23rd Sunday
UMBC Campus Ministry Mass
September 7, 2025
The High Cost of Our Salvation
Yesterday morning, I returned from a visit to Israel. I went with the head of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association and the head of the Knights of Columbus. We traveled as pilgrims during this Jubilee Year of Hope and also to see how we could direct our assistance more effectively, especially as the disastrous humanitarian crisis in Gaza intensifies. Many have died, many more are in harm’s way – let us keep them in our prayers.
At the heart of any visit to the Holy Land is praying at the places where the events in the life of Christ took place. I was privileged to offer Mass at the Holy Sepulchre, over the place where Jesus was buried after his crucifixion and death. I visited the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus agonized over our sins and stood at the spot where the Lord gave his life for our salvation. The following day, we went to Bethlehem where I offered Mass in the Basilica of the Nativity, down below, close to the cave in which the Son of God was born to save us. It was in this cavern that St. Jerome labored for 30 years as he translated the Bible from Greek into Latin. We visited as well the shepherds’ field where they encountered the angels, saw the sky bright with stars, and heard the angel’s song, “Glory to God in the highest . . .” The next day we went to Nazareth, to the home of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the lower part of the Basilica of the Annunciation is the grotto, the place where Mary was told she would become the Mother of God, the place where Mary assented to the unique vocation to which she was called. Offering Mass at the grotto, I felt close to Mary who is the Mother of the Savior but also our Mother as well.
As I went from place to place, spending time in private prayer and offering Holy Mass, I was struck again and again by the high cost of our salvation. The Son of God emptied himself of glory to be born a man, in a cave, in remote province of the Roman Empire. The Son of God sweat blood as he, the Lamb of God, took upon his shoulders the sins of the world. As I knelt at the tomb from which Jesus rose in triumph, St. Paul’s words kept ringing in my ears: “He loves me and he gave his life for me!” (Gal 2:20)
The High Cost of Discipleship
There really is no way to understand Jesus’s words in today’s Gospel on the high cost of being his follower other than to contemplate how completely God has loved us. God the Father did not just give us some gift he would never miss – he gave us his only begotten Son, his beloved Son in whom he is well-pleased. Jesus did not merely come to encourage us or to make us feel better. No, he laid down his life for us, loving us to the very end, loving us totally. His life was a total gift of self to God the Father and to us.
So when Jesus tells us that we have to love him more than our family, or that we have to pick up our cross each day and follow after him, we may find his words to be harsh and uncompromising – but only if we fail to see that the Lord who loved without counting the cost is inviting us also to love without counting the cost. Just as a builder doesn’t begin a project until there is enough of everything and an army does not march until it’s powerful enough to defeat an enemy, so too, we cannot truly be the Lord’s disciples unless and until we are willing to lay everything at the feet of Jesus by loving him above all else and loving our neighbor as ourselves. In tonight’s Gospel reading, the Holy Spirit bids us recognize how radically God loved us and how radically we must love God if we would become like God and reflect in some way his goodness and glory.
Cheap Grace v. Costly Grace
In the same breath, the Holy Spirit is also warning us not to settle for a cheap knock off, a counterfeit version of Christianity. From the first days of the Third Reich, a Lutheran pastor and theologian, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, spoke out against the evil of Hitler and Nazism. For his courageous witness, he was executed in 1945 at the age of 39. Along the way, he wrote a book entitled, The Cost of Discipleship. In it he criticized those who portrayed Christianity as an easy road to salvation. He criticized what he termed “cheap grace”, a pretense that authentic discipleship is cost-free and easy. A few years ago, Cardinal Dolan of New York said that ‘the greatest threat to Christianity is not heresy … or moral relativism, but [a] sanitized, feel-good … therapeutic spirituality that makes no demands, calls for no sacrifice, asks for no conversion…”
The Upshot
So where does that leave us? What should we take away from all this, especially at this time in your life when your education is in high-gear, when you’re coming into your own and setting out on your life’s mission? As we celebrate in this Mass the price of our salvation – the Body of Christ broken and his Blood outpoured to save us – let me suggest two things to keep at the top of your mind and at the center of your heart:
First, don’t let a day go by without thanking the Lord for his gift of self. Spend a little time thanking, praising, glorifying the God who loves us so. Understand what that means when in his grace he calls you to follow him, when he offers you the gift of grace to soften your heart to accept his mercy, especially by receiving the Sacrament of Penance frequently. When he invites you to follow him, to “accept a yoke that is easy, a burden that is light” – whatever form it takes. Second, don’t fall into the trap of thinking of your faith as a set of dead rules. Life with and in Christ is not a set of rules but a relationship with the One who is Love itself, & is an exhilarating adventure. It is not an easy adventure, but an exhilarating adventure which demands of us nothing less than everything.
God bless you and keep you in his love.