Good, Faithful, Virtuous Servants and Friends, 32nd Tuesday (II), November 8, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Tuesday of the 32nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Alverna Center, Winona, Minnesota
Retreat for the Priests of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester
November 8, 2022
Ti 2:1-8.11-14, Ps 37, Lk 17:7-10

Today’s homily was not recorded because of a recorder malfunction. The following text guided the homily: 

• In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives us priests on retreat what at first might seem like a disconcerting lesson. Rather than the consoling words to fatigued apostles, “Come to me all you who labor and are burdened and I will give you rest” (Mt 11:28), or elsewhere after they had just finished a missionary journey and were so besieged by crowds they didn’t have time even to eat, “Come away by yourself to a deserted place and rest for a while” (Mk 6:31), Jesus in today’s Gospel describes what we should do after having come in from hours laboring in the vineyards, not to rest and eat, not to think we’re entitled to a brief respite and meal, but to consider ourselves “unprofitable servants” who have only done what is commanded. This scene is a continuing of yesterday’s Gospel when, as you recall, we pondered Jesus’ words about setting good example rather than scandal and of forgiving continuously when someone repents, which provoked his apostles to say, “Lord, increase our faith!” After Jesus described the power of faith the size of a mustard seed, Jesus talks in the passage we have today about the perseverance, humility and gratitude of faith. He describes a servant who has just come in from the fields. Such a servant would never expect his boss to have him sit down at table and serve him as some type of reward for doing what he was supposed to do, but rather to continue serving. “So should it be with you,” Jesus draws the lesson. “When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’” The lesson is this: Jesus wants us to go on continuing to work in his vineyard, to set good Christian example, to be merciful like he is merciful, to live by faith. There’s no point at which we should say, “I’ve forgiven enough, now I can stop.” There’s no time when we should say, “I set a good example earlier. Now I can do my own thing.” Jesus wants us to persevere with gratitude for the gift of faith and like him continue serving others with love as he loved and served us to the end.
• In the affirmation culture we inhabit, in which we are constantly trying to give everyone ribbons and awards and recognition not principally for merit but just for showing up, Jesus’ words might almost seem cruel. We think that if anyone is going to affirm us, it’s going to be God. To our modern ears, Jesus’ calling people “unprofitable” or “useless” servants seems almost verbal abuse. He seems to be saying that no matter how hard we work for him, no matter how hard we try, no matter how much we succeed, at the end of the day we’re just useless. He implies that he isn’t “grateful” for anything we’ve done, but that all we’ve done is what we were obliged to do and should expect no thanks. The point Jesus was making in the Gospel is not that God isn’t grateful for efforts and that we likewise should not be grateful for others’ efforts. He was trying to change our motivations in doing our work for the Gospel, so that we’re not doing it for recognition but doing it out of love for God and others. During the Sermon on the Mount, with words we hear every Ash Wednesday, Jesus told us not to pray, fast or give alms “so that others may see them,” because if that were our motivation, we would already have received our reward. He told us, rather, to do them with purity of intention, to do them for God, to do them out of love, promising us that “The Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward” us. Jesus is not encouraging us to do good things just to receive this reward from the Father; rather, he’s encouraging us to do good things out of love for God and others, merely reminding us that the Father is never blind to our actions and motivations and will in fact remember and reward us for all that we do with the proper motivations. He’s also encouraging us toward humility and gratitude. The Christian life is about serving, rather than being served, and Jesus is summoning us to seek to continue to serve, even after a long day’s work, something exemplified by many hardworking mothers who continue to care for their families after long days at the workplace. And the Christian serves with the life, the talents, and the energy God has given, and so the first response of the Christian ought to be to thank God for these gifts and the trust he has placed in us by giving us a share in his salvific work. Yes, in one sense, we’re “useless servants.” But he has given us all the help he knows we need so that we can prove to be “good and faithful servants,” who are “no longer called servants but friends” and who will inherit as a reward the kingdom prepared since the foundation of the world. So this is a summons to continue serving, to continue building God’s kingdom, even though we may be tired and exhausted like the servant in the Gospel, knowing that God really is grateful, but doing what we’re doing simply because it’s the right thing to do in response to God’s gift and call.
