FIRST READING: For what man knows God’s counsel, or who can conceive what our LORD intends? For the deliberations of mortals are timid, and unsure are our plans. For the corruptible body burdens the soul and the earthen shelter weighs down the mind that has many concerns. And scarce do we guess the things on earth, and what is within our grasp we find with difficulty; but when things are in heaven, who can search them out? Or who ever knew your counsel, except you had given Wisdom and sent your holy spirit from on high? And thus were the paths of those on earth made straight, and men learned what was your pleasure, and were saved by Wisdom. – Wisdom 9:13-18

RESPONSORIAL PSALM: But humans you return to dust, saying, “Return, you mortals!” A thousand years in your eyes are merely a yesterday. Before a watch passes in the night, you have brought them to their end; They disappear like sleep at dawn; they are like grass that dies. It sprouts green in the morning; by evening it is dry and withered. Teach us to count our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart. Relent, O LORD! How long? Have pity on your servants! Fill us at daybreak with your love, that all our days we may sing for joy. May the favor of the Lord our God be ours. Prosper the work of our hands! Prosper the work of our hands!
- Psalm 90:3-4.5-6.12-13.14.17

SECOND READING: I rather urge you out of love, being as I am, Paul, an old man, and now also a prisoner for Christ Jesus. I urge you on behalf of my child Onesimus, whose father I have become in my imprisonment, I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you. I should have liked to retain him for myself, so that he might serve me on your behalf in my imprisonment for the gospel, but I did not want to do anything without your consent, so that the good you do might not be forced but voluntary. Perhaps this is why he was away from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a brother, beloved especially to me, but even more so to you, as a man and in the Lord. So if you regard me as a partner, welcome him as you would me. – Philemon 1:9-10.12-17

HOLY GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST ACCORDING TO SAINT LUKE

Great crowds were traveling with him, and he turned and addressed them, If any one 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. Which of you wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion? Otherwise, after laying the foundation and finding himself unable to finish the work the onlookers should laugh at him and say, ‘This one began to build but did not have the resources to finish.’ Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with ten thousand troops he can successfully oppose another king advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops? But if not, while he is still far away, he will send a delegation to ask for peace terms. In the same way, everyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple. – Luke 14:25-33

REFLECTION

“Offering God our true wealth”
by John Cassian (c.360-435)
founder of a monastery at Marseilles

We see some people who disdain very great riches in this world-and not only large sums of gold and silver but also magnificent properties-being disturbed over a penknife, a stylus, a needle, or a pen… And when they have given away all their wealth for the sake of Christ’s love, but still retain the heart’s old affection for the littlest things and are always quickly irritated because of them, they become in every respect fruitless and barren, like those who do not have the love of which the Apostle speaks. Foreseeing this in the Spirit, the blessed Apostle said: ‘If I gave all my goods to feed the poor and handed my body over to be burned, but I did not have love, it would profit me nothing.’ (1Co 13,3) Hence it is clearly proved that perfection is not immediately arrived at by being stripped and deprived of all one’s wealth or by giving up one’s honors, unless there is that love whose elements the Apostle describes, which consists in purity of heart alone.

For what else does it mean not to be envious, not to be boastful, not to be angry, not to do evil, not to seek the things that are one’s own, not to rejoice over iniquity, not to think evil and all the rest, (1Co 13,4-5) if not always to offer God a perfect and utterly clean heart and to keep it unsullied by any passion? For the sake of this, then, everything is to be done and desired.

COMMENTARY

From the Order of Preachers
“The Good News”
Province of Ireland

When I paid for a pencil in a shop in Paris the assistant said, “Merci infiniment!” There was no chance that she was infinitely thankful for the couple of centimes, but it was the polite thing to say. Literal translation can often sound absurd. Commentators rush to explain that the Semitic expression “hate father and mother” does not actually mean that in English. It means “to love less.” So why do English translations still say “hate”?

The translator is a traitor, the Italians say: traduttore traditore. You can betray the original sense by going beyond it, or by not going as far as it. Either way there is a risk. I suppose translators of the New Testament feel that it would be a worse betrayal to water down the meaning of what Jesus said. You cannot ignore that word ‘hate’; it forces you to think.

Discipleship, it implies, is deeper than family ties. Jesus is not just saying, “Love me more.” He is saying that it is not just a matter of degree; it is sometimes either/or. To translate every choice into a matter of degree is to avoid choice. If we were to refuse to put our whole weight on one foot we could never walk. But this is just what we often try to do in other parts of our life: we vacillate and in the end we stay where we have always been.

“To another Jesus said, ‘Follow me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead.’” (Luke 9:59). Apparently it does not mean that his father had died; it means that the man wanted to stay at home until his father died. He was mapping out his future; he would get around to discipleship later on. But Jesus made discipleship a matter of immediate urgency.

“Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” The cross stands for stark choice. Its very shape suggests contradiction. Jesus has the right to ask us to carry our cross because he carried his, and was broken by it. It was the Pharisees, not he, who liked to “tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; while they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them” (Mt 23:4). Our life’s crosses will not look like his, but they will have the same logic – or rather (the opposite of logic) contradiction. It was prophesied about him that he would be a sign of contradiction (Luke 2:34); it is from this sign that we have our identity as Christians.

Perhaps we have been too much at pains to make our faith reasonable and intelligible. Were we to succeed, we would have turned it into a philosophy, a theory about life. St Paul tried the way of plausibility and found it false. This set him on his path. “The Jews demand signs,” he wrote, “and the Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Cor 1:22-23). It is not a religion of smooth continuity, it is a tragic religion. In the end, the clever answer has to be wrong, because it doesn’t have the depth of paradox, it doesn’t have the wisdom of Christ crucified.