Main altar

How often have we heard this verse from the Gospel: “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted." To be exalted and humbled are very human processes in society and our lives. We see that every day in the news. A teacher has the great responsibility to teach by word and example. And In some cultures, a teacher is a truly exalted position, I used to take students to a Buddhist temple in North Saint Louis County. The chief monk there would tell my students “your teacher is your God.” As you can well imagine my students didn’t believe that! I am humbled everyday by the insights of my students, and never more than at this time of year, as a trimester course winds up, and I read their evaluations of my courses.

God says in the first reading: A great king am I. But how many of us say that too in our own way. We do like to think of ourselves as great somethings. We are taught to have self-esteem, and so, many of us take that to mean that if I have high esteem for myself, shouldn’t everyone else have high esteem for me too? The fact is that as we grow in our bodies, minds and our careers, our self does get bigger and exalted, but this self of ours very much gets in the way of our relationship with God and others. We start believing our own PR. We can’t help it if our body gets changes and gets bigger over time – that is quite natural. But it is not our body that gets in the way. It is our minds, our growing egos, our growing desires, that frustrate the promise of peace – the demands of love. Eventually, if we live long enough, and I speak from experience, our bodies head in the other direction, and try to teach us humility in the processes of aging. But even then, some do not learn.

The Gospel says the greatest among you must be your servant. Whoever wanted to grow up to be a servant? What university programs prepare students for careers as servants? But even though we really want to be leaders, we are clearly told here we must be servants. Successful and genuine leaders know that leadership too is service. The Pope’s greatest title is “servant of the servants of God.” We all do serve whatever we truly love. because true Love makes demands. And God, by the nature of things, ranks us only on our realized capacity for love. The human person was created by love, conceived in love, born to love. It is in service to love that we find our happiness. And God himself is the full and complete person that is love itself. It is hard for us to understand how awesome is God’s love – for one thing, we use the word love for lots of things that we really don’t love. We say we love our dog, our cat, ice cream, our job, our house, our new car or any number of things that simply give us pleasure. If we focus our love on things, we become selfish: closed and grasping. We can even start using people like we use things, thinking “what can they do for me?” We accept invitations for social events, so we can network. But it is only persons that we can really and truly love, and even then, we usually love only a few people, and our love tends to exclude others to a certain extent. A husband and wife love each other. We love our parents and family. We love our best friends. We don’t feel that way about all others, about everybody. Yet God not only loves us personally and uniquely, but he loves EVERYONE that way too, loves us so much that He became one of us and gave his human life for us, in much pain and suffering. Which is why he asks us to love all people as members of our family, loving even our enemies.

God loves Kim Jong Un just as much as he loves Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, just as much as he loves Pope Francis. That’s shocking, but it is also good news for us, because if we’re honest with ourselves, in our own way we are probably more like Vladimir Putin more of the time than Pope Francis. Here on the Crucifix is the great Christian paradox, the God of Love who appears so powerless. We might feel He is such an embarrassment to us. I mean: turn the other cheek, love your enemies, if a robber steals your cash give him your ATM card and PIN number too? Blessed are the meek and those who suffer persecution for truth and righteousness? The first shall be last and the last first? We are so tempted, like the Pharisees were, to make God and his service what we would like it to be: more magnificent, more elevating, more like you and I would be if we were God. It is a testament to our Abbey church that it resists that temptation and calls our attention to one image, the sign of contradiction, Jesus Christ on the Cross, who in today’s terms would be Jesus Christ enthroned on the electric chair. The embarrassing God of Love, a love which makes demands. Jesus Christ who was humbled and humiliated and finally raised up and exalted. He promises the same to us who truly follow him and who resist the worlds seductive striving for personal and pharisaical exaltation.

Last week we celebrated the Communion of Saints – All Saints and All Souls Days – we celebrated all those who have undergone death – the ultimate humbling experience, that thing which humans fear most, and the fear of which drives all of us time and time again to sin. And yet Jesus tells us and shows us there is no need to be afraid. In scriptural terms, death is the wedding chamber – the honeymoon suite – where we can finally unite with the God who loves us so, and in which He has united to Him all those saints who have gone before us, those whom we remember in a special way today. All through the month of November, with the whole Church, we remember and pray for our friends and family who have left their life in this world to enter into eternal life, all those names in this silver box on the altar and in the Book of the Dead back in the memorial chapel. Every Mass is a remembrance, a memorial of the saving sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. The presence of the living Jesus Christ in the Eucharist is both a sign of and the way to Eternal Life. If we have faith, that assurance of what we hope for and the conviction that what we cannot see is real, we need have no fear. Jesus has told us in the gospels so many times, “Do NOT be afraid; it has pleased the Father to GIVE you the kingdom.” Our loved ones who have gone before us will one day welcome us into this kingdom. They wait for us there.

So, we pray in this Mass for them and for all those who are continuing their spiritual growth and preparation in that condition of the next life we call Purgatory. There they are guaranteed heaven. Our memory of them, of their love in our lives, and our prayers for them helps them arrive at their union with God and the saints. So, let us accept Jesus’ loving invitation to us to come to Him with our heavy burdens, our burdens of sorrow and doubt, our worries for the future. Come to Him with our hard labor of life in this world and exchange it for the lighter burden he offers. Let us accept His help and guidance to be good servants and servant-leaders. In the words of Saint Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians: Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. And who shares that victory with us here and with our loved ones gone on before us.