The Experience of Living Last Is Possible

21st Sunday of the Year

For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.

The summer of 2016 I spent in Guatemala for Spanish language studies. For eight weeks, I lived with a host family, took daily classes, and for the first time immersed myself in a foreign culture. And what I wanted to do very badly during those weeks in Guatemala was make a pilgrimage to San Salvador, to see the sites associated with St. Oscar Romero and his martyrdom. I can’t say that at the time I had any real devotion to this saint of the modern Church. But I wanted to have a devotion to him, and I wanted to go on an authentic pilgrimage—something adventurous, maybe a little dangerous, something that could not be accomplished easily but would require real sacrifice—I wanted to go on that kind of pilgrimage for the first time.

Before leaving for Guatemala, I had reached out to some Jesuit friends about the best way to visit El Salvador. The Jesuits for decades had been deeply invested in missionary work in the country. But to my surprise, the word came back to me that I should not visit El Salvador: such was the state of the violence in the country at the time that even the Jesuits had closed their missionary programs for the summer. For a few months, I resigned myself to the impossibility of pilgrimage. Yet those desires did not go away. For weeks in Guatemala, I tried to convince other seminarians from other dioceses who were studying with me to come on pilgrimage to San Salvador, but no one was interested. About halfway through the summer, a good friend from seminary said to me on the phone one afternoon: “just go, you’ll only have this exact opportunity once in your life.”

So, I made my plans. A van would take me from Antigua to Guatemala City. A bus would take me from Guatemala City to San Salvador; maybe 8 hours of travel. I would stay at a Jesuit retreat house near the campus of Central American University, where six Jesuit priests and two others had been killed in 1989 by soldiers of the El Salvadoran army. I would get around by taxi, and I would get by on the little Spanish I had learned by that point in the summer. The journey itself was long but uneventful, apart from the high-stakes drama of using a very limited Spanish vocabulary to explain to El Salvadoran Border Patrol officers armed with machine guns why I was making this visit to their country. But, as proved to be the case no matter where I was or with whom I was speaking, a mention of the name Monseñor Romero and suddenly all became clear.

I arrived in San Salvador to discover a modern hellscape. What passed for suburbs on the northern edge of the city were fine: a skyline dominated by the best of American culture—Pizza Hut, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Wendy’s; houses with yards and palm trees; bus stops; decent cars. But the city center of San Salvador reveals the horrors of civil war: buildings scarred by bombings and bullet holes; makeshift marketplaces of corrugated steel sheets; armed-guards standing in front of any open business; soldiers demonstrating in the plaza in front of the Cathedral; hucksters selling potable water in Ziploc bags out of wheelbarrows for a quarter; poverty and homelessness anywhere you looked. I saw a man with no arms and no legs, wearing a tattered shirt and covered in filth, tucked inside of a vacant doorway on my way to the Church of the Rosary, and wondered to myself when the last time was that he had not been there in that doorway. For the first time in my life, I found myself in the historic district of a national capital that seemingly had nothing to offer a tourist or foreign visitor; no cafes; no hubs of culture or the arts; no fine restaurants; no beautiful old buildings testifying to the power of government or God—even the Metropolitan Cathedral lacked the grandeur that you see in the cathedrals of other cities in Central and South America.

Except for its citizens: there is no doubt that the people of San Salvador—despite the violence and the poverty that define the lives of so many there—the people of San Salvador are the kindest that I have ever met in my life. And this brings me to the point of my story: walking through the streets of the city on a Saturday afternoon, fearful and disoriented, a man approached me from across the street, saying something in Spanish that I could not quite understand, and my reaction was to wave him off as just another huckster out to sell me something that I did not want to buy. I dismissed him, publicly and directly. And he responded by shouting out to me in English: I just wanted to welcome you to my country! To my mind, I had failed the test of morality.

For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.

Last week, thinking about the Christian life, I asked a friend: what would the experience of life be like for us if we actually lived this way—a life of becoming last, becoming least? I think that when it comes to the first becoming last, we tend to think immediately of acts of charity. Go serve; give things away; join a mission; build a house; love someone; do something. And without a doubt, for the first to become last—to save a life by way of losing it—the work of charity, of love, must be done. But it seems to me that there is a deeper kind of human experience that Christ asks of us. For the first to become last requires more than action—more than labor and work for the good of another. For the first to become last there must be a change in attitude, a maturation of our basic Christian disposition. For the first to become last, our regard for the other must become the very way through which we love ourselves—an openness to the other so radical that it strains the limits nature through the gift of supernatural grace. For the first to become last, a stranger must approach us on the street and our first thought is not for our own welfare, for what we want. What we are talking about is a deep, substantial change in how we engage with reality: the first become last when our first, most instinctive concern is no longer for ourselves but for the person in front of us.

In the Gospel for this weekend, someone asks Christ: Lord, will only a few people be saved? And I suppose that with this Gospel we could have all kinds of conversations about salvation and the work of redemption, all to get clear on who gets saved when and how salvation happens for any person. But notice that Christ does not respond to the question on those terms. Christ responds with a deeper interrogation of the human heart. Set your concerns for salvation—for the end of your life—to the side, Christ says, and let me ask you this question: how are you living? The Christian life is one of striving—yearning, working, sacrificing—for the sake of one day entering through the narrow gate. And the salvific paradox of Christianity is the truth that no one will be saved by way of worrying about their own salvation; we enter through the narrow gate by way of leading others there before us. And that kind of life requires a foundational change in attitude; that kind of life requires a maturation of our basic Christian disposition. All our desires to be first we must relinquish for the sake of being last—and in that way we can respond to Christ with the conviction that we are living well.

How do we live this way? How do we get there? How do we make the movement from first to last in our attitudes toward God and toward our neighbor? Here is my best answer to those questions: go try it. Oscar Romero did. Imagine that your friend is killed for standing up for the last—the least—in society and you commit the rest of your days to carrying on that same mission: defending the poor, denouncing injustice, preaching the love of God, and finding a way to make the person in front of you more important than you are to yourself. That was the life of Oscar Romero. And the kind of interior maturation that defined his life takes root within us only through practice, effort, commitment. The problem with attitudes and dispositions is that they run so deep within us; these are features of our interior lives that do not change easily. And then, there is the truth that we are hardwired to care for ourselves. Go too far down the road of moving from first to last in those deepest parts of your interior life and in due time the logic of nature will push back within you: well, I have commitments; obligations; expectations; to live a life where my first instinctive concern is not for myself but for the person in front of me . . . that kind of life makes no sense. We have built up a language of personal responsibility in our culture that makes living the life of the Gospel seem impossible.

Here is the reality: we know the living of the life of the Gospel is possible because the saints give us the testimony of their lives. The saints show us what is possible for the Christian life. I spent less than two days immersed in the life of Monseñor Romero, but nowhere did I see evidence of a Christian who placed his self-regard before his love for the other. The assassin’s bullet that struck him in the midst of offering a Mass on the 24th of March 1980 only confirmed what the saint himself had said about the Christian life in a homily given three years earlier:

[Christianity] offers us a promise of salvation, but this is not a salvation that occurs only after death. It is a salvation that demands work here in history, among temporal realities. This salvation also demands interior renewal, for the kingdom of God is already beginning on this earth, in our own hearts.¹

The salvation of which St. Oscar Romero speaks happens now—it is an interior renewal—a change in attitude, a maturation of a basic Christian disposition, a regard for the other that becomes more important to us than our regard for ourselves.

For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.

Homily preached at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 20th, 2022.

1. Homily preached at the Iglesia El Carmen in Santa Tecla on July 16th, 1977.