Homily: Taking Care

Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 27 / Sunday

Readings: Isaiah 5.1-7 / Responsorial Psalm 80 (R/v Is 5.7a) / Philippians 4.6-9 / Matthew 21.33-43

Joshua and his mother are walking on the seashore. He is darting in and out of the waves that crash onto the beach and then pull back into the sea. He likes standing knee deep in the water and watching the red, red ball of light fall slowly, slowly into the horizon till nothing is left but the twinkling stars above. 

As he frolics and splashes about at the water’s edge, laughing gleefully, he calls out, “Mommy, Mommy, come and play with me.” His mother ignores him; she is too busy picking up seashells and pebbles. She is preoccupied with gathering more and more of these for her treasure trove of shells and pebbles she has been accumulating over the years.

“Mommy, come and see the sunset!” Joshua cries out. But Mommy, her head bent down, busily continues collecting shells and pebbles she just had to have.

I’d like to think that Joshua’s invitation to his mother is also what Jesus is inviting you and me to do with the parable he tells: to pause and to honestly consider how we are taking care of what God gives us.

All of us benefit from God’s providence. Whether we measure God’s goodness as abundant or little in our lives, no one would deny that God cares for our every need. God always provides, oftentimes more excessive than what we think we are worthy of receiving. From a faith-filled perspective, God does not provide us with things to have; God blesses us with gifts for life. These gifts are for our wellbeing and happiness. They are also God’s gifts to teach us the right way to interact with God: to offer praise and thanksgiving.  

Humans that we are, we can sometimes loose sight of what God’s many gifts are really for. Our neediness to possess and fill our lives; our selfishness to hoar and not share; our small-mindedness to use these only for our self-aggrandizement and glory: these cloud our eyes of faith. They dim our sight: instead of recognizing them as God’s gifts, we diminish them as our earthly entitlement.

This is why Jesus teaches us this lesson in Chapter 6 of Matthew’s Gospel: “do not store up earthly riches; invest in the spiritual things that lead to eternal life; keep what lasts!” 

We are so familiar with this teaching that some of us might tune out when we hear it. Others might numb themselves to its importance for Christian living. Still a few more might be blasé about the urgency of Jesus’ call to re-orientate our lives to God. 

And so we might carry on accumulating more and more for ourselves. Not only more secular good and riches so that we are secure and happy but also more spiritual goods. We all hope to have some spiritual goods in reserve—graces, blessings, anointing. Nothing wrong. But when we are fixated on collecting them as rewards from more prayers, more novenas, more retreats, more rosaries and more good works we do, then, I fear that we deform God’s loving and gratuitous gifts into selfish self-righteous self-possessions that can cause us to sin. How do we know we have done this wrong? When our obsession with preserving God’s gifts for ourselves lead us to pull back from sharing them with others or to dismiss the generosity of others who want to share life with us.

Whenever we act like this, we are like Joshua’s mother. Like her because we are too fixated on accumulating more of what we insist we must have. Like her because we are fixing our gaze on what we want instead of what is being offered to us by God. Like her because we are unable to perceive the splendor of God’s gifts in our daily life. Perhaps, like her, we have lost the innocence and gleefulness of being surprised by God.

In fact, when we act like Joshua’ mother, we are doing exactly what the tenants do in Jesus’ parable of the landowner. In taking for granted that the vineyard was theirs, the tenants forgot about the owner. In taking for granted that it was their right to live on it, they forgot that they stayed there at the owner’s pleasure and good heartedness. In taking for granted that they could control and posses the vineyard’s harvest, they forgot that they had been contracted to return this fruit to the owner and for his delight. 

And, like them, you and I can so easily take the many things in our everyday life “for granted” instead of “as granted” by God as gifts for our daily living.

This is why you and I know with our heads—and quite often, with our hearts—that Jesus’ teaching today is his gentle and loving way of coaxing us to redirect our gaze onto God and to keep it on God. He wants to focus us on God who alone is the true owner of our lives. Nothing we have is ours; everything we have is from God and for God. This should put our lives in perspective and help us to center ourselves on God’s saving love. This is why keeping our gaze on God matters: it saves.

I believe Jesus is urging us to invest in this way of looking at God because this is how we will come to trust in an ever patient and compassionate God. This is the image of God we discover in Jesus’ presentation of the vineyard owner. He keeps sending servants, even his own son, to the selfish, thankless and even hurtful tenants. The God of Jesus Christ practices mercy that always gives second chances. How can we not have confidence and hope in this God of second chances whenever we take his gifts, and, more so, when we take him, for granted?

We experience the truth of this good news in Jesus. Through his death and resurrection, with his presence to the end of time and in his Spirit, Jesus makes God’s gift of divine life and love real as our promised future but, more so, as our present life. Jesus’ saving action admits as redeemed tenants into God’s vineyard where we do God’s work but also live rent free, well and happily with God.

Being selfish and ungrateful like the tenants is not the Christian way.  This is why it is right and just that we offer back to God what we have first received to become people of faith, Jesus. This is what we do at Mass; this is what we pray together when we offer bread and wine. We call this Eucharist because we praise and thank God for the gift of all gifts, Jesus, who redeemed us from sin and death and who continues to nourish us with his body and blood.

Eucharistic praise and thanksgiving are the right dispositions for us to keep directing our lives towards God. They are our hope-filled ways to always set our hearts on God, and so enter more deeply into the riches of communion with God. 

“Mommy, stop!” Joshua cries out. He tugs at his mother’s sleeve; his pull forces her to drop all the shells and pebbles she had collected. They fall onto the sand, scattered and dispersed. She is furious. She looks up ready to scold her son. She sees the setting sun. She sees Joshua’s beaming face. Then, she recognizes who her son is: not a pesky, annoying six year old but God’s gift. Following his pointing finger to the sun, she sees where her heart should be: not with the shells or pebbles but with God who calls her—and us—to live life fully, joyfully, gratefully.

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore

Photo: from the Internet (top1walls.com)