[Ordinary of the Mass]
[English Text]
[Latin Text]
Our Lord proposes an interesting example to us today—one that He doesn't
want us fully to imitate! Obviously He is not recommending that we give
away other peoples' property in order to win friends. But He is commending
the shrewdness—we might say the “enlightened self-interest” of the unjust
steward. He's telling us that it is a prudent thing to look after our
spiritual well-being, even going so far as to suggest that we might make a
point of putting others in our spiritual debt.
In a sense, we are quite like the unjust steward. God is our Master, and He
has given us many of His possessions to look after, and to use for
ourselves. He has given us the world around us, the food we eat, the
clothes we wear, and even our very lives. More importantly, He has given us
our immortal souls; died for us on the Cross to redeem those souls after
the sin of our first parents; and has given us untold opportunities to
nourish and strengthen our souls in the Mass, the Sacraments, the
sacramentals, and the indulgences given us through His Church.
But, just like the unjust steward, we have often been guilty of squandering
our Master's goods. On so many occasions we have taken His material
creations and used them for no better purpose than to harm ourselves
physically and spiritually. Instead of putting them to high purpose, we use
them for base gain, gluttony, and dissipation. Or, perhaps, we use His
material goods to harm those around us.
Our Lord is telling us then, in this Gospel passage, that someday soon the
Master will be back to relieve us of our material possessions and to demand
an accounting. In the judgment to come, our Lord will take away the things
of this creation, and ask us to tell Him what we did with His gifts
throughout the time of our earthly stewardship. In some sense, this ought
to be a frightening notion for most or all of us!
But yet, in this same parable, our Lord also proposes a means to us by which
we can make our “accounting” a great deal easier when the time comes. He
has given us great spiritual gifts—things that we have in no way earned, and
must be acknowledged to remain His—but He allows us to use them for our
spiritual good.
The most obvious use of His goods that we can make is to stockpile a sort of
“spiritual credit” in our own names. He gives us this opportunity every
time we pray; every time we attend Mass or the Sacraments; indeed, every
time we do something as little as make the Sign of the Cross. In other
words, we can take our Master's goods—with His permission—and invest them in
our own name for our own eternal profit.
But it goes further than that. You know that, by virtue of what we call the
“Communion of Saints,” we are our brothers' keepers. That is to say that we
have a responsibility for one another. Now, that might include things like
seeing to the material requirements of the needy, or it might include
counseling and teaching those who are ignorant of the Faith and how to apply
it. Certainly, in modern America we have abundant opportunity for relieving
the needs of those who have been the victims of the economy—and there are
also plenty of people ignorant of the Catholic Faith. If we have the good
fortune to possess both prosperity and the Faith, we should know that we are
sharing in God’s goods.
We can take all of these spiritual goods we are holding for our Master, and
apply them in prayer and penance for those around us. And by doing that, we
can be sure of God's reward for every soul we lead away from the devil, and
for every soul we lead closer to God. And certainly we can expect the
gratitude and spiritual help of those souls who go to their reward before
us.
But, perhaps the most important way we can make use of our Master's
spiritual belongings is to invest them for the relief of the souls in
Purgatory. It is harder to envision any greater charity than to offer our
prayers and good works for those who can no longer offer these things for
themselves. Certainly, our most merciful God will be pleased with the way
we are investing his goods. And it is hard—perhaps “impossible”—to think of
any better class of people to have in our debt than those souls in
Purgatory; all of who will, one day, reign as saints in heaven. And it is
equally difficult to think of any more powerful way to place them in our
debt than to help them in their time of greatest need.
So, finally, we see what our Lord is telling us. He is not urging us to
adopt the crookedness of the unjust steward. But he does want us to make
shrewd use of His gifts for those around us, for the souls in Purgatory, and
ultimately for our own salvation.
As Saint Paul tells us today, our prayers and penances are valuable because
we are God's adopted sons and daughters. And, perhaps, that is the reason
why our Lord and Master is so willing even anxious for us to take His
goods and invest them with a little worldly self interest that when the
time for our “accounting” comes, He “may receive us into everlasting
dwellings.”
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