True freedom is living in the Spirit

Homily for June 26, 2016 (13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)
1 Kings 19:16b, 19-21; Psalm 16; Galatians 5:1, 13-18; Luke 9:51-62

In his inaugural address in January 1961, President John F. Kennedy boldly proclaimed that a goal of the United States would be to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.  Some -time after that, President Kennedy was touring the NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston when he encountered a man who was sweeping the floors.  The President asked him, “What do you do here?”  The man looked up from his broom and replied, “Mr. President, I’m helping to put a man on the moon!”  His work, however humble it seemed, had a greater purpose.

That man had a real sense of mission; and God’s word today challenges us to similarly embrace our mission as followers of Jesus.  Our gospel passage began with Jesus “resolutely” turning his attention toward Jerusalem and beginning his final journey to the place of his trial, torture and execution.  We can only imagine the sense of foreboding that accompanied him as he made his way, accompanied by his disciples.  They were only beginning to understand what he had been called to do and what it meant to follow in his footsteps.  So it’s no wonder that, when Jesus was rejected by the people of a Samaritan town because they followed different religious traditions, his disciples wanted to lash out and call down fire from heaven to destroy them. Jesus, however, wasn’t about to be distracted by anything like a religious or ethnic insult.

As he encountered potential followers along the way, he made it clear to them and his disciples that sharing in his mission would demand several things of them:

  • Itinerancy—They must be willing to journey and not have a place of their own.
  • Clarity of Purpose—They had to keep their focus on proclaiming and building “the kingdom of God,” a world where God’s compassion and will are more fully realized.
  • Commitment—They couldn’t allow anything to distract them, not even the demands of family or the thought of what they might lose or have to give up.

We saw a very similar commitment in our reading from 2 Kings 19, where Elijah caught Elisha by surprise and made him his successor by literally passing the mantle of prophecy on to him.  Like the first disciples of Jesus when they were called to abandon their nets and their livelihoods as fishermen, Elisha’s commitment seemed almost instantaneous and total:  he liquidated his assets—a team of oxen and his plowing equipment—and cooked a meal for his people.  Elisha chose to put his hand to a different plow and never looked back.

Fulfilling the mission that Jesus has given us certainly demands courage, but it also requires real freedom.  But it’s not what too often passes for freedom in our country and culture, that is, doing whatever we want, whenever we want, however want and with whomever we want.  That’s not freedom but rather license.  It’s what St. Paul in our second reading described as living in the flesh.  For Paul, it was merely exchanging “the yoke of slavery” of obedience to the Jewish law and circumcision and reliance on them for salvation for the yoke of our impulses and appetites.  Instead, he asserted, true freedom is living in the Spirit and doing God’s will, making real the grace of God.  It’s in that freedom we also fulfill our mission as Christians. +