What's your favorite paradox?

Homily

Exaltation of the Holy Cross

14 September 2025

St. Ann Catholic Church

Prairie Village, KS

AMDG

What is your favorite paradox?

Before we answer that question, let's make sure we understand paradox.  A paradox is an expression that seems contradictory, but is actually true, and in so being, pushes the limits of what we can know and experience.  

Jesus plays in paradox all the time, and so consistently reminds us that as far as the heavens are from the earth, so far are God's ways about our ways.  You know some of the simplest and maddening paradoxes.  Love your enemies.  Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who persecute you.  Give to those who steal from you.  Then, and only then, will you understand what love fully and really is, what love is capable of.  

Paradox is a key feature of the Gospel.  It's the secret sauce of the beatitudes, what it means to be truly happy.  It is constitutive of heaven, where our narrow categories, judgments and ways of thinking give way to deeper and greater truths and realities.

Another way to think of it is remembering something that you were most sure about, that you were wrong about.  Last weekend I was in Columbia, Missouri, and I was horrified.  I hated it.  Yet I loved it.  The last thing I would ever need are Mizzou friends, and now I'm getting lots of them.  I hate it, but I don't.  I joked that the worst thing that could ever happen to me was to be made the bishop of Jefferson City, and have the University of Missouri as part of my flock.  That would be the worst day of my life, but paradoxically, maybe not.  

A parent said at a kindergarten parent party Friday night - my last kid is starting kindergarten. We have a long way to go, but it will be over too soon. How can it both be true that I can't wait for it to be over, but I'll miss it too?  Cue paradox.

Another paradox is that we are safest not when we are in lockdown, but when we face our fears with courage.  Another is that the greatest way to defeat evil is not to defend against it, or even eliminate it, but to suffer it with courage in love.  No has greater power than this, than to surrender one's life for one's friends.  

There's so many!  

Jesus paradoxically says that I am happiest when my suffering and pain is greatest, for it is precisely at that point when I am most threatened, that my faith, hope and love are stretched to the limits, and my security is placed in them not in self-preservation.  

It's when it's most dangerous to go to Mass and stand up for what I believe, that people are motivated to go. When it's cheap and easy, it's not worth anything.  

Fast forward the paradox of the cross, a reminder that that punishment due to sin is also mysteriously, in Christ, the cure.  When I embrace the thing I least want, or can change, I rob it of it's power.  When I kiss the most threatening thing in my life, I overcome that thing.

The cross is re-presented to us in the middle of ordinary time, as the reminder I need is that the paradox of the cross is my only glory as a Christian.  The glorious cross, the ultimate paradox which reveals fully the power of God and the wisdom of God.  

+mj