How disappointing it is to work hard at something, only to have it go wrong and have no god outcome happen. Students might spend hours studying for an exam, only to discover the have studied the wrong questions. A worker puts in long overtime hours on a project, only to have the manager scuttle the project.  How disheartening this is for us, and how often it even results in our hesitating to work so hard the next time.

God is amazingly resilient despite human forces and frailties that constantly thwart the divine plan for our salvation. Nothing, not even sparing the life of the divine Son, deters God from offering us a rich heritage in divine life itself. For our part we are to be faithful tennants who rejoie in our heritage and acknowledge that we have been given far more than we expect or deserve.

What is the fruit we are to produce? The fruit of the kingdom is the life God offers but the only way to produce that fruit is to die to self. The kingdom involves our rooting out anything that keeps us from growing in relationship with God and hearing God’s word, our dying to self so that we can do God’s willl.

As faithful tenants we plant seeds of encouragement and hope, we water the growing fruit with prayer, we fertilize it with reflection on God’s word, we cultivate it by good works and we celebrate its abundance by sharing it with others.

We are heirs to more than our rightful share. We receive an inconceivable heritage, abundant life that cannot be pressed out.

We cry this day, “Hosanna!”, but unlike the people of the city of Jerusalem of long ago, we need not ask, “who is this?” This is Jesus, the one who models for us the mystery of life: dying to self so that we may be exalted, raised to new life.

This week we celebrate in pointed liturgies the meaning of our whole Christian living: dying to self so that God can raise us up too. This dying can be as simple as setting aside time to participate in all the Triduum liturgies or as demanding as to recognize what in our lives we still need to abandon to be exalted as daughters and sons of God living new life.

Perhaps what we need to abandon is a habit of thinking of ourselves and our own needs first, ahead of others. Perhaps it means not making ourselves the center of attention. Perhaps what we need to abandon is a lot of clutter we’ve accumulated that can tend to take our minds off what is really important. Perhaps we need to abandon the frenetic pace of our lives and cut some things out so we can concentrate on our loved one more or help those in need. In all, what we give up, what we abandon, leads to a new lease on life. Most important, it leads to new and deeper relationships and richer experiences.

With Jesus, we pray, “into your hands….”

What do you find hard to let go of?

What sort of things make it hard for you to be a disciple?

In today’s selection from Luke’s Gospel, Jesus laid out three “trip wires” for discipleship: attachment to family, the hard consequences of discipleship, and attachment to possessions. All three have a caveat. If someone cannot detach from family or possessions, if someone cannot live out the consequences of Christian life, he or she “is not able to be my disciple”

Attachment to family came first. For, place in family defined place in society. Jesus did not condemn society or the clan system that built it. He simply used a Semitic idiom of extreme language to make his point. When he said “hate,” Jesus was not talking about emotional revulsion and physical distance. He was talking about spiritual detachment, the ability to put God first (before relationship or self-interest). Indeed, spiritual detachment requires one to die to self-interest and let God be Lord of one’s life. Without such detachment, one does not have the ability to truly follow Jesus.

Next, Jesus spoke of carrying one’s cross. We sometimes reduce the meaning of this phrase to our personal struggles. For early Christians, however, this phrase had a far more literal meaning. As Jesus went to the cross, his followers could taste death for their devotion to the Master. Jesus, then, told his audience they must accept that palpable danger. If they did not, they did not have the ability to be a true disciple.

Third, Jesus turned again to the notion of attachment. This time, he addressed the subject of possessions with two parables. The first parable involved a farmer constructing a silo (i.e., a “tower”). Without the money, why should a farmer rush to build a silo that will stand only half-finished? If that happened, the farmer would look like a fool.

The second parable spoke of a king planning strategy against a belligerent opponent. Can the king win the battle against an army twice the size of his own? Or should he sue for peace?  In either case, the message of Jesus rang out clearly. Stop! Think long and hard about Christian discipleship before a decision is made. Divided priorities drain the ability of the person to be a disciple.

We all have possessions, relationships, or ideals we guard zealously. Like Jesus’ challenge to his audience, he asks us if we can stand back and view them in the bigger picture. Before we grab these things, people, or causes and hold them close, can we ask God how important they are and what priority we give them? Can we look to God first and put everything else second?

According to scripture, our social aspirations betray the placement of our hearts – with God, or with false idols. In a passage unique to Luke, Jesus, in our Gospel today,  insists that, contrary to everything society tells us, we should not try to “keep up with the Joneses.” Rather, we should keep “down” with those in need, “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” and rejoice when they cannot repay us, “for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous”.

Jesus uses two familiar social situations – dining at table and guest invitation lists- to teach us about knowing our self in both our gifts and limitations. The first parable about wedding guests invites us to reflect on knowing ourselves in relation to others.  We are invited but it is God who invites. Our relationship with God is as those who are poor; we cannot buy our place in heaven. It is in God’s choosing us  that we share in divine riches and sharing in God’s life. If this is how God relates to us, then this is how we relate to others.

The second parable invites us to reflect on how we wish God to relate to us. No one is excluded from the banquet.  Neither should we exclude others from our attention and service. We are called to extend ourselves  to all others, regardless of social or economic class , religious affiliation or gender. We give ourselves over for the good of others.

