Sunday 30 August 2025
22e Sunday During the Year – Year C
Homily by Father Emmanuel Schwab

Today's readings:
1st reading: Sirach 3,17-18.20.28-29
Psaume : 67 (68),4-5ac,6-7ab,10-11
2rd reading: Hebrews 12,18:19.22-24-XNUMXa
Gospel: Luke 14,1.7:14-XNUMX

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“You have come to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant.”

We are no longer like Moses before the smoking mountain of Sinai that frightens the Hebrew people, we are before a poor man who has no stone to rest his head on, who dies crucified between two brigands. It is to him that we have come. And it is he in whom we place our faith, because we recognize him as the only Savior of all humanity. 

He is God born of God, light born of light, true God born of true God. For us men and for our salvation, he came down from Heaven. By the Holy Spirit he took flesh from the Virgin Mary and became man. 

This lowering of the eternal Son, of the second person of the Holy Trinity, of the Word of God, this lowering tells us of the love that God has for each of us. And this lowering of the Incarnation fascinates Saint Therese. This lowering of the Incarnation will be redoubled in the lowering of the Cross: He humbled himself even more, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross., writes Saint Paul to the Philippians (2,8:XNUMX). And all this he gives us access to in that even more astonishing, even more overwhelming, abasement, which is the abasement of the Eucharist: Jesus who makes himself a small piece of bread, so that we can receive in our body his life stronger than death. And it is because God thus abases himself in his Word that we are called to follow this same path to reach the fullness of life, because it is the path that God takes for us.

If a little bird enters this basilica, there is a great risk that it will not be able to get out, and yet there are doors that can be left open. But the bird will try to fly upwards, and it will see the light from the stained-glass windows above. And it will constantly try to get out through the top… I don’t know if the bird will have the idea that it is necessary to lower itself to the level of the doors in order to then soar towards heaven. This image speaks to me a lot about our own lives, because we yearn for Heaven, our homeland. We realize here that we are in exile and this Heaven draws us upwards and to ascend towards heaven, to ascend towards God, Jesus teaches us that we must lower ourselves.

We sometimes experience the same thing in the mountains when we aim for a summit and the path begins by going down, to cross a river and go back up the other side.

We aspire to great things, but this aspiration must involve a lowering of oneself. The essence of love, says Thérèse at the beginning of manuscript A, is to lower oneself. And Thérèse will learn to lower herself. Testimonies from her sisters after her death tell both at Les Buissonnets and at Carmel how Thérèse loved to lower herself, that is, to take the last place, to be forgotten, in order to join the Lord there. 

This humiliation that Thérèse experiences is illuminated by the Gospel. This last place spoken of in today's Gospel, Thérèse covets it. She writes a few months before her death to her sister Céline—in religion Sister Geneviève—:

Beloved little sister, let us never seek what appears great in the eyes of creatures. […]

The only thing that is not envied is the last place, so it is only this last place that is not vanity and affliction of spirit...

However […] sometimes we find ourselves longing for what shines. So let us humbly place ourselves among the imperfect, let us consider ourselves little souls whom the Good Lord must support at every moment. […]

Yes, it is enough to humble oneself, to bear one's imperfections with gentleness. That is true holiness! Let us take each other by the hand, dear little sister, and run to the last place... no one will come to dispute it with us... (LT 243 – to Sr. Geneviève – June 7, 1897)

This last place is almost where manuscript C ends in this same month of June 1897 where Thérèse writes:

Since Jesus ascended to Heaven, I can only follow Him by the traces He left, but how luminous these traces are, how fragrant they are! I have only to cast my eyes into the Holy Gospel, immediately I breathe in the perfumes of the life of Jesus and I know which way to run… It is not to the first place, but to the last that I rush. (MsC 36v-37r) Is it just a calculation? Because when we read the Gospel, we can have this impression: in fact, if you want to find yourself in the first place, choose the last one like that, we will make you go up… Yes certainly, Thérèse desires Heaven and, I hope, each of us too. But this path to Heaven, we cannot travel it by our own strength. If we present ourselves before God at the Last Judgment with a list of all the good things we have done, this is nothing before God's justice, before God's holiness. Thérèse understood this well: she presents herself before God empty-handed. What she understands is that it is Jesus who leads us to the first place, and that we find Jesus in the last place. He is the servant of the washing of the feet. Going to the last place to find Jesus and for Jesus to lead us... This is the whole little way of Thérèse: letting oneself be led completely by Jesus. You probably know the story of the elevator that Thérèse is looking for to go to heaven and she cries out: the elevator that will raise me to Heaven is your arms to Jesus. (MsC 3r)

