Where we tend to place our attention and focus, our thoughts will follow. As we entertain those thoughts, our words and actions will also follow. From there we create habits that carry us through our days and nights, months, and years. If not healthy habits, the momentum that we have created can be difficult to change over time, though not impossible.

Jesus is coming upon the chief priests and the elders in today’s Gospel and shining a light on their unwillingness to see from a different perspective, which is God’s and not theirs. He tells them a story about a father asking his two sons to go out and work in the vineyard, one originally says, “No”, and then goes, the other originally says, “Yes,” and then does not. Jesus then compares the priests and the elders to the second son and the prostitutes and the tax collectors to the first son.

The point is not what we say, but what we do and are we willing to change when we realize we have missed the mark? The prostitutes and the tax collectors repented at the invitation of John, the priests and elders did not.

St. Paul who called himself the Pharisee of Pharisees was so zealous that he was one of the foremost persecutors of the early Church. Yet, in his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, he was willing to change. He was willing to see no longer from his point of view but from God’s. He was willing to humble himself and be transformed over the next three years.

It is wise to be careful with that word humility. Some of us have the perspective that to be humble is to put ourselves down and allow people to walk all over us. That is not humility. A better understanding of humility comes from C.S. Lewis who wrote: “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”

St. Paul did the180 of 180’s and not only thought less of himself going forward but surrendered all to God and gave us one of the most powerful messages of humility in the Bible. Here are two points that he wrote to the Church in Philippi: “Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory; rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves, each looking out not for his own interests, but also for those of others” (Philippians 2:3-4). Again, not thinking less of ourselves, but of others more, especially regarding that God is to be first in our lives.

The God who sent his Son to show us the truth of humility, again, expressed powerfully in the words of St. Paul as “he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). Jesus asked that this cup, the cup of his blood to be poured out, be passed from him. As fully human, he would seek to preserve his life, but Jesus put the will of his Father over his own, he put the lives of humanity over his own.

Jesus gave his life for you and me, so that we might have life and be able to live it to the full. We have been created to love and to be loved. And the best way to begin and continue into this day is to be humble enough to trust, breathe, receive, rest, and abide in the love of Jesus and allow him to show us where we need to heal, to change, to let go, so that we can have the humility of the second son, change course, and follow the will that God has placed before us today.

Let us receive the hand of Jesus and follow him to work in the vineyard of his Father, meaning, let us allow ourselves to be loved by Holy Spirit in the quiet of our hearts and minds and share the love that we have received with those we encounter today.

Photo: May our heart beat in the same rhythm of humility as the sacred heart of Jesus. Mosaic for my living quarters at St. Vincent De Paul Regional Seminary.

Link for the Mass readings for Sunday, October 1, 2023.