Christ Just Wants to Know If He Comes First

Seventeenth Sunday of the Year

Imagine that you are young, maybe in your first year of college, and you discover what you want to do with the rest of your life. You settle on a career for yourself and now the choices you make about the future revolve around the work you want to do. You register for certain classes, select a particular major. You seek out internships, begin to build up a network of contacts in your chosen field. Maybe you start thinking about graduate school programs or where you will live after graduation to get yourself established in your field. You find your work fulfilling, even looking back on your life, and seeing how your past fits together perfectly with your labors in the present and your dreams about the future.

Or imagine that you meet a person and fall in love. You start to think about marriage and family life. You start to make choices about the future that revolve around the kind of life you want to live. You start thinking about your income and the cost of buying a house. You get to know the family of the person you love. You get to know their friends. You start to have serious conversations about children and education and styles of parenting. You find the reality of marriage and family life fulfilling, even looking back on your life, and seeing how your past fits together perfectly with the love you know right now and your dreams about the future.

These are the kinds of stories that many people, maybe most people, would tell about their lives. We get to a place in life at which we make some serious commitments about what kind of person we are going to be. We choose a standard for ourselves against which we will make our choices about the future or think about the past. We find for ourselves an organizing principle that makes sense of our lives. Sometimes what comes first for us is politics or the arts or a love for beauty or adventure. But for many people in the world today, maybe most people, the organizing principle of their lives is a career or a family. The standard for making choices about the future or thinking about the past is the love we have for our families, or the work that we do in a field that we have chosen.

Christ, in the Gospel today, asks his disciples about the organizing principle of their lives. He concludes his Sermon of the Parables with a question: Do you understand all these things? And the kind of ‘understanding’ of which Christ speaks is not an act of mental comprehension. The translation here matters. He is not asking the disciples if they understand these parables the way we would want to understand a math problem written on a blackboard. Christ is also not asking the disciples if they have committed these teachings to memory, the way that we would try to memorize the facts of an historical event or the biographical details of a famous person.

The kind of ‘understanding’ of which Christ speaks is far more personal, far more experiential, far more tangible. What Christ is really asking his disciples is: Have you put all these things together? These teachings on the kingdom of heaven, these teachings on the life of discipleship, these teachings on love for God and what matters most in life, these teachings on judgment and salvation and the wailing and grinding of teeth, these teachings about your life—have you put all these things together?

We could ask the question another way: Do you see in Christ—not in a career, not in a family—the organizing principle of your life? Do you see in Christ the way that your whole life fits together, finds its meaning, past and present and future synthesizing in a personal relationship with the God who creates you and redeems you? The person who has become a disciple for the kingdom of heaven sees in Christ the organizing principle of their lives, the standard for making choices about the future and thinking about the past.

The kind of life of which Christ speaks is new. He is not asking us to abandon career ambition for the life of discipleship; he is not that kind of religious leader. He is not asking us to forsake family life for the sake of the kingdom of heaven; he is not that kind of prophet. What he is asking us, really, is whether our relationship with him—living as a disciple for the kingdom of heaven—is the way through which we make choices about careers or families. Christ is asking us if we see in his life the deep meaning of our existence, the necessary background and foreground to our thoughts about work and family or any other goods in life—politics, friendship, adventure, beauty, charity. Christ just wants to know if he comes first.

I think that the way to make sense of the kind of discipleship of which Christ speaks is to consider wearing a pair of tinted glasses. I have these sunglasses for cycling with interchangeable lenses. Each lens is a different color; one is better for dark or cloudy conditions, another for bright sun, and yet another that falls about halfway in-between. When I make my choice of lens, my whole experience of reality gets filtered and refracted through hues of red or orange. My world takes on a certain color for as long as I wear the glasses, and sometimes when I remove the glasses the contrast in the light startles me or burns my eyes for a moment. Life is different for me because of the color lenses I choose and when I wear them.

What I want to say is that for Christ to be the organizing principle of our lives is for Christ to be the lens through which experience reality. The fact of the matter is that in life we all wear glasses, we all make a choice about how we will frame our experience of reality. Many people choose lenses for themselves tinted for marriage and family life, or for a certain career. And then through those lenses they try to live good lives, even holy lives. You can wear whatever pair of glasses you want in life and still make a commitment to the life of discipleship, work to give yourself over to a relationship with Christ. But Christ wants you to see reality—your reality, your life, your family, your work—through his eyes, to see your life through his life. He wants to come first.

I suppose that to drive home my metaphor I can tell you that choosing the right color lens when cycling is the key to seeing the beauty of the world as you ride. Make the wrong choice of lens and the world seems a pretty dark place, or your experience of reality becomes painful because you have left yourself vulnerable and unprotected. You won’t make it very long before you become less engaged, lose your passion, start to pick up on everything going wrong for you and let those thoughts become consuming. The ride gets hard, real hard, and you get to a point at which you lose sight of why you even set out in the first place.

These parables about the kingdom of heaven tell us that the world in which we live—your life, my life—is a place of profound beauty. There is goodness in the kingdom. Christ is at work in it. But we won’t see the beauty if we aren’t trying to see the world through the eyes of Christ, to see our lives through his life.

Homily preached at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on July 30th, 2023