23rd Sunday - Ordinary Time

Superheroes. We’ve seen a lot of them. Superman, Batman, Spiderman, the x-men, they all have some quality that makes them live up to their names as superheroes. The prefix “super” means to be above or better than other people. They are superhuman. They are what we want to be. We all want to be better than we are. We want to rise above the disappointments, perils, and disasters of this life.

So there is something to these superheroes. They tell us what our culture wants. Our culture wants a savior. We want someone who can save us from evil and everything wrong with this world. We want paradise. Many will admit that there is a paradise. The problem is that we try to build it or invent it ourselves. Our culture sees the truth in this – we have a savior – and He died for us, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven so that the doors to paradise would be open to all of us.

This summer while I was at school, I kept hearing about the new Superman 2 movie. Finally a bunch of us priests decided to go see it. If you want to go to a movie simply for mind numbing entertainment … don’t go with a bunch of priests. We all watch through theological eyes.

So Spiderman 2 was a story of a young man who had superhuman attributes because he was genetically altered to have the traits of a spider. Fortunately he was a good man and he used these traits to rise above it all. He would shoot out the string of a web to attach himself first to one building and then to the next and could fly above all the crowds and limitations of walking in the city. He would use this way to get from one disaster to another helping people and saving them from harm. There was even a scene where he used his powers to save a train full of people. He stretched himself in front of it in the form of a cross and stopped the train from going off the tracks. Then he collapsed back into the arms of those he saved. It was really a great pieta scene. Our culture wants what we have.

The problem was that all he was able to do was fly from one disaster to another. Either that or ignore his gift and not help anyone. His powers didn’t really solve anything. They only got him from one disaster to the next. He would move back and forth swinging from one building to the next moving horizontally just above the people in the city. The people were still susceptible to being victim to the next villain.

In the Gospel Jesus said, “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” “Hate” is a powerful word. What is Jesus saying? We have to surrender everything and then surrender ourselves to Jesus. We can’t cling to anything. There is only room to attach ourselves in one direction – up, to God. We can’t go through life clinging first to one building, then another tower, then a person, then a family, then a dream or desire. We can’t rise up to God if we are swinging back and forth from one thing to another. We have to step out on faith and walk through it all. We must surrender everything else for love of God. There is only one Savior and there are no substitutes.

How do we do this? We have to carefully plan our path through the spiritual life. What we do, how we spend our time, what steps we will take. We don’t just stumble by accident into heaven. Like Jesus said in the Gospel, if we want to build a tower we first lay out the plan. It’s like this restoration project we have begun on the Church. We know we have a lot of things we want to do with the Church and the school. All we can do is carefully plan out each step and then take them, one step at a time.

A week ago, Monsignor Vann and I watched “Indiana Jones, The Last Crusade.” Now don’t get worried. I haven’t fallen in love with Hollywood. I think you know me better than that. And no I’m not even endorsing specific movies. But there are points in some of them that can really help us out here.

The “Last Crusade” is written around the legend of the Holy Grail. There is a point near the end when they are close to the grail. Indiana’s father was shot by the bad guys, by evil, to motivate him to take chances he wouldn’t normally have taken to save his father. You see they all believed that the grail has the power of eternal life, just as we believe the cup of salvation is our eternal life in Christ.

So Indiana set out to get the Holy Grail. If you remember, he took a book of clues that his father had written to help him find the way to the grail. The first clue said, “only the penitent man shall pass.” He realized at the last minute he needed to approach on his knees or he would have been decapitated by spinning blades. The next thing we saw was that behind some cob webs was what looked like a stone hallway with letters written on the stones. The book of clues told Indiana that only in the footsteps of the word of God will you proceed.

As Indiana Jones began to step on the stones that spell out the name of God, he misspelled the name. He started with the wrong letter. It was a simple mistake, a misstep, but it almost cost him his life. For a harrowing second we could see from below that he was about to fall into an abyss that seemed to have no bottom. There was no room for mistakes. He had to stay on the path of the word of God or fall to his death.

Finally he reached a huge chasm. There was no way to fly across, or jump. It was just a drop off into darkness. The clue said something like, only in a leap of faith will he prove his worth. So, hearing the cries of his dying father, Indiana stepped out into the abyss. He landed on a beam that was camouflaged to look like its surroundings so no one could tell it was there. It was an invisible bridge to support him in his walk safely over the chasm. Indiana reached his goal, found the Holy Grail and saved his father’s life.

Jesus said, “Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” So you see, the only way to eternal life, to paradise is to follow in the footsteps of the Word of God. There is no room for anything else. We have to surrender everything else. So we can’t look for a way to fly above and over it all. We have to walk through the dangers of this life in the name of God. There is no thing and there is no person, more important than God. There is only one Savior. There is only one Paradise. There is only one way – the footsteps of the Word of God. Clinging to anything else, stepping in any other path, is death. Our culture is right. It is all about salvation. We are so fortunate that we know The Way.