25th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Isa 55:6-9
Second Reading: Phil 1:20-24, 27
Gospel Reading: Mt 20:1-16
In his very being, God is a giver. The Father eternally begets the Son, giving him all that he is. The Son eternally receives his father’s gift and offers it back to him in delighted obedience. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as their mutual love.
We see God the giver in his creation. He established Adam and Eve in friendship with himself, giving them the whole world and even offering them a share in his own divine life.
At first, Adam and Eve accepted all these delights as continuous gifts from God. Then, however, tempted by Satan, they tried to take them for themselves, for they began to see God as a rival curtailing their freedom.
That was the original sin, which St. Augustine calls a sin of pride. However, “we all carry within us a drop of the poison of that way of thinking,” said Pope Benedict XVI. For example, in the Morning Offering, I try to offer the whole day to God. However, before long, I begin to think that the day is mine and the time I give God is a generous deduction from what really belongs to me.
Pride is the fall in every individual life. You can hear it in a child’s scream: “It’s mine! I want it!” or the defiance of an uneducated labourer: “I don’t want no charity; I just want my rights,” or the claim of a scientist: “This is my theory; I thought of it first.”
We can commit this sin of pride in two ways. One is to try to seize the gifts God wants to give us, like the prodigal son in Jesus’ parable. The other is to try to earn them, like the older son in the same parable, or like the workers in this Sunday’s Gospel Reading, who expect the landowner to pay them in proportion to their efforts. As Bishop Robert Barron says in his book The Priority of Christ, their sin introduces “the rhythm of economic exchange” into God’s “utterly selfless gift.”
God’s ways and thoughts are not ours, we hear in the First Reading. “As the heavens are higher than the earth,” so are his ways higher than ours.
For example, the world says, “Happy are the rich,” but Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Heaven cannot be seized or earned; it can only be received as a gift.
Our “poverty of spirit” is precisely what brings us close to God, says Pope Benedict in his Jesus of Nazareth. The poor in spirit “do not stride into God’s presence as if they were partners able to engage with him on an equal footing; they do not lay claim to a reward for what they have done.” No; “they are lovers who simply want to let God bestow his gifts upon them and thereby to live in inner harmony with God’s nature and word.” As Saint Therese said, “They come with empty hands; not with hands that grasp and clutch, but with hands that open and give and thus are ready to receive from God’s bountiful goodness.”
Poverty of spirit “is never a purely material phenomenon,” Benedict warns. “Purely material poverty does not bring salvation,” for “the heart of those who have nothing can be hardened, poisoned, evil, interiorly full of greed for material things, forgetful of God, covetous of external possessions.”
On the other hand, he notes, it is not “a purely spiritual attitude,” either. The Church needs people like the Franciscans, who live in material poverty, “to wake everyone up to the fact that possession is all about service” and “to contrast the culture of affluence with the culture of inner freedom.”
Each of us, in our own way, must live “in a manner worthy of the Gospel of Christ,” as St. Paul says in the Second Reading.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver, and Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. Next week’s topic is This History of Our Salvation. The course is entirely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary.
