Homily

I was thinking about today's Gospel this past week and one day, suddenly a word kind of popped into my head. It is not surprising that things can just pop into my head. There's plenty of room up there. But the word that came to me was "surrender." Funny how that works. Why "surrender" and what does that mean? So I let that thought roll around in my head for a while. It's kind of like a marble spinning in a clothes dryer. Then it became clearer.

The idea of surrender is a way to describe what we do for a decent portion of our living days. We have our habits, routines, duties, obligations, necessities for life and patterns that form our days. These are the things we do and the way we act after we get out of bed, or when we go to work or school, or shopping or to church. It can be about the way we cook, the foods we eat, what we do at our jobs or even that we go to work five days a week. It can be about how we spend our evenings, or how we raise our children, or about what we do on the internet. There are many areas of our life that are largely governed by our habits or following our sense of duty. And, as a rule, we surrender to these patterns and habits most of the time. That's not a bad thing. Indeed it can be very helpful. Imagine every day, thinking about whether or not you should go to work. "Hmmmm, if I go I will get paid and that's a good thing, but I just do not feel like going today. I went the last two days and it was pretty boring. But we probably need the money." Imagine that mental conversation every day; Monday through Friday, 50 weeks of the year! Every night you and your spouse deciding what sides of the bed you want to sleep on. It could get tedious. So we surrender to a good number of our habits and patterns and that can be a very helpful thing, allowing our lives to run more smoothly and efficiently. Surrendering to them actually can give us some freedom from having to sit and decide about every little aspect of our living. If we had to make all those choices about every single element in our lives, over and over again every day, "choice" would soon become a very negative word.

Here then, "choice" is the opposite of "surrender." And I propose to you that the people in today's Gospel who are bound for hell are the people who had too much "surrender" in their lives. We often think of the hell-bound as people who do very bad things, and of course we are correct about that. But here the Lord surprises us with a very different outlook. The people who are going to hell are also the people who did not choose. They did not step out of their daily patterns and ways of thinking and acting. They did not look past their somewhat comfortable surrender to the life they had grown accustomed to in order to choose to help people in need of their time, their money, their help, their comfort, their prayers, their assistance. They did not choose to help those in need. They preferred their comfort and routine. Because helping the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, those in prison, those without decent clothes—these things are not part of our regular daily habits and patterns. They are not part of our routines. They are not about the patterns of our regular round of activities. We have to choose to see the needs and we have to choose to do something about them. Those who know how to choose wisely are those who can look past the comfort of the regular surrenders and see something greater and more important that they need to take care of. They are heaven-bound, not because they necessarily see all the time a reward for their labors and help, but because when they follow the commands of the Lord to love their neighbor both in word and in deed, they are in fact serving Him.

How are we helped to see what we should choose, and how we should choose it? We grow in our awareness and in our ability to make those good kinds of choices, ironically, by our surrender. But it's not the surrender to habits and patterns that we have made, but rather a greater surrender of ourselves to Christ our Lord. Our willingness to read and to hear His words, our willingness to choose to spend more and better time with Him, our willingness to worship Him, to follow Him, to better conform our lives to His truth, these things lead us to better recognize how we ought to see, and what we ought to do in order to serve Him and to serve Him in our neighbor. There is nothing necessarily wrong with surrendering to our good daily habits and routines unless they are keeping us from surrendering ourselves more completely to Christ.

Lent is a season given to help us shake it up a little bit, or even shake it up a lot. The same routines produce the same results. The same ways of thinking produce the same ways of acting. The same viewpoints and observations will produce nothing new or better for our own lives or anyone else's life. The same kinds of surrender will keep us in the same situation, not a better place.

The change we need will probably not drop into our lives on its own. It will come, more and more, if we choose and surrender ourselves to Jesus. Then, like the heaven-bound in the Gospel, we set our sights more intensely on what He has asked us to do, how He has asked us to believe, and Who He has asked us to love, and how He has asked us to love them. (Choice)

In our times much of the culture believes that the primary job of the Church and for Christians is to help the poor, and this Gospel today would seem to support that. But of course this is not true. The primary goal of Christians is to love and to serve our Lord, and to do that even by loving and serving our neighbor.

The season for choices is coming upon us once again. Let's not surrender to the sadness of our status quo, but set our minds aright toward the glory of God.