Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time. Year C - Sunday, September 7, 2025 (EPISODE- 546)
Readings for Sunday, September 7, 2025 - Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time. Year C
FIRST READING: Wis 9:13-18
Ps 90:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14+17. "In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge"
SECOND READING: Philemon 9b-10, 12-17
GOSPEL ACCLAMATION (Luke 14:25-33). Alleluia, alleluia! Let your face shine on your servant. And teach me your laws.
GOSPEL: Luke 14:25-33
Image Credit:
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PROLOGUE
In Australia, it's Father's Day this weekend, the first Sunday of September. We give thanks today for all fathers, for their love, their care, their generosity. We pray that God grants them joy in their family and friends, and health and strength.
For all fathers who have passed into eternal life, may God give them a permanent place at the heavenly feast that never ends, for all their goodness and kindness. {FHL}
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HOMILY
To become a full disciple of Christ, we know, comes at considerable cost. Being a full-fledged follower of Christ means accepting a value system that is often at odds with other value systems. This can lead to us being ridiculed and ostracized.
Throughout history, it has led to people losing their friends, family members, reputation, their position, standing in society, and even their lives. The cost is worth it, but our Lord wants us to know that the values of the kingdom will turn on its head the many values of the world. Those benefiting from keeping things as they always were, are not going to surrender their position and privilege lightly.
Our Lord doesn't desire divisions, but He warns us that there are no fence-sitters in the kingdom. We have to jump in wholeheartedly and be prepared for opposition, which will not fight fairly. Sadly, those who oppose Christ's values oppose His vision of true justice, compassion, inclusion, love, and peace.
Why would Jesus counsel His followers to hate their families or their lives? This seems contrary to the consistent message of Christ, which is about love, inclusion, mercy, and graciousness, that our Lord has been proclaiming throughout His whole ministry. When Jesus made this declaration, He was on the road to Jerusalem. He had set His face towards Jerusalem, and there was no stopping Him. ## ( William Barclay, the scripture scholar, says)
He knew He was on His way to surrender everything for us. He was going to die after suffering terribly on the cross. The crowds with Him thought He was on His way to an empire, to take over, to claim earthly kingship.
No wonder He turned around and spoke to them clearly and bluntly in this way. In the most vivid way possible, He told them, Anyone who wants to follow Me is not on a road to worldly power and glory. You must know that.
Rather, you must be ready for loyalty, which will sacrifice the dearest things in life. You must be ready for suffering, which would be like the agony of a man on the cross. And for Christ Himself and some of His closest disciples, it was literally to be such agony.
Others would experience spiritual agony of the same. We must understand His words as intended. And we must remember that Jesus was speaking with the nuance of the Eastern language as it was spoken, which is always vivid, as vivid as the human mind can make it.
When Jesus tells us to hate our nearest and dearest, He doesn't mean literally. There's no hatred in God. He means that no love in life can compare with the love we must bear to God first.
Christ knew if anyone who followed Him had Him as second priority or lower, then when the first of many challenges, threats and suffering come along, these people would fall away immediately. So, this passage teaches us it's possible to be a follower of Jesus without being a disciple. That is, you can follow an army, so to speak, wherever it went, but it doesn't mean you're a soldier.
You could be a hanger-on in some great work without pulling one's weight. When the battle occurs, and if you're not the soldier, you might run the other way.
There's a modern-day story where a person talking to a great scholar about another person, name-dropping his connection to that scholar, so-and-so tells me that he was one of your students.
The great scholar replies, he may have attended my lectures, but he was not one of my students. That would be a devastating thing. It's the same with a Christian church.
There may be some distant followers of Jesus, but how many are real disciples?
The second point we can take from this gospel is a Christian's first duty is to count the cost of following Christ. But if the high demands of Christ daunt us, let's remember that we're not left to fulfill this task alone. Christ walks this step before us, and also walks it with us every step of our life.
Our Lord's constant practical example and his teaching show us that we must love and cherish our family and loyally keep our commitments and duties that we owe to parents and family. He's not cancelling that out, even if one could twist the words of the scripture to say that. Our Lord saved one of his most stinging criticisms for people who used religious excuses to justify neglecting their duty to parents and family.
