On February 5th, 2006, Fr. Andrea Santoro, an Italian missionary priest in eastern Turkey, was kneeling and praying in his church when a young man entered, shouted, “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the greatest”), and shot him dead. His murderer, though convicted, he was released after serving only ten years of his sentence after a military coup attempted to topple the Islamist government in 2016.

            A couple of days before his assassination, as if he knew what he was going to face, Fr. Santoro said, “I am here to live amongst the people and to allow Jesus to be here lending him my flesh (…) One becomes capable of salvation only when offering one’s flesh. The evils of the world must be carried and shared, one must allow them to be absorbed into one’s flesh, as Jesus did.”

            “I am here … to allow Jesus to be here lending him my flesh.” Fr. Santoro’s words and actions are a powerful witness to the call of Christ today in the Gospel: “The cup that I drink, you will drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized … whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all.”

            Today, Christ invites us to live His very life, to experience the redemptive suffering that leads from pain and sorrow to joy and new life. He invites us to offer all the sufferings and pains of our life in union with His Cross, to lend Him our flesh.

            We have heard this invitation before, no doubt, but we usually do not understand it correctly. We can think that we just grit our teeth and tough it out. Suffering is a part of life, and we just deal with it.

            That isn’t at all what Christ proposes. We hear in the letter to the Hebrews, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin.”

            James and John ask the Lord for the chance to sit at His right and left in glory. They certainly do not know what they are asking, because Christ’s throne is the Cross, and the ones at His right and left when He is on this throne are the thieves who were crucified with Him. He asks if they can drink the chalice He is to drink. This chalice can represent what God has in store for someone – either a cup of blessing or, as in Christ’s sake, the “full brunt of God’s judgment on sin.”

            When we think about this invitation to lend Christ our flesh, to allow the evils of the world to be absorbed into our flesh as we drink the chalice prepared for Him, we can think that our starting point in this spiritual struggle of redemptive suffering is the same as our earthly trials and endeavors. We have to toughen up; we have to try harder.

            The Christian starting point is very different, though. It is that our high priest, He who won the redemption of our sins, has loved us so profoundly as to suffer for us and has invited us to walk with Him – that profound invitation of love given last week to St. Mark. We are not just toughing it out – we are walking alongside Christ who has loved us first.

            Surely one of the primary ways people are called to live this mystery of redemptive suffering, to lend Christ their flesh, is in the vocation of marriage and family life. Before becoming a priest, and seeing the ups and downs of marriage and family life, I never realized just how challenging it is to cultivate a holy marriage and family. Marriage requires a constant drinking of the chalice of Christ in a life of self-sacrificial service.

            We have been hearing a lot about marriage the past few months – both from the Ephesians series over the summer, and the past two weeks from Christ’s teaching on divorce and the calling of the rich young man (maybe, St. Mark himself) to an even greater life of celibacy, giving up the great good of marriage to pursue an ever higher good: perfect conformity to Christ. We also saw the fear that many of us have of commitment and marriage, fears that could come from experiencing divorce or separation in our families, or from witnessing unhappiness in others’ lives.

            This fear, and the conflicts that lead to the breakdown of relationships, also comes from misunderstanding what is reasonable to expect from a spouse. Let me be abundantly clear: There is not a single human person in the entire world, whose reason for being is to make you happy. And that includes your spouse, your future spouse, or your hoped-for one-day spouse. Your spouse does not exist to make you happy.

            Some of you might be thinking, “Well you got that one right, Father!” But your spouse does not exist to make you miserable either. What I want to emphasize is this: Your happiness is the responsibility of two people: You, and God. When relationships break down, it is often because the other person does not make me happy any more, and we misunderstood from the start what the relationship was supposed to be about in the first place.

            The most joyful weddings I have ever experienced are not the ones where the couple has a perfect fairytale story. They’re the ones where the couple knows that it is going to be tough and they’re doing it anyway, with faith and trust in God’s loving care for their lives. It’s the wedding where they aren’t sure how they’re going to navigate the serious differences in their families of origin, when they haven’t made up their minds where they’re going to live, when they don’t yet have their dream jobs, when they haven’t always been perfect but they’ve made real changes to live according to God’s plan, or when they have good reason to believe it won’t be easy to have children, but respond with radiant joy when I ask if they will accept children lovingly from God and bring them up according to the law of Christ and His Church. These are the really joyful weddings: the ones where the couple knows that marriage is about way more than mutual self-satisfaction. These couples know that it’s about lending their flesh to make Christ present.

            If the temptation to make an idol of your spouse, to expect your spouse’s reason for being to be to make you happy, is a temptation primarily for younger married couples, the temptation for middle aged and older couples is often to think that your children exist to make you happy. Your children do not exist to make you happy. (Again, I bet there are some people out there thinking, “Ain’t that the truth, Father!”) But more importantly, your children are, what we call in philosophical language, ends in themselves. They are to be loved how God loves them: entirely for their own sake, without reference to what good they do with you. This is what we call “disinterested love” – not because you’re not interested in them, but because you’re not interested in what you get out of the relationship. It’s for them.

            Misunderstanding this is what leads older people to be excessively worked up over their adult children’s life choices. We might be right to regret the fact that they’re still unmarried (if not for the right reasons), not open to life in their marriages, not going to church, or moving to other parts of the country for the prettier landscapes, trendier craft breweries, and better dog parks. But again: your children’s reason for being is not to make you happy. It’s not even to give you grandchildren, because again, those children, real or potential, also don’t exist to make you happy. They exist to be loved – first by the Father, and then by you.

The world is starving for an authentic witness of love. When we courageously and boldly proclaim the love of Jesus Christ, a love that does not consist in mutual gratification but a self-sacrificial love in which we lend our flesh to Jesus Christ, submitting to His plan in a way radically grounded in how He has made us as men and women, and when we do so out of love, emphasizing that it is because we have been loved first that we can dare to drink His chalice and live this counter-cultural life, my brothers and sisters, hearts can be changed and minds can be opened to the saving message of Jesus Christ.

            Fr. Andrea Santoro – a lonely Christian in a Muslim land who gave his life as a witness to the love of Christ – and the couple and family who heroically live their vocations are not so different.  Each are called to lend their flesh to Christ and allow His sufferings to be made present in them. It is only when we sacrifice radically that we love radically. And it is only in radical love that we can find radical joy, and love is learned in making a sacrifice of yourself. The hundred-fold is found in the most surprising places.

            Christ today asks if you will drink the chalice of which He drank. We draw near to Him in the Holy Eucharist, to eat His flesh and drink the chalice of His blood. The blood in His chalice is the blood of a new covenant, a new agreement between God and man. If you will lend Him your flesh, allowing His redeeming suffering to come about in you, then He will lend you His, as a pledge of eternal life.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope

XXIX Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXIV