Fr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Agnes Church, Manhattan
Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Extraordinary Form
August 4, 2019
Rom 8:12-17, Lk 16:1-9
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
The choice between two lives
Today St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans stresses that the most important decision we make in life is whether we are going to respond to God’s help and gift to live according to the Holy Spirit or whether we are going to live according to the flesh. It’s a choice filled with consequences not only for our happiness in this world but forever. Right before this passage, St. Paul says that those who live according to the flesh are concerned with the things of the flesh. They place their faith, hope and love in money and what money can buy. Their hearts are set on the things of this world, on earthly pleasures, power, fame, vanity and passing luxuries. St. Paul in pastoral charity categorically underlines, “If you live according to the flesh, you will die.” But at the same time he stresses the path of life: that Christ died and rose to fill us with his Spirit, and if the Holy Spirit dwells in us, he will help us to live a new, risen life together like Jesus. He emphasizes, in words that are fundamental for the Christian life, that as a result, “we are not debtors to the flesh, to live according to the flesh.” Rather, “Those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, ‘Abba, Father!’ The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” By Christ’s resurrection and outpouring of the Holy Spirit, in other words, God has made possible for us to live truly as Christians, to live as beloved sons and daughters of God the Father, to seek the things of God that are above and to seize the eternal treasure in Christ of which God has made us heirs. In order to do this, however, we need to act. We have to choose. We must persevere. We have to “put to death the deeds of the body,” mortifying the temptation to live according to the flesh, so that we can live freely according to God’s help and inspiration.
Deciphering Jesus’ Most Confusing Parable
Today in the Gospel, Jesus makes the same point, in a brutal, cutthroat, bottom-line manner, that we need to make the choice to stop living according to the flesh and begin living fully for God and the things of his kingdom. He does so by means of what for many Catholics is the most confusing parable in the Gospel, what’s popularly called the Parable of the Dishonest Steward. This story can sometimes get some people to wonder whether Truth incarnate is praising a crooked business manager for deception, whether he who gave us the commandment “Thou shalt not steal” is himself praising someone for violating it. Jesus, however, is doing no such thing. In order to grasp what the Lord was and was not saying and what the crucial lesson is for us, however, we first need to understand something about the way loans were done in the ancient world.
In the Parable, a manager is about to get sacked because he was squandering the property of his business owner. His boss gave him his pink slip and told him to do an audit of the books prior to his dismissal. So the man called in the tenant farmers who owed his employer money or items and reduced their debts considerably. At first glance, this seems like dishonesty, like he was allowing the indebted farmers to steal from his boss, but it wasn’t. In the ancient world, the way loans were conducted was that the manager or broker would be paid by adding on something to what was borrowed, rather than a percentage taken out of the master’s proceeds. For example, if someone borrowed 50 barrels of oil, he would have to pay back say 55 to the master and another 10 — or 30 or 50 — to the broker, whatever the broker thought he could get. This dishonest steward was probably tacking on way too big of a commission, and, in order to maximize his profits, was probably, like Fannie and Freddie earlier this century, lending out the master’s property to very bad risks, allowing people on the Master’s fields who were going to waste them rather than produce. Hence, when the manager called in those who owed, for example, 100 containers of wheat, and reduced the amount to 80, what he was almost assuredly doing was eliminating most or all of his commission. Therefore, he wasn’t really allowing them to steal from the owner; he was eliminating his own take. Faced with the decision of saving his life by making friends who would be grateful to him and care for him after he was fired or trying to hold out to the end onto the possibility of making money via these commissions, he chose to save his life. His master — and Jesus through the master in the Parable — calls this prudent and wise.
