The Gospel of John, chapter 6:67-68

Surviving in our world demands that we make choices. The disciples of Jesus have to choose between Him and the Gods of society. Which will it be? Jesus or the world?

Choices are the tools we use to chisel our personalities from the hard stone of life. Today, we will talk about making choices and about the most fundamental of choices: who will be our God? We sometimes imagine that modern-day people rarely, if ever, worship false gods. It all depends on what is meant by false Gods.

Do we accept the god of our society with all the materialistic values and self-centered pursuits this social god offers us? Or, will we turn aside from the spirit of materialism and walk no more with it? Will we walk instead with Jesus, the God who loves the poor and the downtrodden, the homeless and the hungry, the deprived and the forgotten? What will be our choice? Will we invest our lives in becoming secure and comfortable, rich and powerful, or will we use our gift of life to bring justice to the poor, care to the forgotten and love to the unlovable? Either we stand with Jesus and walk His way or we walk with the idols of the marketplace toward power and worldly prestige. We cannot have it both ways. We must make a choice. That is what Christianity is all about.

Oscar Romero was the archbishop of San Salvador, a conservative man who led his archdiocese along traditional paths. He was a good man, a man well loved by all decent people. He began building a new cathedral and strengthening his diocesan seminary. Then, he was confronted by the oppression and the poverty of his people. He cancelled his building plans, moved refugees onto the seminary grounds and began to speak out against the tyranny he saw everywhere around him. He made a choice, a choice for the poor and the oppressed. After several threats, a group of assassins murdered him while he was saying Mass in a local hospital.

Many who abandoned Jesus after his challenging sermon on the Eucharist went away sad. They would have wished that Jesus had not challenged them the way he did. They must have longed for the days before this sermon, the days when they could follow him without having to make such a hard choice. Yet, they did have to choose. They could not avoid that choice nor can we.

We may imagine we can love both God and the ways of our world but we deceive only ourselves. We cannot serve God and the gods of our society. We must make a choice. St. Peter chose Jesus over the world because Jesus had “the words of eternal life.”

Fr. Hugh Duffy