Readings for Sunday, September 22, 2024

Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

[Jesus said,] “If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.”

— Mark 9:35

Click here to find the daily readings on the USCCB website

Opening the Word

Editor’s Note: Fr. Peter shares insights from a variety of voices on the Sunday readings.

Learning How to Die Well

Karl Rahner was a German Jesuit priest and a leading theologian of the twentieth century. He once observed that one of the tasks of life is to learn how to die well. On first hearing this, we may be much like the disciples who didn’t understand Jesus when he spoke of his own need to enter death (see Mark 9:31–32). How do we learn to “die well”? If we forgo the need to always have our own way, if we forgive and resist the impulse to get revenge, if we are sensitive to the needs of others even when it’s inconvenient, if we care for the child among us, whether that “little one” be five, forty-five, or eighty-five — if we practice a willingness to die in such ways, then when it comes time for us to make that final journey of our earthly lives, it will not be as frightening because we will have been there before.

Furthermore, if we learn how to die well, our lives will take on new meaning. The focus of our lives will not be on ourselves, but on others and their needs. We will find ourselves less disappointed when life doesn’t go our way. Blue moods will evaporate more readily. We will have a greater interest in daily life. In other words, the very aspects that once seemed to drag us down will become doorways to hope and renewed life. What once seemed to have been a kind of death will become an avenue to faith in the resurrection.

~Fr. Joseph Juknialis

Reflect

Have you ever “died to yourself” and then experienced a resurrection?

 

Fr. Joseph Juknialis, a retired priest of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, is the new author of reflections for Liguori Publications’ Our Parish Community bulletins. Fr. Joe has served in ministry as a parish priest and a teacher of homiletics at St. Francis de Sales Seminary in Milwaukee. Retirement has given him time for hiking, canoeing, writing, poetry, gin rummy, the Green Bay Packers, and pursuing his appreciation of nature. In noting the most amazing aspect of his life, Fr. Joe says, “God has always brought me to the place I should be.”