Maybe Most Days I Want an Easier Life
4th Sunday of the Year
What I want to share with you today is an idea that has remained with me over the years, the kind of idea you push away but that always returns and forces you to confront it. The idea came back to me two weeks ago. The Gospel reading for daily Mass told the story of a man with a withered hand sitting in the synagogue on the sabbath. The pharisees are watching Christ wanting to accuse him for curing someone on the sabbath—a day that is meant for rest, and not for labor.
Christ knows the minds of these pharisees and asks them: Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?
The question that Christ asks the pharisees struck me powerfully. The question makes the implicit claim that to not help a person in need who is standing in front of you is to perform a work of evil; to ignore a person in front of you who needs some kind of saving is to destroy another life. Maybe dozens of times before I had read that Gospel passage or heard Christ’s teaching but never had those words struck me so powerfully. I began to think of the many people in genuine need who I see each day on the streets of Baltimore, but who I do not help because I have an important meeting to attend, or a wedding to celebrate, or some other kind of work. I began to think of the people we see each day who need genuine saving, but who we often ignore because there are other good and necessary demands placed upon us: we have families, children, jobs that really matter, commitments to honor.
My experience of reading the Gospel forced my old idea back upon me, and here it is: for those of us who live in the world—and that includes me and most of you—there is a tension between vocation and the demands of the Christian life. What I mean is that when I walk past a homeless person in need and do nothing about the situation because there is a wedding I need to attend, there is a tension that develops between my vocation and the demands of Christ. Me doing my vocation well means that sometimes I can’t stop to help a person in need. What I mean is that when you find a sick person needing care in a hospital but walk past them because you need to visit someone in your family who is sick, there is a tension that develops between your vocation and the demands of Christ. You doing your vocation well means that sometimes you can’t stop to help a person in need.
I find it difficult to well-articulate my idea. Maybe a good way to describe my thinking is that because of vocation our charity becomes particularized while the demands of Christ remain universal. What I mean is that our vocations give us a space in life for the work of love. A mother or father practices charity in the life of a family; a parish priest practices charity in the life of a parish. There might be people in need who we meet from outside our family or outside our parish, but the demands of our vocation give us license to move past these people because of our family or parochial obligations. Maybe sometimes we do stop, but the decision is ours to make. The universal command to charity that Christ places upon us—help the person in need who is in front of you, full stop—becomes conditioned and contextualized by the reality of our vocation. There is a tension that develops between our vocation and the demands of the Christian life.
The tension is not a simple matter of choosing between feeding your child or feeding the homeless person in front of you; the problem goes much deeper. The vocation we receive to live in the world means that we create lives for ourselves: families and homes and friendships, certainly, but then also the ways that we like to relax and the passions that we possess for different parts of life and our hobbies and habits and the many good things in the world that we decide will matter to us. The vocation becomes a life filled with lesser commitments and desires because the vocation is to a life lived in the world. Maybe the example of walking past a homeless person to attend a wedding seems a little exaggerated, but how many homeless people will get walked past today by people on the way to a football game? What are the chances that some person walking to the football game today will meet a homeless person on the street and choose to miss the game because they remember Christ talking about saving lives instead of destroying one?
These kinds of tensions in life, really, are what St. Paul wants to warn us about in our second reading today. He is not telling anyone not to get married. Paul might possess a preference for people remaining unmarried, but in other passages in First Corinthians he recognizes that Christ calls people to the vocation of marriage and that marriage is a genuine path to holiness in life. But St. Paul is a good pastor, and he is concerned for the married people under his care. He knows that to meet the obligations of family life and to meet the obligations of the Christian life in general is not easy. How is someone supposed to commit themselves wholeheartedly to a family placed under their care and to the life of evangelical witness and charity that Christ commands of all disciples?
The consequence is anxiety—a literal experience of being pulled apart from within. I think that for St. Paul, living the explicit life of the evangelical counsels—leaving everything behind to follow Christ under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—makes the most sense because then there is no experience of tension between the demands of love. But Christ calls people to marriage, so that divine vocation cannot be ignored. There seems to be an irresolvable tension at the center of the Christian life for those who are not called to the life of the evangelical counsels.
I wish I could give you a way forward, some way to resolve the tension. I have struggled with the tension between vocation and the demands of the Christian life for many years. Some days I am convinced that life would be much easier for me, for anyone, really, if we could all go sell what we have and follow Christ. But we have an obligation to live the life that Christ gives us. A person called to marriage belongs to a family; a person called to priesthood belongs to a parish. Christ wants these lives for us. The problem is that he also wants us to stop everything so that we can save the life in front of us.
More and more I am convinced that living with the tension is the path to holiness and Christian perfection for those of us who are called to remain in the world while we strive to meet the demands of the Gospel—the tension itself is a cross that we must carry. Many of us, most of us, are not called to renounce the world to follow Christ. Many of us, most of us, are called to live in the world, to build a life for ourselves, to not sell our belongings and yet to follow Christ. The Christian life, for anyone who really cares about love for God and love for family and love for neighbor, is very hard. The consequence of that kind of life is anxiety, the literal experience of being pulled apart from within as we struggle to meet our obligations. But the anxiety is a cross, and a cross—when carried well—is a path to holiness. And I think we can say more: anxiety breaks us down and helps us to open ourselves up to Christ. You cannot carry a cross well on your own, so if your anxiety leads you to God, then you just might become a holier person because of your struggle.
I think that one question we need to ask ourselves is: Am I, really, genuinely, anxious about the demands of love in my life? Am I really, genuinely, getting pulled apart from within each time I meet a person in need but do not stop to help them? I think that over time we start to push the tension away. No one likes the experience of anxiety in life. We start to use the language of vocation to justify our choices, to give ourselves license to not stop to help the person in need. Enough time passes and suddenly we aren’t making any choices at all, we are just walking past people Christ wants us to love without thinking or feeling, free from tension and anxiety. That kind of life is too comfortable for anyone who wants to follow Christ.
I am not saying that your family counts the same as whatever stranger you meet who is in need. You need to feed your children first, and if you have someone in your family who is sick in the hospital, your vocation to family life demands that you not stop to care for every other sick person you meet along the way. But I am saying that making those kinds of choices should probably be harder for most of us. Meeting the demands of our vocation to the exclusion of meeting the demands of Christ’s universal command to love the person in need who is in front of you should really hit us like a punch to the gut.
Most of us probably know we can do better. The people in the synagogue who hear Christ teach in today’s Gospel are amazed that he teaches with authority. And we know where the teaching authority of Christ is going to take us: love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself—and your neighbor, as Christ will later tell an expert in the law, is whatever person you meet who stands in need of mercy. Those commands of love are burdensome, sometimes in conflict. There is tension in our lives and the Christian life is hard.
What I want to say to you today is: let the commands of love work on you and cause you anxiety and make you question how it is even possible to do what Christ asks of you. There is holiness to be found in the struggle, perfection to be gained by carrying the cross that love and charity demand.
Homily preached on Sunday, January 28th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary