By Archbishop Thomas Wenski - The Archdiocese of Miami
Archbishop Thomas Wenski preached this homily while celebrating Mass Feb. 23, 2023 with the seminarians at St. John Vianney College Seminary in Miami.
“Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” This might sound contradictory, but these are the conditions of discipleship. A man called to the priesthood offers himself completely to God’s Church, just as a husband in marriage gives himself completely, holding nothing back from his wife. A consecrated woman gives herself in total devotion as a bride of Christ, just as a wife gives herself unreservedly in matrimony to her husband. All of these examples are renunciations of the self to love in imitation of Christ.
And these are simply the normal high standards of the Gospel that each one of us, through baptism, is to aspire to. As the bishops of the Second Vatican Council said in underlining the universal call to holiness of all the baptized: We can only realize ourselves as human beings – and become the men or women that God calls us to be – only through the sincere gift of ourselves. Thus, for the Christian the way to true happiness – or to put it in a theological way – to beatitude – is found not through self-seeking or self-assertion but through self-giving and self-sacrifice. For the Christian the way to happiness is love – which requires us to take up the cross and follow him. Jesus promises us glory – but the road to glory passes along the way of the Cross, the way of self-forgetting love.
This is the kind of love that unites, a love that heals, a love that reconciles. Sin divides, sin hurts, and sin engenders conflict. Oftentimes, when we come across conflict and division, we misidentify its causes. In the Body of Christ, we are many members – and each member is different. And when we observe division or conflict, we might think that the reason is because of the differences.
But that is to misplace the blame. It is almost blasphemous – because it is as if we are blaming God, who created each one of us – with his or her differences. In the Church, there is great diversity – of language, of cultures, of races; we are male and female, we are rich and poor, learned and unlearned. And in God’s plan, this diversity is not meant to divide the Church but to enrich the Church – for God has made us in such a wise way that there is no one too poor that he does not have something to give, nor is there anyone so rich that he cannot receive.
The Hebrews left the slavery of Egypt, crossing the Red Sea, they wandered 40 years in the desert before reaching the Promised Land. As we begin our Lenten observations, let us remind ourselves that Lent is a call to “Exodus”, to come out of ourselves, our self-centered, self-referential concerns and choose life, “by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.”
