Twenty-third Sunday in Course 2025
Let’s suppose you have what you think is a good idea, but you wonder whether other people will agree with you. If your primary concern is to avoid public scorn or controversy or losing a valuable part of your business, you are in need of prudence. You are asking if this is a prudent decision. But if your primary question is whether this is the right thing to do, the best decision for everyone, what philosophers call the path to the summum bonum, you want wisdom. Most folks, faced with this conundrum, will seek out and ask the wisest person they know for help.
That helps explain why my wife and I, every day, make an early morning prayer of thanks for all God’s gifts and graces and challenges, and then ask “for the wisdom to know Your will, and the other virtues we need to carry it out in our day and time.” True wisdom is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and without it we can never make our things on earth cohere with the destiny we desire in heaven.
Consider the situation the Christian Philemon faced when he read the letter from Paul we heard most of today. Somehow, Philemon’s slave Onesimus had been with Paul. Perhaps he was a runaway slave, or Philemon had lent him to Paul as a servant for a time. One way or another Paul was obliged to return the slave to Philemon, and he sent this letter of reference with the man. Paul’s influence and teaching had drawn Onesimus to the faith of Christ while they were together, and Paul certainly baptized him and brought him into the life of the Church. Paul is telling Philemon that Onesimus is now more than a slave, but a brother in Christ, and one highly regarded by Paul, who really wished that he could continue helping Paul. What would you do in Philemon’s situation? And, no, we have no evidence in Scripture of what the outcome was. But this letter certainly was helpful when Christian churches went to work to ban slavery, the odious ownership of one human by another. Just put this together with the last words of Jesus in today’s Gospel: “anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.” The will of God must be primary in our lives and in our decision-making.
Here's another opportunity to put yourself in another’s position, and it is critical. You have been following Jesus, for several days or months or years. He is going to Jerusalem with this vast mob following Him, including you. He stops. He turns around. He says—and you can tell He’s not joking—" 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. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” You can try to finesse this by looking up the verb Jesus used in the Gk: miseo, and it really does mean what we mean by hate. This must be hyperbolic, an exaggeration for effect, but it demands that following Jesus must have priority even over our family obligations. Most of the people I know have told me that either they or a friend or relative has had this experience. They listened to the Word of God and followed it, followed Jesus by perhaps leaving their parents’ church to go where they knew they were called, and they had to pay the price. Ostracism. Disinheritance. Even expulsion from the family home. The payment for following Christ can be excruciating. That’s the right word, because it is derived from the Latin “crucifixus,” which means being nailed to a cross and left to die in torment.
Over the years Christians hear the words “carry your own cross” and we tend to forget what that would sound like to a subject of the Roman empire. It would feel like a lightning bolt to Christ’s hearers, and Paul’s.
So before you approach the altar for communion, consider what it means to take the body and blood of Christ in communion. If there is anything in your life that you would not gladly sacrifice in order to be His disciple, you need to repent and offer it to Him right now.
That’s what the psalmist says, and what we mean, when we sing “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart.” True wisdom involves understanding the commitment we have made in our baptismal covenant with Christ, and willingness to give whatever He requires. Then we can know true joy of heart. We can sing “Fill us at daybreak with your kindness, that we may shout for joy and gladness all our days.” We make that commitment now, because this day may be our last chance to prepare for entry into the kingdom of heaven.
