13th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
First reading: 1 Kgs 19:16b, 19-21
Second reading: Gal 5:1, 13-18
Gospel reading: Lk 9:51-62
St. Paul says that Christ has freed us and means us to remain free, and he warns us against slavery. However, he also tells us to serve one another and not slip into self-indulgence.
What, then, is freedom?
To children, it means self-indulgence. When a man I knew, then about five years old, tried to tell his younger brother what heaven was like, he said, “Imagine yourself eating lollipops, one after the other. Well, it’s better than that!”
To him, at that age, heaven meant the freedom to eat as many lollipops as you wanted.
However, as adults, we know that eating lollipops is not freedom, but slavery to indigestion. The impulse to eat comes not from ourselves – our soul – but from our appetite, something we must control if we want to be free from indigestion and truly happy.
Some adults have similar childish ideas. For example, many people think that happiness comes from submitting to every sexual desire. However, people join Sexaholics Anonymous because they have become slaves to their sexual appetites and want to be free.
What, then, is freedom? If we are truly free, what do we do?
We do things that will make us truly happy – happy in the long run.
God made us to know him, love him, and serve him in this world so that we can be happy with him in the next world. He knows what will make us truly happy, without growing tired of it or getting indigestion. Moreover, since the Fall, we can no longer perceive clearly what we want most deeply, so he has told us: love God and, out of love for God, love our neighbour.
This seems the way to be not happy, but unhappy, denying ourselves the things we want.
However, that should not surprise us. Even on the human level, there are things we must give up if we want to be more deeply happy.
For example, if we want good health or a slim figure, we must deny ourselves excessive alcohol and desserts. If we want to make more money, we must not spend too much time on leisure. If we want happiness in marriage, we must renounce other men and women.
It can be difficult for us to realize. I know a man who, he said, had always been the family’s “good boy”: happily married, with a very attractive wife, a good job that he liked, and a successful grown-up family.
Nevertheless, he said, “I sometimes wish I had broken out – done what I wanted without considering the consequences.”
“Most people would envy you,” I replied. He mused a while and said, “I hadn’t thought of it like that. People who do just what they want, when they want, aren’t really all that happy. You’re right; I don’t know anyone who enjoys life more than I do.”
We are challenged, always, to give up lesser goods for the sake of greater goods. It is not just the Church’s rule, but the rule of life. Liberty means freedom from slavery to goods that interfere with our pursuit of greater goods.
Now the greatest good – in the long run, the only good – is Christ, who brings with him all other goods.
He is the only good to which we can legitimately become slaves. We can always give in to our love for him because he loves us and knows and desires our everlasting good: the good we were made for, satisfying us forever.
We are about to celebrate Canada Day. In Canada we enjoy a liberty unknown to most of the world.
Let us, as St. Paul warns, be careful, or this liberty will provide “an opportunity for self-indulgence,” leading to slavery to our appetites – a worse slavery than any imposed by the most tyrannical government.
Let us pray for ourselves, that we may value our liberty and use it for our own deepest happiness.