So, when our Lord says in the gospel we should hate our lives or our families, the actual point of Jesus' message is not to reject or abandon bonds of family, the ties of blood, but rather to widen our vision of family. So, Jesus is telling his disciples that his definition of family includes our traditional ties of blood relations, but also includes anyone who acts and follows in Christ's ways, anyone who holds the values of the kingdom, all people, which he means to be taken quite seriously and quite literally. We know that Jesus had deep respect and love for his family, both his earthly family and of course his heavenly family.
So, faithfulness to Christ and love and respect for our family need not be any kind of contradiction, which is good news to know.
Hopefully our faith, our values and relationships with our family and friends will be mutually consistent and supportive. As Christians, and as people of goodwill everywhere in the world, we've gotten so many of our beautiful values from our families, and rightly so.
Jesus is simply saying that if in some situation there had to be a choice between following God and remaining a part of our loving family, well something must have gone awry in that family.
Jesus is saying here, you've got to be in this disciple thing a hundred percent. Half measures just won't do. Being the body of Christ makes us complete sharers in the life of Jesus. And Jesus was never one to do things by half measures. There may very well be a lot of hating at the time of Christ's ministry, but the hating was not by Jesus or his followers.
Rather, some people hated Jesus. They hated his message. They wanted to destroy him and his message and persecute any of his followers.
And they hated him and his followers precisely because they seemed to be welcoming outsiders and strangers into the fold of the family of God, whom they think shouldn't be there. Unintended but very real conflict and loss will be suffered because of choosing to follow Jesus, because people included in Jesus' plan are people who others think should be left out. The hatred and persecution will come from those who are very comfortable with things as they are, because they're doing very well while others are doing very badly.
A change in this situation will be detrimental to them, even if it is helpful to others, and they won't stand for it. The plain truth is our goal is not merely to be a good person and avoid doing wrong. Being a disciple is a goal as well.
Discipleship, being a friend and family member of Christ, is an expensive proposition because it'll cost everything we have. Jesus needs us to give all we have in energy and time. It shouldn't be inconsistent with so many good values in life, because all good values come from God.
Why is this price so high? It shouldn't be, but it's because the stakes are so high. Christ's kingdom is filled with the wonderful values and virtues that all people want and need. They're worth fighting for, and these values are life-giving and lasting.
Christ is asking us to put our lives, energy and resources into the service of His plan for building up the kingdom of God and its transforming values, and they are quite revolutionary. Christ, more than anyone, knows that following Him will lead to tensions and pain, but not because He wants us to reject family, but rather because His message includes more people in the family than others under the old system want or can cope with. In the kingdom, the waters of baptism bind us more closely and more infinitely with all our other members than even deep hereditary ties of family.
And so, this turns the whole system on its head. If people everywhere extended to everyone they met, that same love, loyalty and unconditional bond of generosity that we share with people who are related to us by blood, what a difference the world would be. And it would be a world ever closer to the vision of Christ's kingdom.
We see an example of this perfectly illustrated by St. Paul, who really is a true and inspiring disciple. We're so fortunate so many of his writings are in the New Testament. He speaks about a fellow Christian, a runaway slave, who's become like a son to him, he writes, because he's a fellow disciple of Christ, a member of the family.
Paul writes to another disciple and begs that disciple to accept his runaway slave back, not as a slave anymore, but as a brother in Christ. This is perfectly consistent with Jesus' gospel, and today we would understand that perfectly. There's a considerable change in our lives and relationships when we become true disciples of Christ.
Things change dramatically, old values and old ways of doing things end, and new values begin. The owner of a slave, which was quite a common practice in Roman times, that owner has paid an enormous price for becoming a Christian, because he's lost his slave. This slave, who has also become a Christian, is now a free person under Christ's law, because in Christ there's no distinction between slave and free, we're all free.
