29th Sunday in Ordinary Time

This week’s collect offers us a very interesting way into today’s Gospel. It’s relatively simple in its words, but it leads us rather far:

Almighty ever-living God, grant that we may always conform our will to yours and serve your majesty in sincerity of heart.

We pray today that our wills would be conformed to that of God. That we would desire the things that He desires; that we would have as our aims the aims that He has in His heart; that our thoughts and actions would be directed towards the same ends as His.

The common saying that “the Lord works in mysterious ways” is a bit unhelfpul in this. It makes us conceive of God as someone who is unknowable, beyond comprehension, almost fickle. And while there is some truth in that, it makes us forget the incredible fact that this same God has revealed Himself to us. He has made his will manifest — first, through the law and prophets, which, like rays of light reflected by a prism each show us something true of God; and then in His Son, in whom the Light of the World has come.

To put it simply: we know what the will of God is, because he has told us, showed us, lived it for us, imparted it to us. We may not know his plans in every specific situation: but we know what His general purpose is with the world.

The beautifully poetic prophecy about Christ our Lord in Isaiah tells us, too: “* through him what the Lord wishes will be done … he offers his life in atonement … By his sufferings shall my servant justify many, taking their faults on himself.* Then the Psalms: “The Lord looks on those who revere him, on those who hope in his love, to rescue their souls from death, to keep them alive in famine.”

The will of God for us each, and as the human race, is, atonement - at-one-ment - union with Him; that we would be made just - conformed to His truth and justice so that we may be like him; to make us free of faults: those that our fallen nature has produced in us, as well as those that we committed ourselves; to keep us alive truly alive; and not just to rescue us from evil things in this world, but even rescue us from death itself. This is God’s vision for each of us. This is what he came for in the person of Jesus Christ.

So as we pray today that we would be given the guidance of the Holy Spirit to enable us to conform our will to His, we are also called to participate in this saving plan. Our aims for others, and our aims for ourselves, should be these same things: truth, justice, freedom, restoration, healing, sustenance, life, all achieved through deep union with Him.

God wishes to give us these because He thinks we are worth all this. We were worth coming into the world for: to lay aside the eternal glory of heaven and to be born in poverty and persecution; to suffer all those things that we suffer; to be worn out, to be rejected, to be mocked, but even beaten, tortured, and to die, so that our death could be overcome by death.

If this is how God views us, this is how we should be viewing our fellow man as well; because this is His will for each — this is the true purpose of all human life. It is important to keep these first principles always in mind, because they will allow us to seek what is truly good for us, and when moral difficulties arise, going back to these things will help us to see clearly what God wishes in complex situations.

Take for instance the current debates on assisted dying: will it enable life for others? Well, first, in the physical sense, no, clearly not. But you could say, we are talking about making dying easier for those who are terminally ill anyway — isn’t that just merciful and compassionate? But to argue in such a way would betray that we are in fact operating with wrong definitions about “mercy” and “compassion”. “Mercy” is not at all about seeking shortcuts, but to give more than what we need, in order to prevent the need from arising again. Mercy makes sure the desire to take one’s life cannot even arise. And compassion is to share in one’s suffering — in order to alleviate it, to soak up some of it, and to exhaust it of its power. Simply allowing someone to cut their precious life shorter because of the tremendous pain they experience — is that compassion? Is that truly taking on difficulty ourselves so that others would have less? Wrong ideas about mercy and false compassion will not live up to the test of measuring them against God’s will about human life: they do not yield greater freedom, they do not yield more life, but rather allow others to make truly perilous moral choices about themselves or others.

As you can see, to come to a stage where our wills are conformed to that of God, to have it so deeply ingrained in us that it becomes almost like a gut-feeling, that will need work. If we wish to “conform our will to His”, then that means deliberately training our will. And that means taking time to examine things in the light of revelation, and in the light of the Holy Spirit’s guidance. It means knowing our Scripture, it means knowing the teaching of the Church because God has instructed it through the Holy Spirit, so fortunately we do not need to start afresh each time, and it means allowing an honest, loving, true relationship to develop with Him through Christ, whom we encounter in the Sacraments.

The disciples desired to participate in Christ’s glory — to sit on his right and left; to share in His life in heaven. To get there, we first need to share in His baptism, and we need to share in His cup. In generic terms, that will mean the life of the Sacraments. It will mean a life of conversion, repentance, of penitence, so that our consciences would be cleansed of the mark of sin, and that we would be enabled to access God’s grace in the Sacraments unhindered and without danger to ourselves. But in specific terms, it means allowing God’s will to be done in our own lives first, even if it brings about conflicts and difficulties with this world. Even if it means that we sometimes need to fight for it; or that to enable God’s will of true life and union, atonement, freedom, restoration to take place in the lives of others, we ourselves have to share in their suffering.