• In today’s first reading, St. Paul describes the various traits in which we need to persevere as good and faithful servants, as true friends of God. St. Paul talks about the virtues he wants to encourage in various classes of people — senior men, senior women, young people, even Titus himself — but while, at certain times of life some of these virtues may be more important, no matter how young we are, all of them are Christian virtues to which we should aspire “so that the word of God may not be discredited” and so that critics “will be put to shame without anything bad to say about us.”
  • Say what is consistent with sound doctrine — We all have a duty to speak in a way that’s consistent with the truth that God has revealed. If we teach contrary to the truth — whether we consciously or unconsciously know that it contradicts what God has taught through revelation and through the Church — we can draw people to follow us down a wrong path. We need to know sound doctrine and have the love for God and for others to pass it on. Much of our present predicament is because sound teaching wasn’t passed on and lived.
  • Temperate — This means “sober” in terms of food and drink. With the passing of time, we should learn what our limits are, what are true pleasures, and how not to over-indulge. Drunk or gluttonous seniors are a sad scandal to all.
  • Dignified — This means that one is “serious” and aware of living in the light of eternity, one who, as St. Leo the Great will remind us on Thursday, remembers one’s Christian dignity and lives in according with that intrinsic worth. We need to set an example of dignified behavior especially when others act in an undignified way.
  • Self-controlled — The word means “prudent,” someone that has things under control, who doesn’t give in to flights of anger or passion. This is the one thing St. Paul says young people need to have, to know their limits and follow them.
  • Sound in faith, love and endurance — We must be healthy in our total self-entrustment to God and what he teaches, in sacrificing ourselves for God and others, and for perseverance until the end.
  • Reverent — We must learn how to revere God and the things of God, especially others. To be reverent means to be conscious that one is dealing with sacred things. That reverence must pass to the way we treat others.
  • Not slanderers — Gossip is a truly ugly scandal. Pope Francis says that it is slaying our brother Abel with our tongue.
  • Not addicted to drink — How sad it is to see someone who is addicted to anyone or anything other than God! An elderly lady addicted to drink is a sign that not even with the passage of years has one learned basic human lessons.
  • Teaching what is good — We can’t keep goodness to ourselves. Bonum diffusivum sui, the good spreads itself. We need to teach what is good.
  • Chaste — We must be capable of unselfish love.
  • Good homemakers — Women in particular must know the art of filling a house with the warmth and love so as to make a home, a skill that parishes likewise need.
  • Control themselves — If one has no self-discipline, then one can’t discipline — or make disciples of — others.
  • Model of good deeds — To know what they should do, others should be able to copy our actions, which is the most powerful teaching of all.
  • Integrity in teaching, dignity and sound speech — We need to have an integrity to follow what we teach on behalf of Christ, to carry ourselves as a Christian and to speak as a Christian ought.
  • Reject godless ways and earthly desires — We have to make a choice for Christ which means that we likewise have to make a firm choice to separate ourselves from the things that are not of God and from spiritual worldliness. To believe in God we have to reject Satan, all his evil works and all his empty promises.
  • Justly — We need to give God and others what they deserve, which is whole-hearted loving service until the end.
  • Devoutly — Devout means “de voto,” or from an vow or commitment that we’ve made to God and to others. It points to something that comes from the heart with love.
• These are the standard Christian virtues that set a good example for others. It might sound like a long list, as if St. Paul is proposing to us an unmeetable standard. But after summoning us to that style of life, he reminds us of God’s help to meet it, saying, “the grace of God has appeared, saving all and training us to reject godless ways and worldly desires and to live temperately, justly and devoutly in this age.” God gives us what we need.