Whatever happened to Onesimus, was he freed as Paul requested? Well, I didn't know, but if we move on 50 years later, St Ignatius, one of the great Christian martyrs, is being taken to execution from Antioch to Rome, and as he goes, he writes letters, which still survive, to the churches of Asia Minor. He stops at Smyrna and writes to the church at Ephesus, and in the first chapter of that letter, he has much to say about their wonderful bishop, and the bishop's name is Onesimus. And Ignatius makes the same pun as Paul made, he is Onesimus by name, and Onesimus by nature.
That word means profitable, so he is profitable or useful to Christ, and it may well be that this is the same runaway slave, who has been released by his owner, and has become a wonderful member of the Christian faith, and later has become a great bishop of Ephesus. How wonderful are God's ways, well worth staying on this difficult path.
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References:
Fr Paul W. Kelly
## Barclay, William. 1975. The Daily Study Bible – Luke's Gospel. Edinburgh: St Andrew Press; ^^Barclay, William. 1975. The Letters Of Timothy, Titus And Philemon. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press;
SHARING THE WORD THROUGH THE LITURGICAL YEAR. GUSTAVO GUTIERREZ
Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time. Year C (Sunday, September 7, 2025) (EPISODE- 546)
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (or/ The Lord be with You)
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{{Shalom (peace)}} welcome everyone, we gather - Reflect upon the Holy Scriptures and the values of the Lord.
Coming together as brothers and sisters in Christ, let us prepare ourselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries by recalling our sins and remembering Christ's greater mercy.
Lord Jesus, you are mighty God and Prince of peace. Lord have mercy// You are Son of God and the Son of Mary. Christ have mercy// You are Word made flesh, the splendour of the Father. Lord have mercy.
May Almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us our sins, and bring us to everlasting life. Amen.
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Ps 90:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14+17. "In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge"
GOSPEL ACCLAMATION (Luke 14:25-33). Alleluia, alleluia! Let your face shine on your servant. And teach me your laws.
the Lord be with you'
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Memorial Acclamation
2. When we eat this Bread and drink this Cup, we proclaim your Death, O Lord, until you come again.
PREFACE: Sundays III
EP II
(theme variation: full)
(pre+post variation: v1-long)
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{my heartfelt thanks for your participation in this time of reflection, prayer and praise.}
Father's Day blessing -
God our Father, in your wisdom and love you made all things. With give thanks for and ask you to Bless all Fathers. Grant them the wisdom and love to always be good fathers. Let the example of their faith and love shine forth. Grant that we, their sons and daughters, may honour them always with a spirit of profound respect.
Grant this through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
And may almighty God bless you all, the Father, and the Son, + and the Holy Spirit. R. Amen.
Dismissal: +
Go forth, the Mass is ended.
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Prayers and chants — Roman Missal, 3rd edition, © 2010, The International Commission on English in the liturgy. (ICEL)
Scriptures - New Revised Standard Version: © 1989, and 2009 by the NCC-USA. (National Council of Churches of Christ - USA)
"The Psalms" ©1963, 2009, The Grail - Collins publishers.
Prayers of the Faithful - " Together we pray" by Robert Borg'. E.J. Dwyer, Publishers, (1993) . (Sydney Australia).
Sung "Mass In Honour of St. Ralph Sherwin" - By Jeffrey M. Ostrowski. The Gloria, Copyright © 2011
ccwatershed.org.
- "Faith, Hope and Love" theme hymn - in memory of William John Kelly - Inspired by 1 Corinthians 13:1-13. Music by Paul W. Kelly. Arranged and sung, with additional lyrics by Stefan Kelk. 2019.
"Quiet Time." Instrumental Reflection music. Written by Paul W Kelly. 1988, 2007. & This arrangement: Stefan Kelk, 2020.
- "Today I Arise" - For Trisha J Kelly. Original words and music by Paul W. Kelly. Inspired by St Patrick's Prayer. Arranged and sung, with additional lyrics by Stefan Kelk. 2019.
Sound Engineering and editing - P.W. Kelly.
Microphones: RODE NT-USB MINI
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NCH – WavePad Audio Editing Software. Masters Edition v 12.44
Sound Processing: iZotope RX 6 Audio Editor
[Production - KER - 2025]
May God bless and keep you.
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