Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

My mother has a picture of my great-grandmother’s family, taken perhaps around 1915. When I was a child, I noticed that the head of one of the sisters was too large, and this oddity worried me. Perhaps there was a strange disease in those days that caused heads to swell up. Later, I realized that the reason for her abnormality was actually that she wasn’t in the picture at all, but had been pasted in at a later date.

The reason that the picture was taken hastily in her absence is explained by another detail in the photo. The youngest son and daughter are both in religious habits. It so happened that both were home at the same time, a very rare phenomenon, since Sr. Daniella and Br. Ignatius (as they were known) were each allowed to visit home once every three years. As was common in Catholic families at the time, the youngest son and daughter were consecrated to God in religious life. It is a salutary custom upon which to reflect, living as we do in an age when the decision to enter religious life is seen as deeply personal and existential. There was no discernment on the part of the children, only on the part of the parents, and their choice had to do mainly with when to stop having children.

This impulse, to give a child away to God, is an ancient one and a practice whose history is unsettling for most of us. In the late 1970’s archaeologists excavating the ancient North African city of Carthage unearthed a burial plot covering nearly an acre and a half and containing some 20,000 tiny urns dating from a period of some two hundred years. Inside each of these tiny urns were the remains of one or two young children, apparently offered to the equivalent of the god Molech (the Carthaginians were related to the Phoenicians, who give us the Biblical character of Jezebel).

A striking feature of these sacrifices is the fact that they are commonly seen as a gift. The child’s life is not destroyed by the sacrifice, but is given over to a god, whom they will now serve. To give another example: among the Inca, a family could gain in social status by offering a child. The family that was left behind gained a familial relationship with the god and now could intercede on behalf of the larger community because their son was a friend of the god. By the way, the Inca were relatively humane in their manner of sacrifice. From some surviving accounts, most delivered to us by Catholic priests trying to eradicate this practice, the child went with a pretty clear knowledge of what was to happen, was given pain killers and alcohol and then carried up to the top of a mountain where the combination of the cold and thin air would never allow the child to wake from sleep.

A typical Judeo-Christian reaction to these horrors is to insist that we have a rational religion that has done away with such barbarities. I do not dispute this entirely, but the more correct interpretation is that we have transformed the practice of child sacrifice in various ways. In the book of Exodus, for example, God says that every first-born son of the Israelites must be given to Him! In other places, we read that the son must only be redeemed. In other words, he truly belongs to God, but can be bought back for the price of an animal. This is what Mary and Joseph do when they bring the baby Jesus to the temple and offer in his place two turtle doves.

Well, that’s fine, you may think, for the Old Testament. What about today? Today, we baptize. Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism. Remember this when you attend your next baptism and the baby cries.

All of you who are baptized in Christ have been offered to God the Father as His servants and confidants. This is why we don’t allow the unbaptized to approach holy communion. If you have not been so consecrated to God’s service, one should be a bit fearful of taking food from those who have.

But the more radical implication of this is that our parents, by baptizing us, have given up their full claims to us, and we have been dedicated to God’s service. Hence it is clear that when Jesus says that anyone who prefers father or mother, son or daughter to Himself is not worthy of him. Furthermore, we have an obligation to help our fellow servants, the prophets, righteous persons and thirsty pilgrims for God’s sake. In our present climate, where there are a variety of squabbles amongst baptized Christians, we do well to remember this. Be careful whom you spurn or criticize: he or she might turn out to have God’s ear.

All of this might make God sound too old fashioned, scary and arbitrary, were it not for the fact that He does not ask anything of us that He does not Himself do. God, the Holy Trinity, is perfectly content in Himself and has no need of our companionship. And yet, He took the startling chance of creating us to be with Him. And even more, to prove His love for us, His complete fidelity to us and concern for us, God the Father sent His Son to go forth from His bosom into the dangerous world, where He knew very well that what awaited Him was what awaits all of His children, the rial of death. And yet He preferred our salvation to sparing His Son that trial.

Jesus too, preferring not the comfort of easy unity with His Father, accepted His mission to rescue us by showing us that the way back to God and back to our true brotherhood as human beings, is through our deaths in faith in baptism. How can we then prefer pleasing our fathers and mothers, sons and daughter when this conflicts with pleasing God? God Himself is ready to please us, if only we imitate Him in a death in union with Christ.

It perhaps goes without saying that all of this s worth the risk because Christ is risen and is with us always. This ultimate act of faith, His own baptism on the Cross, completely helpless and without and human support, is possible because our God raises from the dead.

Let us never forget this great sacrifice of our Lord on our behalf, re-enacted this morning upon the altar. And let us go forth and live our lives as if fully given over to our loving God in Jesus Christ, to whom be majesty, power and glory forever. Amen.