Take a step back in time with me.  First century, Judea.  Jesus tells his disciples to take up the cross and follow him.  This was hardly a comfortable or even acceptable thought.  The reality of the Cross was that it was used to make a statement to the people.  Rebel against Rome or doing something criminal and this too can be your fate.  No one wanted to end up on the Cross, let alone pick it up.

Granted Jesus is talking metaphorically for his disciples, but, he knew that this would be his fate because of the radical nature of his message.  He was proclaiming a Kingdom that would replace Rome and would be eternal, not like the temporary nature of manmade structures, whether civil or religious.  The commitment to follow him included the Cross and it would be the deciding point for many.

This is the deciding point for us, too.  Can we pick up the Cross and follow Jesus?  Ronald Rolheiser, an Oblate Father, in an article about today’s readings, quotes James Martin’s book: Jesus, a pilgrimage to describe what it means to take up our Cross:

The need for us to accept suffering in our lives.
No one want to suffer, but it happens. People are not perfect, our bodies are not perfect, nothing is perfect and because of that we feel pain and we struggle.  Buddhism tells is when we accept sufferings it will not control us.  Accepting it, frees us

To not allow bitterness to overtake our lives and not to despair

This is my fear for each of you and every Catholic including myself.  That given all the news that keeps coming out, our hearts will fill with despair and this will choke out our faith and our commitment to Jesus.   With Christ, no matter what people have done in the Church, we, the living Church, will always have hope.

To accept some deaths before our physical deaths

to die to the parts of ourselves that keep us from being full disciples;
to die to our selfishness, our sins, our comfortability, our stubbornness

To be willing to wait for the resurrection

We pray after the Lord’s Prayer every Mass: “we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”  We are pilgrims in this world walking with our eyes fixed on Jesus, even when it is tough, and the way seems hard.

Accepting that God’s will is not necessarily ours

To accept that when we give over our lives to Christ, God will work through us in ways we will never expect

Rolheiser concludes his article with this statement:  that we can only take up our Cross when we begin to believe in the Resurrection.  What a great statement for us to consider, considering the turmoil of the Church right now.  Our faith is in Jesus who calls us to take up the Cross knowing what the disciples did not know; that Easter morning would be end of the story (or its beginning), not Calvary.  Jesus reminds us of the hard truth of discipleship:  when we give our lives over to him we must walk with him to Calvary, but also to Easter Morning.

May each of us take our Cross and walk with Jesus, not just to Calvary, but beyond to the Empty Tomb and life eternal.

 

Have you ever been with someone and the moment you start taking about something uncomfortable or something that someone doesn’t want to hear, they stick their fingers in their ears and usually start singing something, so they don’t hear?  God’s voice can make us uncomfortable sometimes, too.  We hear the Scriptures and, like today’s second reading from James, I would not rather hear it because it is uncomfortable to hear.   Listen to it again:

 My brothers and sisters, show no partiality
as you adhere to the faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ.
For if a man with gold rings and fine clothes
comes into your assembly,
and a poor person in shabby clothes also comes in,
and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes
and say, “Sit here, please, ”
while you say to the poor one, “Stand there, ” or “Sit at my feet, ”
have you not made distinctions among yourselves
and become judges with evil designs?

 

As a parish community, we need to be ready to not only give to Concerns U or Circles of Mercy or Unity House or wherever, we also need to be ready to have someone from any of those places sitting next to us and welcome them as Jesus did.  This is the core of discipleship: to be like Jesus and to bring the Good News to the poor and the forgotten of society.   Everything Isaiah described in the first reading are the signs that the Messiah is among us.   It is up to us, you and me, to now be the signs of the reality of the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed

I have been saying that we need to challenge the Bishops of the United States and the Church to authentic discipleship and I stand behind my words.  We need to hold them to accountability.   Yet, we need to be living it ourselves, or as St Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:  you are a noisy gong or clanging cymbal without love.  I would change it to without living as authentic disciples.

To be a Christian disciple is not an easy call.  It demands from us the willingness to say publicly, “I believe in Jesus and I am Catholic” which is not an easy thing to say right now.  It demands from us the willingness to be like Jesus and touch the hurting and lowly of the world.  It demands that we give up the desire for the best clothes or the finest things and befriend those who have nothing.

As hard as it is to hear it, it is the truth of the Gospel.

          The poor and lowly one we welcome to sit next
to us  here in church is Jesus himself.
The stranger in our midst is Jesus himself
The one who doesn’t look like us is Jesus himself

 

      May the Lord touch our ears and open them to hear his voice and our lips to sing his praise;
for He is God among us