19th Sunday Year C - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2202

Slavery as such did not exist among the Jews in their own homeland — though, by Jesus’ lifetime, Jewish society was gradually moving in that direction. Slavery was quite common, however, throughout the Roman Empire.

Luke was writing his Gospel for third-generation Christian Jews and converted Gentiles living somewhere within that Roman Empire. They were only too familiar with the practice of slavery, with its cruelty and arbitrariness.

We shall listen to what Luke’s Gospel has for us today. It gave us a series of stories dealing with slave-masters and slaves. The common theme uniting them was initially that of readiness.

The first story dealt with the readiness, the alertness, of a group of slaves waiting for their master to return home late one evening after his attending a wedding feast. 
The second story dealt with a householder being ready for the constant possibility of burglary — and had nothing to do with slave-masters and slaves.

The Gospel passage then reverted to the original story, with Peter wondering whether Jesus’ parable was intended for the small group of Apostles or for others. The purpose of the stories changed to become ones about the mutual responsibilities of disciples for each other.

Of all those stories, only the first one, the one about the slave-master serving his slaves, holds a surprise — and it is a pleasant surprise. The rest of the stories seem to reflect the “common-enough” cruel practices of the time. They are allegories applied in a heavily moralistic way to a variety of further scenarios — with no surprises at all but rather a wooden application of rewards and punishments.

The first story with the pleasant surprise sits well with my sense of Jesus. I wonder if the following stories tell us more about the moral concerns of the early Christian communities — somewhat disconcerted by what to them was the unexpectedly-delayed return of Jesus to usher in God’s Kingdom.

So let’s look closely at Jesus’ first story, the one “real” parable, about the master returning in the middle of the night from a village wedding-feast, obviously in a good mood, and finding the slaves ready and waiting for him. Jesus’ story has him doing what no slave-master would ever imagine doing. Joyfully he swaps roles: he gets the slaves to sit down and serves them as though he were their slave.

In his parables, Jesus generally wanted to challenge people to let go of their assumptions — in this case, their assumptions about God.

Is that how I spontaneously see God — a joy-filled, smiling God? I think that the older I get, the more I am seeing God in that light. God’s creation of our world and God’s subsequent sustaining of everything in existence are the over-flowing of the joyful creativity resulting from the love of the Persons of the Trinity for each other. Love and God are essentially joy-filled.

In his Last Supper discourse, Jesus prayed that his “joy be in us” and that “our joy be complete”. On that night when he was to give his life “as a ransom for many”, Jesus, the human revelation of the Mystery we call “God”, was apparently still quietly joy-filled with the prospect of serving the world by his redeeming death, the price of his perfect love.

Jesus’ constant joy, sourced from the heart of his Father, is harder for us to admit than we realise; as is the truth that he engages with each of us personally. But as we do begin increasingly to listen to him and simply to believe him, the more wonderful life becomes. Jesus went to the extremity of the cross so that we too might be joyfully convinced of our innate human dignity.