Gospel-Homily for Twenty-Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time (2024)

Read the Homily

How Do You Achieve Greatness, You Don’t. It Is Given To You.

After I told my girlfriend that I was going to be a priest (which, by the way, did not go over very well), and after I sold my truck, I thought to myself, “If I am going to do this, if I am going to give up my having a wife, taking my son to a ball game for the first time, walking my daughter down the aisle at her wedding, babysitting the grandkids, then I better do this right. I will not be a “so-so” priest. I am not going to be a “good enough” priest. I am going to be a great priest. So it makes sense to me why the apostles, who gave up everything to follow the Lord, sought and tried to achieve greatness. Yet, Jesus shuts down the conversation, and here is why he does this.

When I went on vacation this summer with my family in Maine, I climbed Tumbledown Mountain. On top was one giant boulder. As I arrived on top, I thought how the massive rock must have been here since the last ice age. It will probably survive global warming and remain until the next ice age. If I were to draw a line from one ice age to the other, it would represent the existence of this rock. If I were to represent my existence on the same timeline, it would be a dot. A quick puff of existence, and I am gone. Later that evening I sat under the stars I was amazed at the number of lights in the sky. I felt as if I were a very small, insignificant spec in the universe.

How can I ever attain greatness? Suppose I did something impressive like winning the Boston Marathon. No one is going to care four hundred years from now. I cannot even remember who won the World Series three years ago. My book on Scripture is going to be published. I spent many years of my life studying the Bible, and I made a few inspirational observations. Still, twenty years from now, the book will be outdated, and someone else will have even deeper insights. How can a dot on a timeline and spec in the universe achieve greatness? There is only one way: demand.

A pair of old, used, smelly sneakers are worthless and eventually tossed. Yet, if Michael Gordon wore them at a championship game, they would be worth a lot of money. If you had a painting of a distorted figure with three eyes and a very long nose, you would probably say that this is the ugliest thing you ever saw. You would never allow anyone to hang it in your home. Yet, if Picasso had drawn it, it would have been worth a fortune, and you would have hung it proudly in your home. Jesus placed a child at front of his disciples—someone who had made no contributions to society or had done anything that was considered great. At that moment, Jesus redefined greatness.

We all want to achieve greatness, be the best at something, or be a GOAT. But you become great differently. The only way we can be great is if God loves us. That is why the disciples were drawn to Christ, why I wanted to be a priest, and why we gather each Sunday at church. 400 years from now, we will be great because God loves us, and that is why we are in demand.