Useless, Good and Faithful Servants, 32nd Tuesday (I), November 12, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 32nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Josaphat, Bishop and Martyr
November 12, 2019
Wis 2:23-3:9, Ps 34, Lk 17:7-10

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Yesterday we focused on the aspiration, “Lord, increase our faith,” a prayer that we are called to pray continuously. Faith is a new way of seeing. It’s a participation in Jesus’ own way of seeing. We begin to see things as God sees them and therefore as they really are. We are enabled to go beyond the appearances, beyond superficial human understandings, to grasp realities to which those who don’t look with faith are blind. Today in the readings, we see in two different ways the difference looking at things through the eyes of faith makes.
• First, we look at death differently. During November, dedicated to praying for our faithful departed and also preparing for the time that the Lord will come for us, it is important that we learn to face death and the process of dying that lead to it with the light of faith. Today’s first reading taken from the Book of Wisdom is by far the most common Old Testament passage used for funeral Masses and it manifests what happens when we look at suffering and death in the light of faith. Referring to those who have died, Wisdom says, “They seemed in the view of the foolish to be dead; their passing away was thought an affliction; their going forth from us, utter destruction.” The worst insult that a Jew could hurl was to call someone a “fool,” because this meant someone who did not look at things the way God sees them. To those who do not look at things from the light of God’s revelation, it teaches us, the dead are simply dead. They’re gone. They’re decomposing. Their sufferings were just worthless afflictions leading to annihilation. Today there are still many who look at suffering, dying and death in this same “foolish” way. They believe there’s no meaning to human suffering and that once someone is diagnosed with a terminal illness or is experiencing chronic pain, the only compassionate and humane response is to treat them the way we do our pets, to “put them out of their misery” through “physician-assisted suicide” or euthanasia. They often treat their mortal remains as anything but sacred, incinerating them like we burn garbage, grinding the bones, and scattering them like chaff that the wind blows away. That all begins with the way the foolish “view” things.
• Those who look with the eyes of faith see something altogether different. They perceive, according to the Book of Wisdom, that “the souls of the just are in the hand of God and no torment shall touch them.” They perceive that even if they suffer, “their hope full of immortality.” They grasp that their chastisements become blessings in which God tests them “as gold in the furnace,” burning off the dross and impurities so that at the “time of their visitation they shall shine. Those who look with Christian faith see all of these realities and more as their view death from the prism of Christ’s own sufferings, his own chastisements, his own death and resurrection. They recognize that Good Friday precedes Easter Sunday, that to experience the resurrection we first must endure the passion, and that in our suffering, dying, death and resurrection, Christ seeks to unite us to his own. The passage finishes by reminding us, “Those who trust in [God] shall understand truth and the faithful shall abide with him in love, because grace and mercy are with his holy ones and his care is with his elect.” These are truths that can only be grasped by those who see through the lenses of faith. November is an opportunity for us to beg the Lord to increase our faith with regard to the way we regard end-of-life issues. It is also an opportunity for us each day, if we hope to have just souls eternally embraced by the Father’s strong and loving hands, to imitate Jesus here on earth by saying throughout the day the words we hope to exclaim with Jesus at the end of life, “Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit.” If we look at our life this way, as a free act of entrustment to God, we will approach death as an eternal embrace with a Father who loves us, not as a loss or annihilation.
