TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME - SEPTEMBER 22, 2024

TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

In our lives as followers of Christ, Christ walks alongside us as we journey towards our goal of being considered saints in the Kingdom of God in the life to come. This journey of solidarity that Christ undertakes is not merely symbolic; in a very real way, he walked alongside his disciples as they journeyed towards those places where they were led by him. In these scenes, we can place ourselves directly in the position of these disciples. We can see ourselves in the actions they undertook, the conversations they had with one another, and their admiration for Christ as he walked with them. Most importantly, we can take the messages of Christ on these journeys, not just in his words but also in his actions, and apply them to our current journey of the Christian life.

READ THIS SUNDAY'S MESSAGE

This Sunday’s Gospel is broken up into two scenes: first, we have a journey through Galilee back to Jesus’ ministerial base in the town of Capernaum. On this journey, Christ teaches them of his future death and resurrection, though the disciples don’t properly understand what this message means. Also implied later in this reading is the fact that Christ somewhat separates from them for a moment, allowing them to have their own conversations amongst each other as he simply leads them in silence at a distance where they may have felt he had left them alone. In the second scene, Christ asks them what they argued about along the way; he may have been far enough from them not to hear what they discussed, but he was close enough to see that their conversation was not amicable. Their argument was about who was the greatest among them; Christ humbles them all by taking a child and implying that they must serve the smallest among them to be worthy of great things. Anyone seeking greatness will be humbled. If we are to take seriously the applicable imagery of the journey in our own Christian lives, we will find so many similarities between this scene and the life of the Church. As we journey towards Heaven, we walk along the way with each other, learning from Christ the message of the Gospel, particularly that he died for our sins and has invited us into new life through his resurrection. If we understood what this means, we would acknowledge that this is an invitation to share in the suffering as well as the glory of the life of Christ, something the disciples did not understand at the time. So many of us Christians find ourselves in that same position - we may know what Christ is saying to us, but we don’t understand the real-world implications of such an invitation.