Monday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time
“If I were trying to please people, I would not be the servant of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:10).
“You can please all of the people some of the time, or some of the people all of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”
Many on social media and the internet become fixated on likes, shares, and views. But posting ought not be a measurement of self worth. Nor should anything else.
Desire for approval can shape who we are and what we do. Rejection is hard to take. At the first hint of criticism do we shrink back so as to modify and qualify?
The compulsion to please can put us in conflict with pleasing God. Following Christ contradicts the world in one way or another. After all, the Gospel turns the world upside down and inside out.
Jesus confounded the authorities of his day because he had no patience with their hypocrisy. He was not concerned with their approval. Not once. Saints throughout time aimed at pleasing God above all and suffered because of it. Saint Oscar Romero, martyr of San Salvador, is an example in our time, as was Martyr Thomas a’ Becket of Canterbury eight centuries before him.
Romero was a compulsive people-pleaser, a “yes man,” withering at any hint of conflict. So the junta pressured Rome to appoint him archbishop of San Salvador when the bishop’s chair was vacant. What they didn’t anticipate was the work of the Holy Spirit on the new prelate upon witnessing the abuse of his people. On fire with the Gospel, Romero spoke truth to power and paid the price saying, “If I am killed I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.” He's a modern rendition of the tension of English King Henry II vs. Saint Thomas a’ Becket (d.1170).
Our current parish series on Wednesday evenings @ 7pm features The Book of Revelation, written to encourage courage and heroism for Christians who are up against it. https://www.youtube.com/user/imedayton/live
Few of us will rise to the heroism of Saints Becket or Romero. But all of us are to be “servants of Jesus Christ,” as Paul reminds his foundling church at Galatia today.
As “servants of Jesus Christ” we are to serve one another. But none of us are to be doormats for one another. The question is, who do we want to please more, God or others? Will we change like chameleons to blend in? Conversion requires inner fortitude on our part.
Our mandate is to pray for our persecutors, not bending over to please them.
-Timothy J. Cronin