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| My Uncle Mike and Aunt Carine |
(Twenty-second Sunday of the
Year (A): This homily was given on September 3, 2017 at St. Pius X Church,
Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond Suriani.
Read Romans 12: 1-2; Matthew 16: 21-27.)
[For the audio version of this homily, click here:Twenty-second Sunday 2017]
On Monday, August 21—the day
after my retirement Mass and party—I went down to Maryland to see my aunt and
uncle (as I’ve done for many years now during the third week of August). This year, though, something was different:
my uncle was in a nursing home recovering from a stroke he had suffered a few
weeks before. On Thursday the 24th
they brought him home and placed him in hospice care. It was difficult to see my uncle in that
condition, even though he’s 87 and his health has been declining for quite some
time. He’s a retired Army Colonel and
has always had a very commanding, engaging presence. People have always loved to be around
him. But the stroke, combined with the
dementia he was suffering from previously, has taken its toll—making it very
difficult to communicate with him in any kind of meaningful way. In fact, with the exception of my aunt, he
doesn’t always know who people are—even people in his own family.
I’m sure many of you can relate.
But, through it all, my aunt has
been amazing. In fact, she’s the reason
I’m mentioning this in my homily this morning.
Even though she’s 85 and not in great health herself, she was at that
nursing home at least twice a day at her husband’s side—encouraging him and
trying to communicate with him—in spite of the fact that he was often saying
things that only he could understand.
And then, when they brought him home and my uncle got restless and
disoriented at 2 or 3 a.m., she got up and went into the separate room (where
they had placed the hospital bed) in order to comfort him and calm him down as
only she could. She did that every night
that I was there—depriving herself of the sleep that she certainly needed.
It was a great witness to me of
the truth of today’s second reading from Romans 12, where St. Paul says, “I
urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as
a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.”
When we first hear a Scripture passage
like that, we may think of the great saints and martyrs of the Church, who
literally offered their bodies to the Lord in some special service or in
martyrdom. And it certainly does apply to them!
But the text also applies to people like my aunt. It applies, in other words, to people who
make the sacrifices necessary to fulfill their vocations in life well (whether
it be as a priest, or a religious, or a husband, or a wife, or a father, or a
mother, or as a single person living for Christ in the world).
Scripture scholar William
Barclay put it well when he said in in one of his books that St. Paul’s message
to us in this verse is (and here I quote): “Take your body; take all the tasks
that you have to do every day; take the ordinary work of the shop, the factory,
the shipyard, the mine; and offer all that as an act of worship to God.”
That should be our daily
intention as disciples of Jesus Christ.
But if we’re going to do this,
it means that we will have to think differently than most other people do! Let’s face it, most people in the modern
world don’t see their daily, ordinary, mundane tasks in such spiritual
terms. They’re just things that need to
be done—period. There is nothing
spiritual about them.
Which is why St. Paul adds the
next verse! After he tells us to offer
our bodies as a living sacrifice to God, Paul says, “Do not conform yourself to
this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern
what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.”
Jesus said we’re supposed to
live in the world, but not be “of the world.”
People who are of the world (or what Paul calls “this age”) would have
said to my aunt, “Why bother going to see your husband in the nursing home
twice a day? He barely knows who you are;
he hardly communicates with you or anyone else; and five minutes after you
leave, he doesn’t even remember you were there!”
My aunt saw things
differently. Because she’s allowed her
mind to be renewed by the truth of the gospel concerning marriage, she didn’t
conform her behavior to the wisdom of “this age”; rather, she discerned that
God’s will for her was that she go and visit my uncle every day—whether he
remembered who she was or not.
If we want to do God’s will in
our lives we have to allow the Lord to do this for us. We have to allow the Lord to work on our
minds and give us a different perspective on reality—different, at least, from
the typical, worldly perspective that most people have. Now we do that—we allow God to renew our
minds—in 3 ways (I got these from Fr. Francis Martin): by thinking about holy things, by praying
about holy things (the Bible can help us to do that) and by talking about holy things.
How often do you do you engage
in those 3 activities? If you’re like
me, not often enough.
In this regard, the fact of the
matter is we are all “works in progress.”
That is to say, none of us has a perfectly renewed mind at this
moment. And we never will on this side
of the grave.
Think of Simon Peter. The gospel passage we heard today from
Matthew 16 follows the passage we heard last Sunday. As you will recall, in that other reading
Jesus asked his disciples the question, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter
responded with his bold profession of faith, “You are the Messiah: the Son of
the living God!”
Peter’s mind was renewed to the
point where he saw Jesus differently than other people saw him—including,
perhaps, some of his fellow apostles.
Most other people looked at Jesus
and saw a really smart and powerful rabbi.
But that was all they saw! Peter looked at Jesus and he saw something
more! He saw the deeper reality. He saw the man that Israel had been waiting
for for centuries—a man who had a unique and special relationship with God.
But it’s clear from today’s
gospel story that Peter’s mind was not completely
renewed, because when Jesus began to talk about the kind of messiah he would
be—a suffering messiah—Peter said what
a typical Jewish person of his time would have said: “Oh no, Jesus, not
you! Everyone knows the Messiah is going
to be a great and powerful leader who will bring back the glory days of
Israel. He’s not supposed to suffer;
he’s supposed to conquer.”
To which Jesus responded, “Get
behind me, Satan! You’re an obstacle to
me. You’re not thinking as God does, but
as human beings do.”
Thanks be to God, Peter
eventually got it right. It took him a
while—and a few other falls—but he finally had his mind renewed on this point.
Which was one of the major
reasons why he eventually offered his body in the ultimate sacrifice of martyrdom.
He was martyred in Rome by the Emperor Nero in what is now St. Peter’s
Square.
We will probably not be asked to
make that kind of sacrifice ourselves, but all of us will be called to make sacrifices
like the one my aunt has made in her life.
We will be called to “offer our bodies to God” by doing hard things,
difficult things, unpleasant things—in order to love others and to live our
vocations well.
May we be as successful in our self-offering
efforts as my aunt has been in hers.
