Who's important to Jesus?: Homily for Tuesday, July 23, 2024

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Who’s important to Jesus?

In some ways, both of these statements are true. It’s not who you know. It’s who you know. They may seem like a contradiction, saying them both back to back like that, but in today’s gospel, we get a picture of what it really means to be important in the eyes of Jesus.

It’s not our association with this famous person or that wealthy individual or this person who everybody knows and is quite popular or this athlete, whatever. It’s whether or not we know Jesus. And in knowing Jesus, we discover something really phenomenal and great, namely that we are invited to something that is beyond any ability of ours to imagine.

St. Paul tells us that, and time and again, Jesus reassures people whose lives are broken that there is something greater and better and more wonderful when we have a relationship with him. One thing that I can say from people who have come back from a mission trip– when I was at Blessed Sacrament in Madison, a number of times a year, we would have college students through the parish go down to Haiti and do work there. We actually brought a contractor because there is something that’s known as tourism service.

In other words, it makes the people that go down feel better, but what they do is really not helpful in the least. So we always wanted to make sure at Blessed Sacrament that when we built something, it was built to last, not something that just made our college students feel better. We spent time each time we went down to ask, “What do you need?”

And we got really wonderful answers. Now, I mention all of this because the one thing that they came back and acknowledged, almost to a person, the thing that had surprised them the most was that the people to whom they served seemed happy. Now, I say “seemed” because that was the way they said it. I think they are happy in some ways.

Now, don’t get me wrong. They’re not happy in their poverty. It doesn’t mean we can say, “Well, they’re happy. We don’t need to worry about it.” But it does mean this, that sometimes when we recognize, as we sang this weekend in the church, “God is all we have,” there’s a certain freedom, joy, and happiness that arises.

Jesus reminds us that more important than any physical relationship is our relationship with him. And if our relationship with him has changed our lives in a positive way, then if we don’t share that with others, in a way we’re kind of selfish. We’re keeping it to ourselves rather than sharing it with those who need to hear it.

Look at our world. It is filled with brokenness, hardship, difficulty. And we have the relationship that can make all the difference. And so let us make sure that we are open to the great mandate of Jesus at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, the one we heard today. Teach all nations, baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

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