Train Your Successor

Eleventh Sunday in Course 2023

Over the years, I have been blessed to function in a number of leadership positions both inside and outside the Church and school systems. One lesson my mentors–the effective ones, anyway–taught me is to “train your successor.” That is a little scary for most people, you may know intuitively. If you are training your successor in the right way to do your job, you could be teaching everything needed for that person to supplant you if you make a mistake. But if you, day by day, resolve to trust Christ, who is our true leader in our journey to the Kingdom of God, then you don’t have to worry, as long as you were careful in the first place about the ethics of your number 2!

Today Jesus looks out over the multitude that was following Him in the first century, and He feels “compassion for them.” Look carefully at the word Matthew used that we weakly read as “compassion.” The Greek word is esplanchnizomai, which means “deeply moved.” It’s the feeling you might have when you come across something really awful that has been done to another human being. I think it’s the feeling that our troops had when they liberated Dachau, in April 1945, where the Nazis killed over 30,000 humans, many of whom were priests and other ministers. Jesus saw that the people–His people Israel–were being overtaxed, beaten, even murdered by the occupying Romans, and that the Jewish authorities were not helping them. So what did He do? He trained his successors, the apostles, to take over His ministries after His ascension and the giving of the Holy Spirit. He gives them their first lesson, which is to stick with the Jewish people. The Holy Spirit will send them to the Samaritans and Gentiles years later, but they were directed here to go to the people they knew and could relate to. That’s a lesson for all of us, clergy and laity, as we respond to Christ’s call to evangelize our nation.

What do we learn from St. Paul today? He teaches us the good news we should be sharing with everyone we know, the good news of freedom from sin. What is the biggest fear human beings have, now and in the past? It is the fear of death. Only being drafted into public speaking is close to being that scary to most people. Why are people fearful of death? Because they don’t know what is going to happen after that. They have secret fears because they have what the psalmist calls “unknown faults.” They are known to us and to God, but we have not shared them with other humans. And without Christ, there is nothing one can do about serious sins committed. But with Christ, we can be forgiven of sins, first in Baptism and later on in Reconciliation. He, the very Son of God, died for our sins when we were God’s enemies. I might be persuaded to give my life for a stranger if I knew he was a very good person. But what if the guy was a real jerk, maybe a thief or murderer, abortionist or pimp? Not me. But Jesus, God Himself, showed his love for us when we were, or are, jerks, sinners, selfish cowards and His adversaries. He poured out everything, and longs to pour out forgiveness and grace on the whole world.

We who have accepted this gift of forgiveness, reconciliation and grace can rejoice in God through Christ. Our prayer today, we hear, is a “sacrifice of praise.” Praise and thanks–gratitude–is the only thing we can offer as humans. We do so in Christ and with Christ. We can rejoice because we know we are heard, and we commune directly with the Trinity today in Christ through the action of the Holy Spirit. We stand together as priests, just as Moses predicted at Sinai, a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. We are the heirs of every covenant that God has made with His people, and everyone we know can be an equal heir, child of God, if we draw them toward the gift of Baptism. May our God be praised forever.