Today’s readings and feast challenge both the location of our faith and the depth of our faith, it seems to me. The first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy places us in the context of the ending of the founding story of Israel. Moses, the great hero, and God’s good servant is dying but the work is not finished. Moses is not going to lead God’s people into the Promised Land. Obviously, the people had put their faith in Moses by this time. He has led them for the better part of forty years and they can see the end of the road on the horizon. But Moses insists that it is God who has been leading them and will continue to do the leading. God has chosen a new servant for this last phase of the project, just as God had chosen Moses was the earlier phases of this complex and very dramatic journey. The point here is that anyone who has put faith in Moses has misplaced it and must now put his faith NOT in Joshua, but in the Lord, and no one else. It does not matter who the servant leader is, it is God who is really doing the work and is bringing forth a people on the land.
For this reason, also, Moses tells them to not be afraid. After all, if God is leading them who can stand against them – no matter how strong and expert they look.
The Gospel reading again challenges our sense of who is in charge and who is the real leader. The Apostles ask Jesus who will be the greatest in the Kingdom of God. Who is going to be right up there with Moses and Joshua as trusted servants anyway? The implicit sense of the question is that “surely it will be me or one of us, won’t it?” Jesus, to make his point very strong puts the one person who has NO POWER in Israel – a child – in front of them – very likely a girl child, just to really make the point. God is in charge here, fellows – and if you want to be in charge look to what God means by that.
A servant leader, after all, looks like Moses, who is chased out of any notion of power in human terms, and driven off to learn to be a leader by herding sheep, and then brought back home to drag a griping, sniping, ungrateful group of slaves across a desert - to save them even while they went kicking and screaming.
Or we can look to the perfect servant leader, Jesus. In him we have the model of suffering servant, the one persecuted, treated violently and put to death. As he has done, so must we do if we think we are called to leadership in God’s Reign.
St. Maximilian Kolbe, whose memorial we celebrate today, is an example of such a real leader, a true servant in God’s Kingdom. Even before his death at the hands of the Nazis, Kolbe lived a life of heroic virtue as the superior of a large Franciscan mission of evangelization and publication in Northern Poland. Kolbe’s passionate love of Christ and the Blessed Mother was brought to perfection in his terrible death of starvation, beating and finally chemical injection on the Vigil of the Assumption – that great feast of Mary that fulfills the promise of the Resurrection for those who live “in Christ.” Kolbe’s death was a martyrdom not only because he was arrested, imprisoned and tortured as an active leader of the Catholic Faith in Poland, but because he volunteered his life so that a man with a family could be spared an arbitrary decimation by the Nazi guards in retaliation for an escape by another prisoner. John Paul II held Kolbe up for our attention and veneration as one who genuinely understood and accepted the cost of faith leadership in the modern world.
For those who fear the next steps in life, whatever they might be or bring, Moses, Jesus and Kolbe all remind us today that God is absolutely and finally in charge. We can go forward in faith and confidence wherever we are called to serve and at whatever cost, and the project belongs to God not to us. At the beginning of a new semester and school year here at Creighton that reminder seems particularly apt.
The Lord alone is our leader! No strange god is with us.
Eileen Wirth
I’m a retired Creighton journalism professor, active in St. John’s parish and a CLC member. In retirement, I write books about state and local history, including a history of the parish, and do volunteer PR consulting for groups like Habitat for Humanities, refugees etc. I love to read, work out, spend time with family and friends including those who can no longer get out much.
Writing reflections has deepened my faith by requiring me to engage deeply with Jesus through the Scriptures. In the many years I have been doing this, I’ve also formed friendships with regular readers nationally, most of whom I have never met. Hearing from readers and what I learn by writing make the hours I spend on each reflection well worth the effort.
