Feast of St. John of the Cross
“Every one of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.” – Luke 14:33
In the Gospel for the Mass of the feast of St. John of the Cross, Jesus is explaining to the crowds that they need to realize that there is a kind of cost to being a disciple. They need to know this. Jesus compares this to someone who decides to build a tower without seeing if that person has the resources to finish the job. Or, a king who needs to determine ahead of time if he can defeat another king in battle or not. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Jesus gives the crowds that line about renouncing their possessions. Somehow, Jesus is saying, this renouncing is at least one “cost” that any disciple must expect to pay.
What can this “renouncing” mean?
First of all, we must guard against one temptation that afflicts us all when confronted by sayings like this, a temptation that is especially strong with preachers. The temptation is this: to immediately add that Jesus didn’t really mean what He said, that His cultural situation was very different, and so on. Though there may be a grain of truth in this approach, the reason why it is a temptation is that it seeks to prevent people from being made uncomfortable by the message of Jesus rather than to help them face it and become more faithful to it. It hands people a security blanket instead of a solid rock to stand on.
So, what does this renouncing mean? Are we all to take on a vow of poverty, and literally own nothing? Not necessarily, even if some people are called to do just that. It is evident from the witness of the New Testament that people like St. Peter and St. Paul, though hardly rich, still had a few material possessions. The same can be said of saints of all kinds throughout the history of the Church.
Jesus is challenging us to recognize two related truths. First of all, in an ultimate sense, we don’t really own anything. The earth is the Lord’s, as the psalms remind us. All that we have, including anything we might call private property, is entrusted to us by the Lord. We have it only for a time. The things that outlive us, like our land, will one day be entrusted to someone else. We are caretakers of God’s earth, and so we are called to use everything entrusted to us as God has taught us to do.
Secondly, nothing else is God. No possession, no earthly thing, no matter how good or useful it may be, is our ultimate reality. Too often, we turn to something we have and try to make it into a substitute for God. Maybe our money or material goods. Maybe our relationships. Maybe even our idea of who God is. Very often, we imagine that God is like some company and we are the customers (who are always right, of course), or that God is our consultant and not our Lord. God serves our needs, rather than we serving and worshiping God. We need to renounce everything that is not God, even the best things we see around us, so that God and God alone can be God.
Here is where St. John of the Cross can help us. At the risk of simplifying things too much, John’s writings can be seen as an extended meditation on the First Commandment: I am the Lord your God… you shall have no other gods before me. John systematically leads us to renounce all other things, not because they are bad but because none of them are God. In this way, we become more open to the true God, the living God. Such renouncing can be painful. We can be addicted to some idol of our own creation, a “god” we think we control but which, in reality, enslaves us. To renounce such a “god” for the living God isn’t easy. But once we start doing so, we can then more deeply appreciate everything else for what it is. We won’t expect that anything else will do for us what only God can do. It’s incredibly freeing. Once we get a taste of the true God, no substitute will do. We won’t cling to anything else, expecting it to be our “god”. We can live in true freedom, hope, faith, love. May this be one gift that this Advent gives – or renews – in each of our hearts.