Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Cycle B

Jas 3:16—4:3
Mk 9:30-37

Receiving the child is tantamount to receiving God, the Gospel of this weekend tells us. This is why Pope St. John Paul II could write in “The Gospel of Life,” “whoever attacks human life, in some way attacks God himself” (n. 9), and “rejection of human life, in whatever form that rejection takes, is really a rejection of Christ”(104).

Jesus places this teaching in the context of humble service to others, and his lesson on service is, furthermore, in the wider context of his impending passion, death and resurrection. In other words, at the heart of the Christian life is the Paschal Mystery. That is what brings salvation and changes us. It changes us precisely into people who have the power to love by giving ourselves away. The dynamic of giving ourselves away in humble service is that “self-emptying” of which St. Paul speaks when he writes to the Philippians and says that the Lord Jesus “emptied himself” (Phil. 2:7). The link between these themes in today’s Gospel is that the same self-emptying is exactly what is needed in order to welcome one another, from the elderly to the unborn, from those who are like us to those who differ in a thousand ways. Self-emptying frees us from the prejudice that fails to see the one who is different as our neighbor, and frees us from the selfishness that welcomes only those whom we choose to welcome. The Christian faith demands that we accept responsibility for our neighbor based on God’s choice, not ours. The “pro-choice” Culture of Death, on the other hand, says we have responsibility only for those for whom we choose to have responsibility.