4 September 2025 - Thursday of the 22nd week of Ordinary Time
Homily
‘Leaving everything, they followed him.’ This last sentence obviously gives us the key to understanding the passage we have just heard. One cannot attach oneself to Jesus without detaching oneself from everything else. One cannot follow Him without abandoning everything that might hold one back elsewhere. At the beginning of his Gospel, Luke wants to show how the Apostles, and Peter in particular, made this radical break.
But what exactly did they abandon? Matthew says, ‘leaving their boat and their father, they followed him.’ Mark adds the workers: ‘leaving their boat, their father and their workers.’ Luke, ever more radical, simply says, ‘leaving everything.’ This ‘everything’ means much more than material possessions. It means first of all a profession (for the apostles, their profession as fishermen), then a place in society, a role to play. Everything by which a person normally identifies himself in society.
When we entered the monastery, we left behind everything we had. It could have been a lot or a little. We also left our families of origin and gave up forming our own families. And then, as we progress in this monastic life, we realise that there is another, more important and more difficult renunciation - a renunciation that must be made again and again; the one that Jesus himself spoke of when he said: ‘Whoever does not renounce himself cannot be my disciple.’ What does it mean to renounce oneself? First of all, it means renouncing all the things with which we identify ourselves, in order to gradually discover our true identity, the ‘name’ that God has given us.
Even though it is quite different in female psychology than in male psychology, the renunciation that costs the most, and the one that most often subtly escapes us, is the renunciation of finding our identity in what we do, in the role we may have in society or in our community. Whatever our role may be, whether it is the responsibility for an important area of community life or that of third assistant in dusting, our temptation is always to find our importance and even our identity in what we do, in the services we ‘generously’ render to our community.
God then uses various means to detach us from these false identifications, to lead us to our true identity. Either it is simply the demands of community life, which require changes of job, or we encounter failure in what we have been entrusted with - and we have to be replaced - or illness that makes us incapable of doing what we were appreciated for, or age that requires us to give up, one by one, the services we rendered with great dedication and also great satisfaction. There is a process of constant and gradual stripping away that lasts a lifetime and is never finished, and that can easily frighten us. For when we are stripped of all the things with which we identify, all we have left is our identity, the ‘I’ that had these things and no longer has them, that did these things and no longer does them, that had this title and no longer has it. All we have left is the ‘name’ that God gave us, the new name we received at the lake when we left our boat there. And then Jesus says to each of us, as he said to Peter: ‘Do not be afraid’.