“Who will be saved?” If you Google the question, there are pages and pages of search results and books galore trying to distill the answer!  Many of the entries try to streamline the response!   Our Gospel for this Sunday makes it very clear who will be saved.

Jesus makes it very clear, that the journey to Jerusalem, the journey of salvation is very demanding and always requires dying to self.  During Lent, we sang a song penned by Rory Cooney entitled, Jerusalem, My Destiny. Part of the refrain contains these words:  I have fixed my eyes on your hills, Jerusalem, my Destiny. Though I cannot see the end for me I cannot turn away. We have set our hearts for the way; this journey is our destiny.Let no one walk alone. The journey makes us one.

Jesus walks the journey with us and shows us the way to what we desire most in our lives – life with God! Our salvation is not without cost! Being a disciple means daily dying to self and living for the sake of the other – seeking reconciliation with another; accompanying a dying spouse or parent; reaching out in compassion to a neighbor in need.  The journey makes us one.

Who will be saved?  The one who looses their life for the sake of the other.

Anyone involved with youth knows that the question of identity is the question for them. They are trying to find out who they are in terms of talents, career choices, how they relate to others. All of this is a positive step in maturation during which they identify their strengths and weaknesses, consider their gifts and bond with others who help them in this somewhat painful process. When asked about who they are, no one would answer in terms of pain, suffering or death.

In our Gospel today, Jesus asks a similar question about his identity. When Peter answers, the Christ of God, little did he know that implied suffering greatly, being rejected and being killed! This is the way Jesus becomes who he really is – the Risen One.  When we think Jesus’ mission we usually think of his teaching and preaching, his healing and working miracles. Bur underlying these activities is his suffering, death and resurrection. And so it is with us.

We are called to daily take up our cross; to die to ourselves and to care for others. Following Jesus has its cost.  We save our lives by losing them. Self-giving is life-giving.

Pentecost! The celebration of… what? Flames on heads? Speaking in tongues? The blessing of the Spirit on individuals?

Although Pentecost was originally a festival celebration of the wheat harvest in ancient Israel, and of the giving of the law which defined Israel as a nation, for Christians it is known as the time when the power of the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples, and is sometimes called the birthday of the church. In that sense, Pentecost, which can also refer to the entire 50 days between the resurrection and the coming of the Spirit, is the celebration of the formation of the church as corporate body. Jesus’ promise to send the Holy Spirit to guide his disciples, just before he ascends to heaven, is sealed with the arrival of the Spirit on Pentecost.

The Spirit of God has, of course, been present since the beginning of creation, but the event of Pentecost marks the moment when the Spirit works to mediate the presence of the Risen Christ to the church community.

Pentecost, then, is more about the corporate body of the church than about the spiritual presence of God to individual believers. The Spirit is now available to guide the church in its mission to bring the Gospel to the world.

The effect on the disciples as they receive the Spirit is interesting in this respect. They begin to speak in languages other than their own, with the crowd who gathers hearing the disciples speak in their own language. This is the reversal of what happened with the curse of Babel, which resulted in confusion and lack of understanding between peoples. Rather, at Pentecost, all are made able to understand the message of the Gospel, and are drawn into the church through the power and understanding given by the Spirit.

What should this mean for us today, as a people of the Spirit? By this indwelling of the Spirit, we ourselves become advocates of God’s presence for others. It maybe as simple as a reassuring touch or a helping hand. It might be a sacrifice of time in volunteering for a task that needs to be done for the good of all. In all, we are called to die to ourselves in order to be the true presence of Christ for others.

There is a literary device novelists, playwrights and screen writers sometimes use known as a flashback. A flashback fills in details that are helpful to us, the viewer or reader, to understand the unfolding story and/or to remind us of previous incidents. Today’s Gospel functions as a flashback for us. The context is Jesus’ farewell discourse which really happened before Jesus’ passion, death and Resurrection. Now we read these words after those events and hear his words in a new light.

It is only in the Resurrection that we begin to understand Jesus’ final command: “love one another as ‘i have loved you.” This commandment to love one another requires a new way of living our lives for the other without counting the cost; dying to self for the common good. Our dying to self reveals the measure of our love for the other.

My experience with sheep is limited. I have watched them grazing from a distance. I’ve walked among them on my uncle’s farm and found them skittish and aloof. I am allergic to wool.

Most of what I’ve heard about sheep is unflattering. They are reputed to be stupid, lacking in initiative and likely to fall over cliffs or entangle themselves in brush. They are not playful. Lambs have a winsome charm, but the adult animal is a little boring. Rams are distinguished by their horns. Although there may be some variation in color, most sheep resemble every other sheep in the flock. To see one sheep is to have seen them all.

And there is no such thing as an independent or self-made sheep. A sheep needs the shepherd to guide and care for it and – in dire straits – to rescue it. There is nothing sentimental about this relationship: for the sheep it is a matter of survival, and for the shepherd a matter of economy. The sheep are valuable property, not pets to be cuddled.

In our Gospel today, Jesus names himself the Good Shepherd. The good shepherd knows his sheep as individuals. Each one is worthy of his care and attention. Today, let us rest a bit in what the Good Shepherd offers us when we live the paschal mystery. For all our efforts to dying to self for the sake of the other, they do not equal the gift of self that Jesus gives us.

Let us rest a bit this Sunday, basking in Jesus’ care and protection, listening to his voice calling us to his loving embrace, This, too, is living the paschal mystery.