Homily for Tuesday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time Cycle II
Theme: WORKING ON YOUR ATTITUDE
By: Fr. Benedict Agbo
Homily for Tuesday November 3 2020
* Phil 2 : 5 – 11, Lk 14 : 15 – 24.
Americans use the word “Attitude” for vices like pride or arrogance. Sani Surk calls it the obesity of the mind – when you have an attitude of puffing up yourself instead of emptying it. Our 1st reading today warns that if we want to be Christians, then our attitude must be Christ’s who had an attitude of poverty/ emptying of self ; his will was to obey his father’s will, his means was to become a poor carpenter of Nazereth and his senses were to become a chaste celibate. The 1st reading teaches us that Christ’s way is the descending way. And this descending way is actually the ascending way in the realm of the spiritual. I defined humility many years back as “a conscious drama of condescension that becomes real with time”. As Christians we learn to act this drama everyday in imitation of Christ our master and with time it becomes our second nature just like humanity was the 2nd nature of Christ whose 1st nature was divinity.
Our society today has got so much of an opposing attitude to that of Christ’s that unless Christians brace up for a revolution, we can’t beat the trend. Instead of our emptying of self, we tend to fill it more or less with useless garbages and unnecessary appurtenances of wealth, affluence and power. This plays out in Nigeria each time we have ceremonies like funeral, wedding, thanksgiving, jubilees, etc in the kind of wastage and superfluous invitations we make just trying to make people think we are big. One of my parishioners that I never knew before so much insisted that I must travel from Nsukka to Portharcourt to attend her wedding ( even when this was so inconvenient and unnecessary) that I began to wonder where our emphasis are.
The parable of the rejected/ wasted dinner tells us about the “frustrations” of God when we reject the real dinner ( the call of spirituality) with so many flimsy excuses ; attachment to possessions, business interests, political ambitions or human relationships. The banquet of Christ was finally filled up by non – Jews, the poor, the crippled and the lame. What does this imply? We may discover when the chips are down that the real spiritual people may no longer be the ones who had the original/ special vocation for it such as the priests and religious but the lay people or even people from other religions that are not even close to Christianity.
We pray for more humility and detachment in the Church of Christ.
May God bless you today!