really get the benefit of a college education if there is too much you in the process. You must let your own ideas, and, especially, the ideas you have gotten from your peers and from the culture that surrounds you, be challenged by ideas from other times and other places. There needs even to be a certain reverence before what you are trying to learn: an attitude of receptivity and unselfconsciousness in the face what is greater than yourself and what you think. And that reverence before the truth can make you more than you are now if you give yourself over to it. This is true whether you are studying the world around you; the complexity of human history, culture, technology and institutions; or the accomplishments of human creativity in literature and the arts. As you can tell, this suiting of the means - study - to the end - learning - is not just a matter of putting in the hours, and making sure you get the balance right between studying, your other activities and your social life. It's also a matter of your attitude, of an interior disposition that will make the difference between merely going through the motions and actually being changed by your education, and becoming a better, more authentic person because of it.

Now, of course, Jesus isn't talking about the intellectual life in this gospel passage. He is talking about human relationships and discipleship: about love and, if you will, commitment. We know that at a certain level, Jesus' own mission, his own commitment, was precisely to love and human relationships: "Love one another as I have loved you," he tells us. But clearly Jesus' love for us and our love for one another in imitation of him is not a simple or undifferentiated notion. It isn't just a matter of how we feel about one another, because our feelings, almost by definition, are about us rather than about somebody else. If we think that love is only a matter of having good, reassuring, self-affirming feelings about ourselves as a result of our relationships with other people - our mothers, fathers, siblings and friends - then, indeed, it would be better not to love this way at all, because that kind of love is more likely to hurt than to help. The love that is also a following of Jesus does involve things like foresight and consideration. And, yes, there is a discipline, and even an asceticism to loving that takes a certain amount of practice and requires, for example, asking for and being able to forgive: ask your parents!

But mostly, the love of one another that is a following of Jesus involves the reverence and unselfconsciousness, the self-forgetfulness and even self-denial out of love for the other that I was talking about earlier in relation to true learning. And even more so. Because if reverence is an appropriate attitude toward the natural world and human artifacts, how much more should it be our attitude toward one another! We know from Jesus' own example, that the truest and deepest kind of love-in-discipleship involves not only self-forgetfulness and self-denial, but also self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice in loving is not an easy notion for us to understand, to say nothing of putting into practice! But if in our lives of discipleship, we enter into the mind that is in Christ Jesus, we begin to understand something of the internal dynamism by which to lose one's life it to gain it, and to love in unselfconsciousness and self-forgetfulness is to find one's truest deepest self.

So you don't have to think that Jesus is telling you in today's gospel not to love your parents. He isn't! But he is telling you to try to learn the ways of loving by coming to understand his own ways of loving you. We have many things to teach you and there will be much to learn in your years at Fairfield University. It will be a great adventure, and, as I have said, you are among the luckiest and most fortunate people in the world to have this wonderful opportunity in front of you. But not least among the things I hope you learn, not least among the things I hope we will teach you, hopefully by our own example, is a kind of self-abandonment to the beauty of truth and the truth of self-giving love.