Recognizing Holiness

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Me after my first Extraordinary Form Mass

    There is a tradition in the Extraordinary Form that the people bow as the priest processes up or down the aisle at the beginning or end of Mass.  This gesture is a sign of respect, not so much for the priest as an individual, but for Christ whom the priest makes present in a special way each Mass.
    I remember at the first Extraordinary Form Mass that I celebrated, I invited my friend to be there.  After Mass we spoke about how it went, and he joked with me that he saw all the people bowing, but he didn’t bow because he knows me too well and he doesn’t think I’m worthy of a bow. 
    I know my friend didn’t mean any disrespect, and he certainly is good at keeping me humble and not thinking that they are bowing to me.  But it illustrates the point that Jesus made in the Gospel today: it’s hard to recognize holiness in people we know well.  It was true for Jesus in His own time, and it continues to be true now.  With merely human friends, we know all their failings and their idiosyncrasies.  Of course, Jesus had no failings or idiosyncrasies.  But the cliché phrase can so easily come true: familiarity breeds contempt. 
    But in our minds, we convince ourselves that if we would have been alive at the time of Christ, we would have been one of His closest followers.  We would have walked all over to see His miracles; we would have believed in Him from His miracles and teachings; we would have stayed faithful to Him during His Passion; we would have stood by the cross at His crucifixion.  But the witness of the Gospels show us that, just because people were close to Jesus didn’t mean they stood by Him all the time or recognized His holiness.
    Holiness can draw people in.  Think of St. Theresa of Calcutta (Mother Theresa) or St. Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio).  Though, even in those cases, most people who were drawn in didn’t spend a lot of time with the saints.  They simply had one or a few powerful encounters.  So it’s also true that holiness can put people off.  St. Francis of Assisi drew a number of people towards him to join in his radical way of life.  But if you stripped down in the town square to show your renunciation of all your worldly goods, it’s not an old man in a white cassock who would come to see you, but a doctor in a white coat who might come to commit you to a mental health facility!  Sometimes the holiest of people can be quite annoying to those of us who don’t share in their total love for God.
    Why?  Why can we find it so difficult to love the saints?  Why is it so easy to be hard-hearted, as God warned Ezekiel the people of Israel would be.  As St. John says in the Gospel, people often prefer darkness to light, and so when the light comes, we try however we can to get rid of it.  The light makes the darkness in us uncomfortable, and makes us realize that we are not who we claim to be. 
    And because of this hardness of heart and preference for darkness, God does not work great things in us.  He can’t, because we leave no openness to His work in our lives, but reject it and work against it.  And God respects our free will, however miserable the misuse of our free will makes us.  He wants to do great things in us, to transform us by the power of His love and grace, but He won’t force Himself on us, because love never forces itself on anyone.  Jesus didn’t work great miracles in His home town because of the people’s lack of faith there.  When we don’t open up to God, when we lack faith that God can do something for us, then He won’t work miracles in us. 
    The key to allowing Christ to work great things in us is to admit we need Him.  Even the smallest opening to God’s work in us can be enough for God to break through.  Think of St. Paul: there must have been some openness to God’s work, even as he was persecuting Christians, so that when Christ appeared to him on the road to Damascus, it could change his life and change him from a persecutor of Christians to one of the greatest Christian missionaries the world has ever known. 
    Today, ask God to soften your heart to be open to His work.  Ask him to reveal holy people in your life who can help you grow closer to God.  It could be a friend or a relative.  It could be someone you have written off.  But if we ask God to do great things for us, and make even a small amount of space for His love and grace, there’s no telling how much God can do with us, and make us into the saints He created us to be.