Hand over your whole self, God says

32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: 1 Kgs 17:10-16 
Second Reading: Heb 9:24-28
Gospel Reading: Mk 12:38-44

According to this Sunday’s Readings, the cost of following Jesus is nothing less than everything. Elijah asks a widow about to die of starvation to feed him first. Another widow puts all she has into the temple treasury.

In turning to God, we start with our various desires and interests. We admit that God has claims on us, so we agree to stop doing some of the things we like and to start doing some things we dislike. However, we hope that when we have met all God’s demands, he will give us some chance, and enough time, to get on with our own lives and do what we like. As C.S. Lewis says, “We are very like an honest man paying his taxes. He pays them all right, but he does hope that there will be enough left over for him to live on.”

However, God says: I don’t want so much of your time and your money and your work; I want you. Hand over your whole self: everything you think innocent and everything you think wicked. To follow me, you must deny your very self and take up your cross daily.

He himself showed us how: to ransom a slave, he gave away his Son, the Church notes in her Easter Exsultet. The Letter to the Hebrews says Christ came “to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself.” He kept back nothing.

To hand over our whole self to God seems almost impossible. Indeed, without God’s help, it is impossible. However, it is equally impossible to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, with our mind and heart centred on money or pleasure or ambition, and to be, at the same time, honest and chaste and humble. “No man can serve two masters,” Jesus warned.

If we do not resolve to hand ourselves over to God completely, he cannot help us. He cannot accept a compromise, for his plan is to make us perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. Whatever it costs us, whatever it costs him, he will not rest, nor let us rest, until he can say without reservation that he is well pleased with us, his adopted sons, as he said he was well pleased with his begotten Son, Jesus.

If we try to limit God’s entry into our lives, we will find that we have excluded him. As St. Thomas More said, if we try to make a contract with him concerning what we will do and what we will let him do, we will have to supply both signatures ourselves.

We must never think that we are good enough. The question is not what satisfies us, but what satisfies God. He is the inventor; we are only the machine. He is the painter; we are only the picture. If he wants to make his handiwork perfect, we must let him do it.

That, then, is the cost of following Christ. What are we promised? “We have put aside everything to follow you,” Peter said to Jesus. “What can we expect from it?”

Jesus replied, “Everyone who has given up home, brothers or sisters, father or mother, wife or children or property for my sake will receive many times as much and inherit everlasting life.” If we turn over to God everything we have, God gives us everything we want: neither our jar of meal nor our jug of oil is ever empty. In fact, if we let him, he gives us himself.

“Keep back nothing,” Lewis says. “Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay; but look for Christ and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in.”

Father Hawkswell teaches a free course on the Catholic faith on Mondays until Pentecost: from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at St. Anthony’s Parish, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver, and again from 7 to 9 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way (just off 33rd Avenue between Oak and Cambie). Everyone is welcome, Catholic or non-Catholic.