HOMILY BY DEACON JITHIN ANTO
On a Thursday after Ash Wednesday, 2020.
IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO CARRY OUR CROSS FOR A DAY OR A PERIOD OF TIME BUT EVERY SINGLE DAY OF OUR LIVES.
Take up your Cross and follow me.
I have been giving homilies at the parish every week since I have been appointed there and it has given me a lot of confidence to stand in front of the people and preach. But now standing here and looking at you people, the only confidence I see is on the pew there. But I will take up this cross for now.
It is only when we are truly prepared to stop living life for ourselves, and starts living it for Jesus that we truly find life. That is at the heart of what I think Jesus is calling us to do here. His call is to stop living life our way, and living it his way.
If you ask people what they want from life, most people might say they want to be healthy, happy, enjoy a good life, have enough money to live comfortably, have a nice house, or be in a trouble-free parish etc. It is very rare that people would prefer any sort of pain to come to their life. Therefore, trying to deny ourselves in little things that we enjoy, can be a struggle for many of us!
We are all here as followers of Christ. So it is demanded of us to walk the same path, carrying our cross after Jesus. It is not enough to carry any cross but our own, not others’ cross. Everyone’s cross will be different from the cross of Jesus and from that of other people. It can be anything. For some it can be as simple as bringing back the coffee mugs or not eating sweets, it is tough for some. And for others it can be as hard as teaching at CTC or managing 40-45 seminarians. So it is important for us to carry our own crosses and follow Christ.
We must also pay attention to another important word Luke uses here: “every day”. It is not enough to carry our cross for a day or a period of time but every single day of our lives.
Going back to what people want from life, I feel what most people want is an easy life. And I think we sometimes want our faith to be easy as well. We want forgiveness but not repentance and reconciliation, because that is hard work. We want all the blessings possible, we want the Holy Spirit to grant us everything but without Christ - we are not ready to bear the weight of the cross.
The call to follow comes at a cost. It is not always easy as one might want. That’s why Jesus tells the disciples, that the Son of man has to suffer and be killed. Jesus wants us, as his disciples, to realize that danger and hardship would be in our future. He does not want us to assume that our life as his disciples would be easy, simple, or glorious.
The trials, difficulties, dangers – the daily crosses that we face are a reminder of the pain that Jesus suffered. Following him invites us to share the pain and sufferings of Christ. We are set free from the clutches of sin by the cross that Jesus carried, why then should we be ashamed or be reluctant in carrying the cross on a daily basis?
Jesus also asks us to deny ourselves. Denying ourselves is not limited to self-denial, it is a total renunciation of our self and our will – which in turn allows God to enter into and work in us and fill us with the same spirit, zeal, and conviction that Jesus had when he carried the cross so that we can live for Christ in our world.
The acts of self denial that we do, during this period of Lent, point towards the interior self-denial by which we offer our whole self to Christ and his mission in the world. Let that be what we strive for in this season of lent, to have the heart, mind and will of Christ to find true life and to live life the way he wants us to live.