Useless Good and Faithful Servants Until Death, 32nd Tuesday (I), November 14, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Knights of Columbus Senior Leadership Retreat
“Supreme in Prayer, Work and Mission”
Villa Maria Guadalupe Retreat House, Stamford, Connecticut
Tuesday of the 32nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death
November 14, 2023
Wis 2:23-3:9, Ps 34, Lk 17:7-10

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• A retreat is normally a chance to reflect upon the big picture of human life. To look at it with the eyes of faith. And part of that reflection is on death.
• 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 in the light of faith. This is part of the formation of Knights of Columbus from the very beginning, as every Knight is instructed, “Tempus fugit. Memento mori,” “Time flies. Remember that you will die.”
• 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 with 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, Wisdom 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 “medical assistance in dying,” euthanasia or other euphemisms. 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, or totally dissolving them by alkaline hydrolysis. 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 hands of God and no torment shall touch them.” They perceive that even if they suffer, “their hope is full of immortality.” They grasp that their chastisements become blessings through 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 they view death through 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.” Those who live by faith in God to the end will see the truths in which they’ve believed manifest as they by God’s mercy experience his love, presence and care forever. 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 living with our faces fixed on Jerusalem, on Calvary, and on what comes after Calvary.
• One of the most important spiritual practices is to ponder our death in the light of faith. Jesus is constantly calling us to be vigilant, like the wise Bridesmaids in the Gospel this past Sunday, for his return. We know from the life of Father McGivney that we’re not all destined to live to 100. In one of the great classics of Christian spirituality, which has forged and formed many saints, The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis reminds us, “Very soon your life here will end; consider, then, what may be in store for you elsewhere. … In every deed and every thought, act as though you were to die this very day. … If you are not prepared today, how will you be prepared tomorrow? Tomorrow is an uncertain day; how do you know you will have a tomorrow? … Blessed is he who keeps the moment of death ever before his eyes and prepares for it every day. … In the morning consider that you may not live till evening, and when evening comes do not dare to promise yourself the dawn. Be always ready, therefore, and so live that death will never take you unprepared. Many die suddenly and unexpectedly, for in the unexpected hour the Son of God will come. When that last moment arrives, you will begin to have a quite different opinion of the life that is now entirely past and you will regret very much that you were so careless and remiss. How happy and prudent is he who tries now in life to be what he wants to be found in death.… The present is very precious; these are the days of salvation; now is the acceptable time. … Try to live now in such a manner that at the moment of death you may be glad rather than fearful. Learn to die to the world now, that then you may begin to live with Christ. Learn to spurn all things now, that then you may freely go to Him.”
• Cardinal Justin Rigali, the former Archbishop of Philadelphia, wrote in 2011 A little over ten years ago, two days before he would retire as Archbishop of Philadelphia, wrote for the priests of his archdiocese an extraordinarily beautiful meditation on Christian preparation for death. “Preparing for death is the greatest opportunity in our lives,” Cardinal Rigali wrote somewhat provocatively. Rather than dreading death as the inexorable occasion in which our life will be taken from us, we can all learn from Jesus, he said, how to make our death an act of supreme self-giving love. He advised we focus on two passages. The first is Jesus’ words, “No one takes [my life] from Me; I freely lay it down” (Jn 10:18). Just as Jesus made his death an act of self-giving love, so we can do the same. “Seen in this perspective,” the Cardinal continued, “death is the moment to give all, to surrender all with Jesus and in union with His sacrifice. … When anticipated by an act of loving acceptance, death is an opportunity to say ‘yes’ to the Father, just as Jesus did; to say ‘yes’ with all our heart, as Jesus did.” That leads us to the second passage, Jesus’ last words from the Cross, when he said, “Father, into your hands I commend My spirit” (Lk 23:46). Our self-giving love is a self-entrustment to the Father, something the Cardinal urges us to do every day before we go to bed, as the Church does in Compline. He comments, “When the hour of death comes, we may not be conscious. It may come very suddenly, by reason of an accident, by reason of a heart attack; there are a million and one possibilities left to our imagination, but this does not matter. The point is: the surrender will have been made thousands of times! The Father will understand that each of us had the power, which we exercised, the power, with His Son Jesus, to lay down our life freely, lovingly and definitively. Then there will be no obstacle to the consummation of our love. Life and holiness will be ours forever in the communion of the Most Blessed Trinity.”
• Having that perspective, allows us to live and work differently than others. It allows us to live for God rather than for ourselves. That perspective obviously helps us to understand the initially 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 who created, created, loves and awaits us! But we need to look at what Jesus is saying not with the eyes of the world but with those 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. All of us 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 slaves, hired hands and other employees 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. Our life is not ultimately about us, it’s not an egocentric pursuit, but ultimately it is about living in God’s love, receiving it, and reciprocating it, by seeking to love God with all our mind, heart, soul, strength and elbow grease and loving our neighbor, including through the love with which we work for them. Jesus does not want us 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 in these words 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, it’s about charity, unity and fraternity, and Jesus is calling us to seek to continue to serve, even after a long day’s work, something exemplified by many hard working moms and dads 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, in light of the purpose of our life, we grasp a particular call. Even though many of us may have worked hard until now to glorify God and spread the faith, to plow God’s fields and tend his sheep, to build up God’s kingdom and prosper the mission for which Father McGivney founded the Knights in service of God, Church, men and their families, 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 in different stages of our life may be different.
• And if we work this way for God and others, if we live each day as if it is our last and try to spend it in love, unity and fraternity, then we will experience a 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 to the extreme. 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 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, as we celebrate on this retreat a Votive Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death, through Blessed Michael’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

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