Will I bet on myself?

Homily

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time C

4 September 2022

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG

Will I bet on myself?

The cost of being Jesus' disciple is so high.  Will I pay it?

Hate your family.  Give away all your stuff.  Embrace what is most torturing you.  Then and only then you will be my disciple.  Blessed and happy will you be!

Is it any wonder that so many run from Jesus instead of following Him, that He has so few, if any, true disciples?  Jesus obviously failed sales in college.  Or did He/

Would Jesus even take his own advice?  Can you imagine him saying 'I hate you Joseph, I hate you Mary'?  I sat around a campfire with my family just last night.  It was hard enough to try to love each other as God commands, let alone trying to hate each other too.  

Isn't the cost just too darn high?  Do I even want to try to be Jesus' true disciple? 

Jesus' words in the Gospel are meant to get me just to this question which lies at the edge of faith.  Jesus is always extreme because He has to be, for how else could  my obsession with tinkering with my own life might give way to the question of how I will spend my whole life?

In case you didn't notice this week, sports betting is now legal in Kansas.  Don't do it. It's a tax on stupidity.  Still, if bookies were making odds of my being a real disciple, what kind of odds would those be?   Suffice is to say they would not be in my favor. Still, despite the worst of odds, would I bet on myself?

Thankfully, this question, though pivotal, is not the most important.  What matters is that Jesus would bet on you, no matter the odds.  What matters is that He already has.  You know well how it words.  He empties Himself here of everything given Him by His Father, then sends us just as the Father sent Him.  What a crazy bet.

Jesus is probably worse at betting than He is at sales.  Yet His foolishness is the wisdom of God we hear of in the first reading.  Jesus comes this morning not to buy life insurance or hedge a bet like I have, but to go all in on you.  He's too foolish to want to know any different.

It's in the context of His bet on you, that this week's pivotal question comes.  Despite all odds, will I bet on myself?

+mj