5 September 2024 - Thursday of the 22nd even week
Homily
‘Leaving everything, they followed him’. This last sentence obviously gives us the key to understanding the Gospel passage we have just heard. We cannot be attached to Jesus without detaching ourselves from everything else. We cannot follow him without abandoning everything that might hold us back elsewhere. Luke, at the beginning of his Gospel, wants to show how the Apostles, and Peter in particular, made this radical break.
But what exactly did they abandon? Matthew, in the parallel text, says: ‘Leaving their boat and their father there, they followed him’. Mark adds the workers, ‘leaving their boat, their father and their workers’. Luke, ever more radical, says simply: ‘leaving everything’. This ‘all’ means much more than material properties. First of all, it means a profession (for the apostles, their profession as fishermen), then a place in society, a role to play. Everything by which a person is normally identified in society.
For those of us who are monks or nuns, when we entered the monastery we left behind everything we had. It could have been a lot or very little. We also left our family of origin and gave up the idea of forming our own family. And then, as we progress in this monastic life, we realise that there is another, more important and more difficult renunciation -- a renunciation that must always be repeated; the one that Jesus himself spoke of when he said: ‘He who does not renounce himself cannot be my disciple’. What is self-denial? First of all, it means renouncing all the things with which we identify ourselves, in order to gradually discover our true identity, the ‘name’ that God has given us.
The most costly renunciation, and the one that most often subtly eludes us, is the renunciation of finding our identity in what we do, in the role we may have in society or in the community. Whatever our role, whether it's responsibility for an important sector of community life or that of third assistant dustman, our temptation is always to find our importance and even our identity in what we do, in the services we ‘generously’ render to the community.
God then takes various means to detach us from these false identifications, to lead us to our true identity. Or it may simply be that the demands of community life require us to change jobs, or that we are unsuccessful in what we have been given to do -- and have to be replaced -- or that illness renders us incapable of doing what we were valued for, or that age requires us to leave one after the other the services we have rendered with great dedication and satisfaction. This is a constant and gradual process of divestment that lasts a lifetime and is never finished, and which can easily frighten us. For when we are stripped of all the things with which we identify, all that is left is our identity, the ‘I’ who had those things and no longer has them, who did those things and no longer does them, who had that title and no longer has it. All we have left is the ‘name’ that God gave us, the new name we received on the shore of the lake when we left our boat there. And then Jesus says to each of us, as he did to Peter: ‘Do not be afraid; do not be dismayed.
Armand Veilleux