23rd Sunday Ordinary Time September 7, 2025

Readings: Wisdom 9:13-18b Philemon 9-10, 12-17 Luke 14:25-33

With the first reading, perhaps we can pray for the gift of wisdom and the gift of the Holy Spirit to be in our personal lives and in our Christian and Catholic communities. We can never take such gifts for granted. Each day we can ask God to give us these gifts and to guide our lives. The Gospel is also a wisdom teaching today. The Gospel teaches us about our relationships with the material goods of this world. We need to know how to renounce such goods. We need also to renounce our families. And finally, we must learn how to carry our cross each day.

These teachings of Jesus sometimes make us squirm! All of us like to have worldly goods. We want to have homes and possessions. We even believe that we should have enough to pass on to our children or to others. Jesus does not insist that all of a sudden we give away everything that we own. Renouncing something means that we must take a different relationship to it. We must not think of earthly goods as our possessions, but rather as gifts of God for us to use for our benefit and the benefit of others. We are usually quite happy to use earthly goods for our own benefit! We are not always so happy to use our earthly goods for the benefit of others, especially if those others are not family or friends! The Gospel invites us to change our attitudes. We must learn how to love everyone, especially our enemies.

In order to do this, we must also renounce our families. That means that we must take a different relationship to our families. We must still love them—there is no doubt about that. But we must love them objectively and clearly. We are not allowed to have simply a blind relationship of commitment to our families. On the other hand, how foolish it would be if we were loving everyone else and treating our families like enemies! Jesus invites to look at our relationships to money, to earthly goods and to family today. All of this can be seen in the invitation to us to take up our cross and follow Him. This is the most important invitation of today’s readings: follow Jesus.

Let us ask that our hearts might become free from all attachments that keep us from following Christ. May God’s Holy Spirit give us wisdom in every situation so that we may understand God’s holy will and do that will with joy and generosity.

Let us ask that our hearts might become free from all attachments that keep us from following Christ. May God’s Holy Spirit give us wisdom in every situation so that we may understand God’s holy will and do that will with joy and generosity.

                      Fr. Terry.