Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 20, 2024

The homilist was away last week. Well the young people sitting up front here spent a night -- I don't know how comfortable it was because they were sleeping outside during the night. It's what we call cardboard city. It is an opportunity for them to have an experience of homelessness. And I wonder whether at school you know people who are similar to what I am going to describe to you. In high school I had two classmates who had this ongoing feud about which one of them was taller. It happened that they were the two shortest guys in the class. And right there we find something about the futility, the nonsense of seeking distinction. Or trying to prove that someone is somehow superior. Well this is what we find in the Gospel. James and John want distinction. I suspect that if Jesus gave them their wish, and I don't know which of them was the older, they might have decided that these places were dissatisfying because the right side is considered preferable to the left. So there may well have been some kind of dispute over that. We see the folly of this. We understand that we must begin our understanding of ourselves by knowing that our God loves each one of us to a degree we cannot conceive. And it is from that awareness of God's complete love for us that we can carry out our life unconcerned about distinctions: that we will make our lives acts of thanksgiving. Jesus asks them, "Can you drink the cup that I drink?" The Old Testament passage and the selection from Hebrews today remind us of that cup that Jesus drank. He laid down his life. He did something which only he could do. As God, he was able to take the initiative. As human, he was able to offer up human nature itself.