27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
First Reading: Hab 1:2-3; 2:2-4
Second Reading: 2 Tim 1:6-8, 13-14
Gospel Reading: Lk 17:5-10
“Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from ploughing or tending sheep in the field, ‘Come here at once and take your place at the table’? Would you not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink’?”
So says Jesus in this Sunday’s Gospel reading. However, the Catechism of the Catholic Church warns, we must read his words in the context of his whole teaching.
Elsewhere, he says, “It will go well with those servants whom the master finds wide awake on his return. I tell you, he will put on an apron, seat them at table, and proceed to wait on them.”
Together, these passages imply that, although, by nature, we are merely slaves, God has made us sons and daughters.
It is not just a legal fiction. At our baptism, he adopted us, making us siblings of his one begotten Son, giving us his own Spirit to make us alive with the kind of life he himself lives in the Holy Trinity.
“You did not receive a spirit of slavery, leading you back into fear,” St. Paul says, “but a spirit of adoption through which we cry out ‘Abba!’” (‘Father’). “The Spirit himself gives witness with our spirit” that we are God’s children and therefore his heirs, along with Christ.
“Rising from the waters of the baptismal font, every Christian hears again the voice that was once heard on the banks of the Jordan River: ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased,’” says Pope St. John Paul II.
“This gift exceeds all gifts,” Pope St. Leo I says: “that God should call man ‘son,’ and man should name God ‘Father.’”
This is what distinguishes Christianity, says Scott Hahn. Judaism “raises believers to be good servants of God,” and “the very word Islam” means “submission” to Allah. However, Christianity “consists in the love of sonship,” for we participate in the love of God the Son for his Father.
Like the prodigal son’s older brother, we tend to forget it. When everyone celebrates the younger son’s return, he complains. “For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command,” he tells his father; “yet you have never given me even a young goat.”
His father replies, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.”
The elder brother has served his father “like a slave” instead of a son; his father reminds him that he is his son and heir.
Like slaves, we tend to obey the letter of God’s commands, concerned only to avoid hell. “Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded?” Jesus asks. “So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’”
However, we are not slaves, but sons and heirs. “A loving son serves better than even the most willing and loyal slave,” says Hahn. God’s slaves avoid adultery, but his sons do not even look at a woman lustfully. Slaves obey their Master out of fear; sons do their Father’s will out of love.
We must “recover the early Church’s sense of awe, astonishment, and gratitude” for God’s gift of sonship, Hahn says. We must “rekindle the gift that is within us,” Paul tells Timothy: not the “spirit of cowardice” appropriate to slaves, but the “spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline” appropriate to sons and heirs.
At present, our life as God’s children is “hidden with Christ in God,” St. Paul says. Nevertheless, in the words of the first reading, this is the “vision for the appointed time; if it seems to tarry, wait for it.”
Father Hawkswell teaches “The Catholic Faith in Plain English” free of charge every week: Sundays, 2–4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre (33rd and Willow, Vancouver); Mondays, 11 a.m.–1 p.m. at St. Anthony’s Parish (2347 Inglewood, West Vancouver) and 7–9 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre; and Tuesdays, 7–9 p.m. in St. Clare’s Parish Hall (2888 Delahaye Drive, Coquitlam).
