Monsignor Krieg
St. Louis Church

Twenty SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Sir 3: 17-18, 20, 28-29 Heb 12: 18-19, 22-24a Lk 14: 1, 7-14

How would you profile an average Catholic, an average Christian? There is so much danger that, when we draw the profile, we can come from our own insights or even prejudice, and the profile becomes more caricature than profile.

Today’s Scriptures give us some idea of the profile that God might offer to us and our world. That divine profile of the Christian, we can be sure, is based on simple truth. God knows us better than we know ourselves, and we need to acknowledge that truth comes from Him and grounds all that is real. Truth is not dependent on our awareness. Our awareness discovers the true; it does not create it.

How we observe that truth is basically opinion, and each of us can be either right or wrong. The old story of the blind men trying to describe an elephant comes readily to mind. One grabs the trunk and declares the elephant to be a hose; another grabs the tail and says the elephant is a rope – you know the story. When each of us has all the information that is needed, we can come to a true picture of the elephant. It is so satisfying eventually to know the truth of any situation that happens to be a part of our daily life. That is one reason for Jesus’ reminding us: “And the truth will make you free.”

As we look for God’s profile in today’s scripture, we hear the sage Sirach call us to conduct our affairs with humility, reminding us that the greater a person may be, more profoundly necessary is that humility. Jesus offers that virtue in Him as the basis for our coming to know Him: “Learn of me for I am meek and humble of heart.”

Humility is, after all, simply the recognition of reality – who we really are, for example, in light of our origin in the creative love of God. If we consider Scripture’s definition of the human in the Book of Genesis as the Image of the Divine, we are far more wonderful than we often give each other credit for.

What we add to that human reality in the course of our lives can really present a daunting challenge, or a roaring flight of fancy. The struggle simply to be ourselves - to be what God made us to be, is one of the really valuable efforts of our entire life and potentially one of life’s greater joys.

If it is true that we humans image the divine in our very substance (as the Book of Genesis reminds us), it is essential that we come to know the God whom we image. In today’s liturgy the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews reminds us that, as Christians: “You have approached Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, …and Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and the sprinkled blood that speaks more eloquently than that of Abel.

The Mount Zion we approach is the site of the institution of the Eucharist in the upper room in Jerusalem. The city of the living God is the community of faith in which we find “Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant”. We are privileged to approach the God we image as we come to Him in Eucharist today or any day we may choose. As Christians so privileged, but as human beings so weak, we can choose to limit our awareness or simply refuse to accept.

When we think of the gospel parable Jesus shared with His hearers in today’s passage from Luke, we can see a suggested parallel between the banquet of the gospel story and the banquet of today’s Eucharist. As the individuals of the story had chosen the first places at the banquet, they set their own estimation of the banquet’s value; they claimed a certain ownership, and they chose a first place. It had become a means for them to make a social statement and to comment on their own self-centered estimation.

Jesus counsels taking the last place at the banquet not as a gimmick to be called higher, but as a means to learn the true value of the banquet and our own God-given worth and place within His love. Each Eucharist we are called to go up higher, to draw nearer to Mount Zion, to Jesus, mediator of the new covenant, to Jesus, “meek and humble of heart.”

Someone has said that if we could see ourselves as God sees us, we wouldn’t be able to stand the beauty. Can we find our profile at Eucharist today or any day? Have we come to learn of Him who is meek and humble of heart? Have we come to Mass today to learn who we are? What profile do we fill?