Trustworthy, like Paul, in Things Small and Great, 31st Saturday (II), November 7, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See, Manhattan
Saturday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
November 7, 2020
Phil 4:10-19, Ps 112, Lk 16:9-15

The homily was not recorded. The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• One of the most important decisions we need to make is whether we’re going truly to live as Jesus lives or whether we’re going to live the way everyone else does. Today Jesus tells us that to embrace him means to detach ourselves from worldly things. We cannot serve, he tells us, both God and mammon. We have to make a choice between God and money and the things money can buy, between serving God or being enslaved to the things of this world.
• Yesterday Jesus told the Parable of the Unjust Steward, the employee of the rich man who was reported to him for squandering his property. He was given a chance to prepare the books before getting dismissed and he began to call in the debtors to the Master and reduce what they owed. What he was essentially doing was cutting out his commission, because the way commissions worked in the ancient world was that if you owed 50 measures of olive oil as rent as a tenant farmer, that’s what you’d owe the Master but the steward could add on another 20 or 50 or even 100 as his commission. Taxes worked the same way. One of the reasons why this steward was probably reported for squandering his master’s property was because he was, like Fannie and Freddie, he was probably making terrible business deals, allowing people on the Master’s fields who weren’t producing and thereby squandering the Master’s property. But after the rich man in the parable saw what his dishonest steward had done, he surprisingly commended him for acting prudently, for seeking to save his life rather than to squeeze out some extra money. And Jesus drew a moral lesson for us all that immediately leads into today’s Gospel: “For the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than the children of light.”
• Jesus wants us to be as wise in the spiritual realm as greedy businessmen are in the material realm. He tells us to use all our material resources to “make friends,” to care for the poor, so that when all earthly mammon turns out to be no more valuable than monopoly money, the poor will take care of us forever by vouching for our charity, for having been the recipients of our care when they were hungry, thirsty, naked, estranged, imprisoned or sick. Jesus calls us to be faithful in the little things of using our material resources so that we can be entrusted with the true wealth of his eternal kingdom.
• But we have to make a choice and this choice is a hard one today, because as Pope Francis has been stressing since the beginning of his Pontificate, there is in our world today a renewed and “ferocious” idolatry of money, a revitalization of the worship of the ancient golden calf, a consumerism that is, basically, consuming us and leading us to consume the weak and those on the extremes of life. He said that worship of mammon leads to a loss of faith in God and a loss of love for others. Idolatry of money leads to a hardening of the heart toward God and others. We begin to place our faith, hope and love in the things of this world. We put institutional concerns about spiritual ones. We begin to obsess about the bank accounts, houses, jewelry and other material things we’ll leave to the next generation rather than the legacy of faith. If we’re truly going to encounter the Lord Jesus on his terms rather than ours, if we’re really going to live a life together with him and say to him and to the whole world that he is our Messiah, that he is our Lord, that he is our Savior, that he is the Son of the Living God, then we need to believe in and act on his words. We need to make the choice to serve him rather than mammon. We need to make him the pearl of great price sacrificing everything else in our life to obtain. We need to make for him the choice that the Rich Young Man didn’t, and that’s to use our material resources for the care of others so that we can be free to follow him, rather than choose, like he did, our stuff over our Savior.
• In today’s first reading, St. Paul praises the Philippians for doing just that, for sacrificing for him and for what he was doing. He said that he didn’t need it, because he had learned how to go without, but he was “rejoicing greatly” because of the “profit that accrues to your account.” They were using the things of the world to advance the kingdom Paul was announcing. They were serving God with the material resources they had rather than using material resources for their own aggrandizement. In doing so, they were becoming rich in what matters to God. The wise man, God reminds us through today’s psalm, “lavishly gives to the poor; his generosity shall endure for ever,” because the poor are our bankers, and to give to them is essentially to give to God. That’s what the Philippians were doing and that’s why St. Paul was so happy, not because he wanted their mammon, but he wanted their souls to use their mammon for God and others. Making this conversion from the worship of stuff to the worship of God is difficult. It requires faith. But St. Paul seeks to strengthen us to make that act of faith, telling us today what he himself discovered, “I can do all things in him who strengthens me.” If we’re attached to things, if we place your heart in a material treasure rather than lift our heart to God, God will give us the grace of conversion, because we can do all things in the Lord who strengthens us. And the Lord comes to us precisely in the Holy Eucharist to make us strong and to help us to choose him who has first chosen us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: