27th Sunday Year C - Homily 5

Homily 5-2019

I was talking to someone yesterday who did not like the “feeling” of today’s Gospel passage. I half agreed. But I found that it can be understood better after some ‘second thoughts’.

The apostles recognized their need for greater faith. We often think of faith in a vague, generalized sense, which asks little of us. We perhaps see it as merely, or primarily, the intellectual acceptance of the fact that Jesus is God. We probably all pass with honours on that criterion. With Jesus, and perhaps the apostles, too, faith was much more engaging than that.

Jesus was talking about the practical faith in the things of which he spoke with passion, the kind of faith that ignites our hope: that God can make the Kingdom come; that structures of injustice and oppression can be changed; that the goods of the world can be shared equitably. Without faith in those possibilities, we do nothing; and the world does not change. But if we had genuine faith in such things, as Jesus did, we would become involved in them. We would devote our energies to them. Life would become more risky; but when faith is motivated by love, we may be prepared to take risks. In that case, the request of the disciples might well become our prayer: “Increase our faith!”

The next paragraph of today’s passage about the servant expected to get the master’s evening meal was not a parable about the kingdom, much less about God’s attitude to us. It simply described a common situation taken from life in the Roman Empire – with which Luke’s readers, if not Jesus’ contemporaries, were quite familiar and would have accepted as usual and even acceptable. They would have expected nothing else. The story was an illustration making an obvious point.

In that case, what might it have been illustrating? Is there a moral to the story? I am not sure. Perhaps, the final bit of today’s passage may be what gives it some clarity. It turned the emphasis away from the servant's master and trained it onto the servants: “When you have done all you have been told to do, say, ‘We are merely servants: we have done no more than our duty’.” Do we go along easily with the fact that we are “merely servants” of each other, voluntarily “servants” of each other? Certainly, Jesus saw himself in that light. Remember how he said of himself, “The Son of Man did come not to be served, but to serve; and to give his life as a ransom for all”. In freely becoming followers of this Jesus, do we not say the same thing of ourselves? Is that not what loving means?

When we become disciples, do we expect to be honoured and looked up to? Or do we come on board, expecting to get our hands dirty, perhaps even to wear ourselves out in the service of the world, particularly the world’s poor, defenceless and marginalized?

In a way, this brings us back to where we started today’s reflection, and ties the various pieces together. As Catholics, as disciples of Jesus, do we direct our attention and energies to cooperating with God in making the Kingdom take shape in our contemporary world? Do we think about, worry about, and do what we can to change structures of injustice and oppression wherever we see them? Do we work for the goal of sharing our nation’s common-wealth equitably? Or do we sit on our hands and leave all that sort of thing to others?

Do we believe that Jesus might be inviting us, hand in hand with God, to “say to some mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea’, and it would obey you”? Or do we need to sit down first, quietly meditate, and then pray, “Lord, increase our faith”?