Wednesday, Thirty First Week in Ordinary Time

In today’s first reading, Saint Paul calls on the Philippians to ‘work for your salvation in fear and trembling’, and then immediately declares, ‘It is God, for his own loving purpose, who puts both the will and the action into you’. Taking the path that leads to eternal life is both our work and God’s work. It is clear from Paul’s letters as a whole that he considers God’s work on our behalf to be more significant than our work. It is God, working through his risen Son, who empowers us to take the path of life, the path that leads to eternal life and is life-giving in the here and now. It is God who ‘puts both the will and the action’ into us. As Paul goes on to say later on in this letter to the Philippians, ‘There is nothing I cannot master with the help of the one who gives me strength’. We need to keep opening ourselves up to the Lord’s strength, the strength of his Spirit, the Holy Spirit. In the gospel reading, Jesus leaves no one in any doubt that coming to him and following in his way will make demands on us. It will mean loving him above all else, including those we have the strongest affection for, our blood relatives. It will mean never allowing our possessions to possess us. It will require sitting down and considering all that is involved in following the Lord and only then making a very conscious decision to take the Lord’s path, even if it becomes a costly path. Yet, we do not head down this path alone. The Lord travels it with us, and through the Spirit he empowers us from within. We set out knowing that ‘the Lord is my light and my help’ in the words of our Responsorial Psalm.