And that is why Thérèse will be able to say:

I took my place in the arms of Jesus. (MsC 23r)

This is his place in the Church. 

In the event of September 8, 1896, when she made this retreat for the anniversary of her profession and she wrote a great prayer to Jesus, at the heart of this prayer, she cried out:

Yes, I have found my place in the Church, and this place, O my God, it is you who gave it to me... in the Heart of the Church, my Mother, I will be LOVE... thus I will be everything... thus my dream will be realized!... (MsB 3v)

This place is not help something isbut wish to remain conscious love; that is, to let the holiness of God flow through us, radiate from us, because holiness is nothing other than love fulfilled. 

Thérèse has to take care of the novices, but she has discernment. She says:

With some souls, I feel that I must make myself small, not be afraid of humiliating myself by admitting my struggles, my defeats; seeing that I have the same weaknesses as them, my little sisters in turn confess to me the faults they reproach themselves for and are happy that I understand them from experience. With others I have seen that on the contrary, to do them good, one must be very firm and never go back on something said. Lowering oneself then does not make humility, but weakness. (MsC 23v)

Thérèse has a very fine sense of spiritual things and she understands that lowering oneself like the Lord, taking the last place, does not consist of no longer having consistency and no longer exercising one's responsibilities. When there is a need to be firm, Thérèse knows how to be, but always in her place. And this place, she says in the same passage:

What I find most difficult is to observe faults, the slightest imperfections, and to wage war against them to the death. […] since I took my place in the arms of Jesus, I am like a watchman observing the enemy from the highest turret of a fortified castle. Nothing escapes my gaze; often I am astonished to see so clearly. (MsC 23r) Since I took my place in the arms of Jesus… The last place is in the arms of Jesus. ; it is not to self-flagellate by saying: “I am nothing, I am worthless”; that is not the last place. It is, ultimately, to live under the sole gaze of God our Father, as Jesus encourages us to do in chapter 6 of Saint Matthew: When you pray, do not make a spectacle of yourself, for your Father sees what you do in secret; when you fast, do not make a spectacle of yourself, for your Father sees […]; when you give alms, do not make a spectacle of yourself, for your Father sees […]. 

To live under this sole gaze of the Father.

Finally, the Gospel ends with this question of invitations to lunch or dinner: Don't invite your friends or your brothers and so on. On the contrary, when you give a reception, invite the poor and the crippled.We are all a little embarrassed by this Gospel: what should I do? How do I go about it? Thérèse interprets this Gospel in a way that allows us all to move forward in the direction in which the Lord calls us. This is also in manuscript C:

I want to be nice to everyone — One decision: I want, I want to be kind to everyone - (and especially to the less kind sisters) to please Jesus and respond to the advice He gives in the Gospel roughly in these terms: - "When you make a feast do not invite your relatives and friends for fear that they will invite you in turn and thus you will have received your reward; but invite the poor, the lame, the paralytic and you will be happy with what they cannot repay you, because your Father who sees in secret will reward you." (MsC 28v)

How does Thérèse understand this gospel in her daily life? At Carmel, she is not likely to invite people who are in Lisieux. 

I want to be kind to everyone and especially to the less kind sisters to please Jesus and respond to the advice he gives in the Gospel...

Go to the last place to find the arms of Jesus that will take us to heaven. 

To live this humiliation on a daily basis in the determined love of all the people I meet. 

All this could be summed up in this last letter from Thérèse which is an image that she sends to Abbé Bellière:

I cannot fear a God who made himself so small for me... I love him!... because he is only love and mercy!

Amen