Homily 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time - September 22, 2024

 Today's readings can be found here.

            What kind of servant are we?  That’s the question our Scriptures are asking today.  The letter from James and our Gospel present two types of servants.  James warns us of the consequences of being one kind of servant.  This is the person that serves their own interest.  It’s the kind of servant our world and our culture calls us to be.  How does our culture define greatness and success?  It’s measured by our personal achievements.

            I remember growing up, I was encouraged to become an engineer.  Not necessarily because I was good at science or loved engineering, but because engineers earned a good living.  One of the ways our culture defines success is by how many things we accumulate.  Having a big house, driving an expensive car, taking exotic vacations.  Our culture also defines success by how well known we are.  We constantly hear about what celebrities or sports figures are doing and what they think.  We measure the “influence” of social media content providers by the number of their followers or subscribers.  Our culture tells us to look out for ourselves because no one else is doing so.  The one who dies with the most toys wins.

            The problem with that kind of success is that it’s never satisfying.  You always want more.  How can you make more money.  How can you get to whatever the next level of followers is.  How can we get better at whatever it is we’re trying to achieve.  It leads to jealousy and selfish ambition, just as James tells us.  Someone always has more of whatever we think we need.  Which makes us think that we have less.  This results in the conflict James tells us about. We start making everything about ourselves and not others.

            Even the disciples were not immune from this sort of thinking.  They were arguing about which of them was the greatest.  The disciples were thinking in a worldly way.  They were the ones chosen by Jesus to be the leaders of Jesus’ followers.  How were they supposed to lead the rest?  They can’t all be equal, right?  It only makes sense that the greatest among them should be in charge.  However, that’s not how Jesus saw leadership and greatness. If you want to be the greatest, you must be the last and servant of all.  You must serve others first, then think of yourself last.  That’s the total opposite of what our culture tells us to be.

            There are many ways we can serve others but it begins with our attitude towards them.  Do we see others as Jesus sees them?  I’ve been reading a book on devotion to the Holy Spirit.  It calls us to invite the Holy Spirit to live in our hearts.  We then should ask the Holy Spirit to guide our actions.  One of the gifts the Holy Spirit will give us is charity.  We typically think of charity in the sense of giving monetarily or of our possessions.  Those are examples of charity.  The Latin root of the word charity is charitas.  This is defined as a generous love.

Imagine if we gave our love to others as if we were giving away all our possessions.  We could generously love our family members, our classmates, our co-workers, people we don’t know.  We can love them even more generously if we have a difficult relationship with them.  How might that change our lives?  If we treat everyone we know and meet with this generous love, the Holy Spirit will show us how we can serve them.

            Our readings today challenge us to choose a way to serve.  We can seek success and greatness the way the world and our culture defines.  We can choose to be great the way Jesus defines it, being last and the servant of all.  One way leads to conflict, the other peace.  Which way will we choose?  Are we willing to invite the Holy Spirit into our heart and receive the gift of charitas?