Lessons
What’s the application to us? Jesus wants us to place ourselves in the position of that dishonest steward. God has given each of us tremendous gifts on the basis of which we have made profits, or at least have tried to do so. He has given us our hands, which we use to work. He has given us our brains, which we use to think. He has given us our families and friends, our education, our lives, and so many other blessings. With these gifts, we have achieved great gains, some people extremely high yields. But have we been using those gifts fundamentally to build up our kingdom or to build up the Master’s? Have we used them to live according to the flesh or according to the Spirit? Have they helped us to seek more the things that are above through inciting us to use what we have and know for love of God and others, or have they anaesthetized our souls to the things that matter most? Jesus gives us this parable in order to help us to see that our time is coming to an end and that we need to prepare an accounting. If we have been living selfishly according to the flesh until now, if we’ve been squandering his gifts on the things of this world, he wants us, like the steward in the Gospel, to start to sacrifice our commissions, our possessions, our time, for others. This is the way we might be taken care of in return — so that those we help may be our supporters and welcome us into, as Jesus says, “eternal homes.” The implication is that if we don’t want to do the right thing simply because it is right, if we don’t want to love others simply because we’re Christian and have a transformed heart, then at least we should do it because it is in our eternal best interest. Either we care for the poor and needy, as Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia is accustomed to say, or we go to hell. Like the steward in the parable, we are faced with the choice between trying to keep our profits or save our lives. We cannot take money or possessions with us as we go. The only thing that fits through the “eye of the needle” (Lk 18:25) are acts of love. All earthly mammon will eventually turn out to be no more valuable than monopoly money. Jesus wants us to remember always that the poor and needy are our eternal money exchangers, who take earthly currency and turn it into something moths can’t eat, rust corrode, or the IRS can’t tax. Jesus wants us to be as wise in the spiritual realm as greedy businessmen are in the material realm.If we use whatever God has given us in this world to take care of others, then at our judgment Jesus will turn to us and tell us that whatever we did for them, he took personally: “Whatever you did for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did for me” (Mt 25:40). And he will welcome us into his Father’s eternal home.
Jesus says immediately after today’s Gospel that the “children of this age” are shrewder in dealing with their own generation than “the children of light.” People who are worldly, he states, are often much more “prudent” than believers when it comes to making choices that concern their survival. Business owners, if they know that a certain practice is losing them money, try to fix or eliminate it right away. They know that in order to survive, they’ve got to cut their losses, otherwise they’ll end up in chapter 11. Christians, however, when we know that a certain thing is losing us God’s grace, seldom act in such a decisive and intelligent way. Even though such a serious sin might send us into eternal bankruptcy, we often don’t get rid of it. Jesus instructs us to act with bottom-line brutality in the Sermon on the Mount, but few of us follow this advice: “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell” (Mt 5:29-30). The failure to cut out sinful behavior from our lives is, for Jesus, simply stupid. Sinning in such a way is cooperating with the devil, and that would be like the Pentagon’s giving top security clearances to spies, or a businessman’s employing someone whom he knows will steal from him and try to destroy his business. The Holy Spirit, with his gift of prudence (or counsel or right judgment), wants to help us choose wisely and become spiritually far shrewder than the most astute and experienced financier.
In this story, Jesus is essentially telling us to use our heads, to be smart about our salvation. Jesus’ words today are like a report from top notch business consultants who have come in to analyze a troubled business, find out where the inefficiencies are and design a business plan not only to save the company but make it thrive. The key, we know, is never just in the information, in knowing what needs to be done. It is in having the wisdom, courage and resolve to implement that plan. That’s what Jesus is proposing to us today, with urgency. Unlike in the parable, when we meet him face-to-face, we’ll have no time to return to try to fix things. We have to fix them now.
If we’ve been selfish with our gifts, if we haven’t been putting God first, if we have been neglecting those left in ditches on the side of the road, the time is now to use our heads to do so. If we’ve been trying to compromise with a sin, with something that is obviously wrong but which we’re trying to deny, the time is now to change. Now is the time for us to be as shrewd about storing up for ourselves heavenly wealth as Bezos, Buffet or Dalio are to increase their fortunes here on earth. We cannot serve both God and mammon. We cannot worship God and the golden calf. We cannot be led by the Spirit and at the same time be materialistic consumers. We cannot be sons and daughters of the eternal Father and set our hearts on the inheritance offered by the world or make Faustian bargains with the prince of the world. Just as the steward in the parable couldn’t try to keep all his commissions and win the favor of those who owed him, so we must choose between storing up treasure and pleasure in this world, or using everything we have in this world to store up eternal treasure and happiness in the next. This is a choice the Rich Young Man was presented by Jesus and sadly refused to take. Today Jesus out of love offers us the same deal urging us to seize it and obtain the pearl of great price.
The example of the Curé of Ars
Today the Church celebrates the 160th anniversary of the death and birth into eternal life of Saint John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests and a model for everyone about how to be a prudent and faithful steward. Once he crossed the square from his rectory to his Church to hear confessions and he saw a man with his rifle in one hand and the leash to his hunting dog in the other. The man had accompanied a friend to Ars who had wanted to go to confession, but the hunter said that he had no need for confession and would go catch dinner while his friend waited in line for absolution. St. John Vianney stopped before the hunger, looked at the dog and turned to its owner: “Monsieur,” he said, “would that your soul was as beautiful as your dog.” The vain young man blushed. After some time reflecting on the saint’s words, he entrusted his gun and pet to townspeople, entered the Church and with great tears, made his confession. His conversion was so thorough that, a few years later, he himself was captured by the Hound of Heaven and became a Cistercian monk. If St. John Vianney stopped before us today, he might ask us if we care for our soul as much as we care for our fine suits or dresses, our cars and homes, our electronic devices and appearance. Is our soul the most beautiful thing about us? If not, do we want it to be? St. John Vianney used to stress that the Holy Spirit has been sent among us precisely to help us seek to have resplendently holy souls. He said, “The Holy Spirit is like a man with a carriage with a good horse who is ready to drive us to Paris. We have only to say yes and climb inside!” The saints are the ones who have climbed aboard with trust and docility and allowed the Holy Spirit to drive them all the way to life’s true capital. For Fr. Vianney, the path to heaven — to which he spent his priest life trying to guide his people — is not principally an excruciating hike of human exertion up to heaven, but rather a wild chariot ride, in which the Holy Spirit confidently leads us through dark valleys and dangerous passes, over crevices and canyons, at all types of speed through all form of weather, even through death, until we arrive at our heavenly home. Our main task is to trust him enough to give the Holy Spirit permission to steer the course of our life, to get on board, to stay on board, to hold on tight for the length of the journey.
The means God provides
The Lord who calls us to live by the Spirit as true children of God is prepared to give us all the help he knows we need to do so. He is about to feed us with himself, the greatest treasure in the world. St. John Vianney once told his parishioners, “We would never have thought of asking God for his own Son. But what man couldn’t say or conceive, what he never would have dared desire, God in his love has said, conceived and done. We would never have dared to say to God to have his son die for us, to give us his body to eat, his blood to drink. [But] since all this is true, man cannot imagine the things that God will do. He goes further in his designs of love than we could possibly dream.” In the Mass, God the Father sends the Holy Spirit not only to convert bread and wine into his Son’s Body and Blood but to renew us in our divine filiation so that we might truly call out “Abba, Father!” and live in accordance with that dignity. Today as we prepare to receive Jesus, we ask him together with the Father to send us to the Holy Spirit, so that we may live as wise children of the light and imitate Jesus’ own wisdom and way of life. That way, when it comes time for us to render an account of all the blessings of life we have received, he may praise us eternally for acting shrewdly and, together with all those we’ve helped through sharing God’s generosity as good and faithful stewards, he may welcome us, with St. John Vianney, into his eternal home!
The readings for today’s Mass were:
From the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans (Rom 8:12-17)
Consequently, brothers, we are not debtors to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die, but if by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, “ Abba, Father!” The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.
The Continuation of the Holy Gospel according to St. Luke (Lk 16:1-9)
Jesus said to his disciples, “A rich man had a steward who was reported to him for squandering his property. He summoned him and said, ‘What is this I hear about you? Prepare a full account of your stewardship, because you can no longer be my steward.’ The steward said to himself, “What shall I do, now that my master is taking the position of steward away from me? I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg. I know what I shall do so that, when I am removed from the stewardship, they may welcome me into their homes.’ He called in his master’s debtors one by one. To the first he said, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He replied, ‘One hundred measures of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note. Sit down and quickly write one for fifty.’ Then to another he said, ‘And you, how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘One hundred kors of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note; write one for eighty.’ And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently. For the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.”