• Second, the light of faith is also necessary for us to understand the humanly difficult lesson that Jesus is trying to teach us in today’s Gospel. We live in an affirmation culture, in which we are constantly trying to give everyone ribbons and awards and recognition not principally for merit but just for showing up. This cultural shift is not altogether bad and in some ways it’s a helpful corrective to an excessively Darwinian competitive culture of yesteryear when there was one winner and everyone else was considered losers. But to the members of this culture of Stuart Smalleys — the former star in Al Franken’s Saturday Live “Daily Affirmation” skit who used to repeat, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggonit, people like me!” — Jesus’ words in the Gospel almost seem cruel. They seem to be the exact opposite of this a culture of affirmation — and we believe that if anyone is going to affirm us, it’s going to be God! But we need to look at what Jesus is saying with the light of faith. Jesus gives us an image of a hard working servant who has just come in from plowing the field by hand and tending sheep. We can imagine the person’s exhaustion. Jesus asks whether the person’s boss would typically say to him, “Come here immediately and take your place at table,” and then proceed to wait on him. The obvious answer is no. Rather, Jesus says, he would say to him, “Prepare something for me to eat. Put on your apron and wait on me while I eat and drink. You may eat and drink when I am finished.” In the culture of the time and in our time, this type of treatment of employees — not to mention slaves — has been standard. Jesus even seems to be affirming it. But he ups the ante with the moral he draws from the story. He asks,“Is he grateful to that servant because he did what was commanded?,” implying that the answer is a definitive “no.” Then he adds, “So should it be with you. When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants. We have done what we were obliged to do.’” Unprofitable servants. The same phrase can be translated as “useless.” To our modern ears it seems that Jesus — whom we proclaim in the Psalm as “close to the brokenhearted” and who saves “those who are crushed in spirit” — is basically engaging in verbal abuse, 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 even 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 or that we likewise should not be grateful for others’ efforts. He was trying to change our motivations, so that we’re not doing our work 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 even here is not encouraging us to do good things just to receive this reward from the Father but rather  he’s encouraging us to do good things out of love for God and others, 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 calling us to seek to continue to serve, even after a long day’s work, something exemplified by many hard working mothers who continue to care for their families after long days of work. 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 for 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 when we read this Gospel with the eyes of faith, we grasp a particular call. Even though many of us may have worked hard until now to spread the faith, to plow God’s fields and tend his sheep, it’s not time for us to retire, put up our feet and let others serve us. It’s time for us to continue working, even if the type of work required is different.
• Today we have an illustration of what it means to look at things through the light of faith in the saint we celebrate. He was a humble servant of the Lord who proved to be very useful, good and faithful. He was one who entrusted himself to the Lord in life and placed his just soul in the hands of God as people threatened to kill him for his fidelity. He was one who saw just how much the Lord wanted unity in his Church and would give his life as a seed to try to bring about that full flourishing. St. Josaphat was born Orthodox in the Ukraine in 1580. In 1595, in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Metropolitan of Kiev and five bishops, representing millions of Ruthenians, came back into communion with Rome (after the split in 1054), and Josaphat was among them. Josaphat would eventually become a monk and begin to preach in favor of Christian unity in the midst of tremendous opposition — fundamentally political — against reunion with Rome. In 1617, he was ordained Bishop of Vitebsk and soon thereafter appointed Archbishop of Polotsk. There he continued to suffer to heal the scandal of schism and bring about the cause of unity. He had great faith and sought to increase the faith of others. When people were threatening to kill him, he said, “If I am accounted so worthy as to deserve martyrdom, then I am not afraid to die.” When people in the city of Vitebsk were plotting against him, he forthrightly confronted them, “You people of Vitebsk want to put me to death. You make ambushes for me everywhere, in the streets, on the bridges, on the highways, in the marketplace. I am here among you as your shepherd and you ought to know that I should be happy to give my life for you. I am ready to die for the holy union, for the supremacy of St. Peter and of his successor the Supreme Pontiff.” His enemies got their chance on November 12, 1623. He returned home after prayer to find people attacking those who worked for him. He said to the persecutors, “My children, what are you doing with my servants? If you have anything against me, here I am, but leave them alone.” They began to cry, “Kill the papist! and he was pierced by a bullet and then someone pierced his brain with a halberd, as he gave his life for the union offered to us in Christ. He seemed in the view of the foolish to be dead, but he is more alive than ever, and continues to work, as a heavenly “useless servant” for Christian unity. As gold in the furnace he was proven and now, he understands all truth and faithfully abides with God in love. With all of the saints, he sits alongside God as he judges nations and rules over people, praying for God’s grace and mercy.
• There in Jesus’ midst, he also experiences the mind-blowing reversal of today’s Gospel parable. According to human logic, as Jesus indicates, no slave would ever be invited in from working the fields in order to be served by the Master, yet that’s exactly what God the Father promises to do for all those how in fact serve him and others in this way. Just as Jesus put on an apron and washed the feet of the apostles during the Last Supper, Jesus promises that at the eternal wedding banquet, those who like Josaphat have always been vigilant in working, he will seat at table, gird himself with an apron and proceed to wait on them. (Lk 12:37). Today, through St. Josaphat’s intercession, we ask Christ whom we’re about to receive to give us the grace to see things as he does, with the eyes of faith, to entrust ourselves freely into his hands, to bless him at all times, and to continue to do our work until the day when, God-willing, Christ with gratitude will welcome, wait upon and feed us with himself at the eternal banquet!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
WIS 2:23–3:9