• Someone who shows us that this life is possible is the great Carmelite we celebrate today. St. Elizabeth of the Trinity. With great humility, she recognized her nothingness, but also the power of God’s grace who calls us to live with him. One of the most inspirational things about her is that she clearly wasn’t born a saint. She needed God’s training to reject the godless way of a ferocious temper. Her mother and a confessor told her that, because of her strong personality, she would either become a terror or a saint. A big change took place with her first Confession at the age of seven. It brought her what she called her “conversion” and from that point forward she vowed, despite ongoing struggles, to become a “sweet, patient and obedient daughter.” As she was preparing for her first Holy Communion four years later when she was 11, a religious sister told her that her name, Elizabeth, meant “House of God” — actually it means “oath of God,” but the sister thought that the combination of “El” (God) and “beth” (house) was determinative despite the intervening letters (omnia in bonum!) — and that thought arrested her. She thought that she could not have such beautiful a name and not live as a house of God. Such a house could not abide someone who was prone to explosions and a source of trouble to others. She asked for the Lord’s help who came to dwell within and whose presence she grew more aware of and treasured. A great pianist and award winner at the Dijon Conservatory, she started to use her musical abilities for God’s glory rather than her own, by singing in two Church choirs. She would eventually say that she wanted to do all things for the praise of God’s glory. She began teaching Catechism so that others would share the same holy desire. She lived just 250 yards from a Discalced Carmelite Monastery and she wanted to enter there in order to serve God with everything she had, a response to a calling she discerned God had given her. She visited the convent when she was 17 and the superior there gave her a copy of a circular manuscript of a French Carmelite who had died just months before, and that first version of what would become St. Therese’s Story of a Soul had a big impact on her and her desire to grow in prayer. Her widowed mother resisted her vocation for several years in the hope that Elizabeth would finally fall for one of her many suitors, but finally relented enough to say that she would need to wait until 21. Elizabeth did and entered at 21, where she would come to know God and serve him in others for five years, until she would die of Addison’s disease at the age of 26. Her life for Christ in the Holy Eucharist, as a house of God, led her to grasp that she could find him in the little things of each day, saying, “I find Him everywhere while doing the wash as well as while praying.” She became known as the “prophet of the presence of God.” Saint Elizabeth’s beautiful prayer about God’s dwelling within us in grace is contained for us in paragraph 260 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church describing how not only is God’s plan for us to enter into the perfect unity of the Trinity in heaven, but to become a dwelling place of God now. “O my God,” she prayed, “Trinity whom I adore, help me forget myself entirely so to establish myself in you, unmovable and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity. … Grant my soul peace. Make it your heaven, your beloved dwelling and the place of your rest. May I never abandon you there, but may I be there, whole and entire, completely vigilant in my faith, entirely adoring, and wholly given over to your creative action.” She accepted her own immense sufferings as a gift from God to bring about a union with Christ on the Cross and to allow her to join Christ in the salvation of souls, making up what was lacking in his sufferings for the sake of his body the Church. She wasn’t afraid to die, saying, “I am going to Light, to Love, to Life,” because in this world, within her, she was regularly communing with that same Light, Love and Life. Before Saint Elizabeth died, she said, “I think that in Heaven my mission will be to draw souls by helping them to go out of themselves in order to cling to God by a wholly simple and loving movement, and to keep them in this great silence within, which will allow God to communicate Himself to them and to transform them into Himself.” Her work, which she continues after her labors on earth, is to pray that we will be kept by God in the silence of prayerful union — prayerful mutual knowing — that will transform us progressively into communion with God, so that we will by the power of the Holy Spirit and following the command of Jesus go out of ourselves to bring others into that same communion with God and with us. As a profitable servant, she’s praying for us and the whole Church now.
• Jesus had said that the prudent and faithful steward, in contrast to a useless one, is someone who acts in the supposed absence of the Master as he does in his presence. St. Paul at the end of today’s passage says to Titus that God gives us the grace to live always in the presence of the Master, to “await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of the great God and of our savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to deliver us from all lawlessness and to cleanse for himself a people as his own, eager to do what is good.” We repeat those words in every Mass after the Our Father as we prepare to receive that Blessed Hope, Jesus, on the altar, who gives himself to us so that we might live purely as his dwelling place, eager to serve. Even though we may be useless servants and even though we should have no expectation whatsoever to be served, that’s in fact what Jesus does at every Mass, cleansing and feeding us with himself as he did the apostles in the Upper Room, and preparing us for the eternal banquet where he seeks to serve and feed us out of love forever. Through the intercession of St. Paul and St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, let’s receive that help so that we may continue working out of love for God and others and for God’s glory and kingdom.

The readings for today’s homily were: