This is the homily delivered by Fr Harvey C Mateo SJ during this year's Feast Day of St Ignatius Loyola on Saturday, July 29 at the Xavier University Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Fr Harvey is a newly-ordained Jesuit priest (3 June 2017), the school director of St Isidore High School, and assistant parish priest of Our Lady Mary Mediatrix of All Graces of Zamboanguita, Bukidnon. Photo courtesy of The Crusader Yearbook 2017.
Every now and then, we come across a message in the Gospels that leaves us a little confused, especially when it seems to contradict Jesus’s other messages.
In our Gospel today, Jesus warned his followers about the cost of discipleship, comparing them to a businessman building a watch tower over his property or a king preparing for war. It was like saying, “Evaluate your resources and calculate your risks. Make sure that you know what you are getting into before making this commitment.” He asked some difficult questions: “Am I more important to you than your family? Are you really ready to take up your cross and follow me?” We recall that in Matthew, Jesus instructed his followers to be lambs without forgetting at the same time to be shrewd as serpents. Be wise to the ways of the world, he appeared to be saying again this time.
Our lives are full of decisions; many of them demand careful deliberation and an attention to all the possible scenarios. Discipleship is no different because to be truly a follower of Jesus — not just an unengaged bystander — involves risks and brings forth consequences. We are being asked, “Are you willing to take this on?”
Here lies the seeming contradiction. Does not the sower scatter the seed with reckless abandon, giving little thought to the quality of the soil that will nurture his investment? Elsewhere in the Gospel, were we not asked to stop worrying but instead be like the lilies of the valley and birds in the air, entrusting our concerns to the great Provider? Did the disciples not go and preach the Good News without bothering to prepare extra provisions like a backup pair of sandals or a loaf of bread or a second tunic? Did not the Lord assure us with the words, “My yoke is easy and my burden, light?”
Ah, perhaps we need to see it not as an inconsistency (pitting our image of the demanding God versus the benevolent God) but more as a paradox within the life of a Christian disciple! To be drawn in by the God who calls us by name and makes us fall in love with Him ... and yet to be confronted with the real cost of being a follower of Jesus.
Jeremiah in our first reading today expresses this well: “Lord, you have seduced me, and I let myself be seduced ... All day long I am an object of laughter; everyone mocks me … The word of the Lord has brought me reproach and derision all day long.”
This is what many in the Lord’s service may have already felt at some point in their ministry. Faithfulness has never guaranteed anyone an easy path. Sometimes, it can feel like a lonely, losing battle. And yet within the same set of readings, the prophet Jeremiah spoke of a fire that burned in his heart, so intensely that it was difficult to extinguish.
In this fire, we recognize the love of the God who had drawn Jeremiah towards himself. God had planted it deep within him. It is what has pulled him close, it was that which had sustained him and kept him faithful as he faced uncertainty and difficulty.
We are able to overcome the demands of discipleship not because of our own efforts, not just through our meticulous strategizing and calculated risk-taking. Ultimately, it is the Lord’s love that will fuel our desire to serve him. And, as we are nurtured by this love—our ability to face those risks, respond to the Lord’s call, and freely give of ourselves to His mission — all these will burn even brighter.
While discernment calls for a realistic appraisal of our own values — what is important to us, what we are willing to go through and sacrifice for the sake of the Kingdom — it is not all that there is to it. Discernment is also a matter of the heart because it is this fire planted within us that will free us from our enslavements and call us into action. Discipleship requires that we look within and ask, “How passionately is this fire still burning within me and for whom does it burn?”
It has been six weeks since I arrived in Bukidnon and started my first assignment as a priest. As acting director of St Isidore High School in Zamboangita, I am responsible for 500 junior and senior high school students, a good 30 percent of whom are from Lumad communities in the Upper Pulangi region. I began my new mission with much hope and anticipation, no different from any other newly-ordained priest on his honeymoon period.
What made it even more special is that I had been there before as a student volunteer, spending my summer break living with a Lumad community. My return to Zamboangita, this time as a new priest, is an experience of having gone full circle, made possible by the mysterious hand of God.
Challenges abound in this new mission, and let us just say that every day is a new adventure. Though I am not yet close to repeating Jeremiah’s lament, things do get overwhelming for a newbie like me. I juggle three roles — as school director, as foster father to our Lumad scholars, and as an assistant parish priest. I used to think that my main role was to raise money for scholarships and to find funding for school infrastructure but now I know that the mission is really about people.
Our new Jesuit General, Fr Arturo Sosa recently said that Jesus is inviting us “to share in some small way in God’s great work of bringing hope, healing, and joy to our world.” In the context of the small mission in St Isidore HS in Bukidnon, I experience hope, healing, and joy through its people.
It is about that girl from grade 9 who returned to class one day after a few weeks absence. She wanted to help me explain to her father what she could not do herself, for fear of her life. A nineteen-year-old man had gotten her pregnant but he eventually left her because she had a miscarriage. Now she wants to start over by going back to school.
It is about young teachers during the first parent-teacher assembly for the year who had just received a barrage of complaints from the parents of the new senior HS students. They were threatening to transfer their sons and daughters barely a month after the opening of classes. Under pressure from the watchful eyes of the admin, they feel unappreciated and hurt that not even a single “thank you” had been heard.
It is about friends and benefactors and their impressive show of support for their mission — like using their online presence to gather books and build a reading collection for a school where the library is grossly deficient and underutilized. As we speak, friends of friends are collecting novels, short stories, and other books to enjoy so that the students of our schools in Bukidnon can experience books as friends.
As with Jesus in the Gospels, the zeal for the mission is fueled by real encounters; it is shaped by the real desires of the people we serve, but also by praying and dreaming with the very people who share our mission. “Spiritual conversations, not just business meetings” — paraphrasing what Fr General told the Malaysian and Singaporean Jesuits just last week.
It can be tempting to live one’s discipleship as a personal vocation, especially when one is the only Jesuit in the school. But more and more, I realize that the fire for the mission that comes from God is a fire that is also found in others and shared with them. I share the mission with the faculty and staff of St Isidore HS, with my fellow Jesuits in the Bukidnon Mission District, with our partners in the diocese of Bukidnon, with our friends here in Xavier University and other benefactors and collaborators from Mindanao and beyond.
When the mission feels too demanding, we sometimes find ourselves looking back to count the cost, heed the wounds, and ask for a reward. That is OK. But we must not forget that apart from risks and consequences, the offer of discipleship also comes with unlimited resources. The Lord provides us with co-laborers who oftentimes surpass our fervor, commitment, and skill. They too have been given that fire. The Lord has given us the least of our sister and brothers for whom his fire burns so passionately; may this inspire us and bring us closer to Him.
Above all, the Lord has given us himself — the very source of that fire, a fire that also burns intensely for you and me. With St Ignatius, we pray to the Lord, give me only the grace to love you — that is enough for me. Happy Feast Day!∎