The Account of Our Stewardship, 31st Friday (I), November 8, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity
November 8, 2019
Rom 15:14-21, Ps 98, Lk 16:1-8

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted:

• Throughout this month of November, we ponder more deeply what we celebrated during the first two days of this month: the last things, that we will die, be judged, and eventually end up for eternity in one of two places, and that we are called and helped by God to end up in an eternal communion with him by means of his mercy and through saying yes to him in a life of sanctity. Today we are able to continue to meditate on the realities we celebrate on All Saints and All Souls Days.
• Today’s Gospel is meant to help us to prepare for our judgment by inspiring us toward a life of sanctity, minimally out of eternal self-love and -interest. Jesus stresses in a brutal, cutthroat, bottom-line manner what we need to do and 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, something that can get some people to wonder whether Truth incarnate is praising a crooked business manager for wily deception, whether he who gave us the commandment “Thou shalt not steal” is himself praising someone for violating it. But Jesus is doing no such thing. In order to grasp what Jesus was and was not saying and what the crucial lesson is for us, however, we first need to understand better the literal sense of this passage through grasping 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 those mostly 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 these debtors 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 denarii or 50 barrels of oil, he would have to pay back the 50 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 it 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 take care of 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.
• What’s the application to us? Jesus wants us to examine whether we are in the place of that dishonest steward. God has given each of us tremendous gifts. 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. He has given us our vocation! With these gifts, we have profited and made a manifold commission. But have we been using those gifts fundamentally to build up our kingdom or to build up the Master’s? If we’ve been squandering his gifts on ourselves or the things of this world, 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. He wants us, like the steward in the Gospel, to start to sacrifice our “commissions,” our possessions, our time, our lives for others so that we might be taken care of in return — so that they may remember us, and then 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 because we’re Christian or we have good heart, then at least we should do it because it is in our eternal best interest. Like the steward in the parable, we are faced with the choice between trying to keep our profits and trying to 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 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, at our judgment and after it, they will be among those in heaven who welcome us into the eternal home of heaven. 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).
• 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.” What he was saying is that people who are worldly 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 it right away. If they can’t, they eliminate it. 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 a businessman’s employing someone whom he knows will steal from him and try to destroy his business.
• In this story, Jesus is essentially telling us to use our heads, to be smart about our salvation. Jesus’ words today are like a top notch group of business consultants who come in to analyze a failing business, find out where the inefficiencies are and design a business plan not only to save the company but make it thrive; but the key is not just in the information, in knowing what needs to be done, but 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 millionaires 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 sons and daughters of the eternal Father and seek the inheritance offered by 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.
• We have two examples today of those who lived as honest stewards and children of the light and who sought to help the whole Church do the same. In the first reading, we see St. Paul begin to wrap up his Epistle to the Romans. He tells them that he was written to them “rather boldly in some respects to remind you” of what Christ himself has entrusted to them, to lead them “to obedience” to what God has asked. He says, “I have finished preaching the Gospel of Christ,” which doesn’t mean he was never going to do it again, but that he has shared the whole Gospel with them: now it was for them to live it. Now it is time for them to live justified lives by grace received through faith expressed through love. Now is the time to live according to the Holy Spirit, knowing that God makes everything work for the good and nothing can separate us from him. Now is the time to offer our bodies and whole lives as a holy and acceptable sacrifice to God, our fitting worship. Now is the time to love sincerely and with affection. Now is the time to recognize that all that God has given us is meant to be used for our and other’s salvation, for the building up of God’s kingdom. St. Paul made himself all things to all people, he was a steward of everything given. He even used his imprisonment to write letters, like this great Epistle. His example inspires us.
• The second standout example we have today is the great Carmelite, Saint Elisabeth of the Trinity (1880-1906) whom the Church celebrates today. She is someone who prudently used her gift of time and prepared a powerful account of the stewardship of her life. She is one who dared to speak of what Christ has accomplished through her through her cooperation. She’s particularly inspirational for Christians today because she wasn’t born a saint. She needed God’s help and strength to overcome a ferocious temper. Her mother 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 to become a “sweet, patient and obedient daughter.” Like St. Paul tried to bring the first Christians in the Church of Rome to the obedience of faith, the Holy Spirit helped her. After she received Jesus in Holy Communion at the age of 11, a further change happened in her, as she began to treasure the incredible gift of Jesus within her. A great pianist and award winner at the Dijon Conservatory, she started to use her musical abilities as a wise steward 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. Her mother resisted for several years, but finally relented. Elizabeth 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. She recognized 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.” She sought to unite everything to God, knowing that in grace God was dwelling within her. 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 God’s plan for us is not only to enter into the perfect unity of the Trinity in heaven, but to become a dwelling place of God now, following through on Jesus’ promise that if we love him and keep his word, the Father will love us and the Trinity will come to us and make a dwelling place within us. “O my God,” she wrote, “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. May nothing be able to trouble my peace or make me leave you, O my unchanging God, but may each minute bring me more deeply into your mystery! 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.” That’s a practical reality of the surpassing good of knowing God! She accepted her own immense sufferings as a gift from God and invested them for great “commissions,” uniting herself with Christ on the Cross and allowing herself 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 is to pray that we will be kept by God in the silence of prayerful union — prayerful mutual knowing — that will transform our whole life 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. She’s praying for us and the whole Church now that we will become these prudent children of light obedient by word and deed and by the power of the Holy Spirit.
• The Lord who calls us as true children of the light 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, and to send the same Holy Spirit who will soon convert bread and wine into his Body and Blood to renew us in our divine filiation so that we might truly call out “Abba, Father!” and live in accordance with that dignity. He is coming to dwell within us. Today as we prepare to receive him, we ask him to grant us that help he knows we need to to imitate his own wisdom and way of life, to approach him who is Light, Love and Life, so that, when it comes time for us to render an account of all the blessings of life he has given us, 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, we may be welcomed by him with St. Elizabeth of the Trinity into his eternal home!

These were the readings for today’s Mass: