bukas palad: September 2017

Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 25 / Sunday

Readings: Isaiah 55.6-9 / Responsorial Psalm: 144.2-3,8-9, 17-18 (R/v 18a) / Philippians 1.20c-24, 27a / Matthew 20.1-16

Sisters and Brothers, isn’t it crazy that even though some of us here are longtime parishioners and others are first timers we accept each other at this Eucharist without envy or jealousy? Crazy too that no matter how long, or short we have served in this parish—or, even, not at all—we celebrate our equal right to a place at Lord’s altar? We don’t ask who’s more entitled to be here, nor do we ask anyone to leave. Instead, you and I acknowledge each other’s worthiness by worshipping together.

Isn’t it crazy too that when Mass ends, we will do the opposite? We will return to our homes, schools and work places, and find ourselves—for one reason or other, and at some time—envious of those we interact with. Who amongst us has not resented others who are treated equally as we are? Or, begrudged their better accomplishments? Or, even acted self-righteously and defensively about our rights?

None of us sets out to act in these ways but we have done so. We are prone to turning into angry, disgruntled and disappointed green-eyed monsters when we are treated unfairly and unjustly.

This is why we can readily empathize with the longer-serving labourers in today’s gospel passage. We know their outrage and dismay. They have worked harder and longer than the latecomers, but they get the same wage, nothing more. Don’t we feel their pain that a grave injustice has been done against them? Their grumbles echo ours.

Jesus challenges us to think otherwise: “for the last will be first, and the first will be last.” He offers a logic that is contrary to today’s business ethics and labor practices. These demand that salaries are commensurate to hours of work, scope of job, and reach of responsibility. In matters of faith, this translates into the logic that God rewards us for more prayer, more penance, more good works.

Today, Jesus reminds us that everyone is entitled to share in God’s love. This the commonsense of God’s commonwealth, or goodness

Yes, God loves us in unique and special ways because we are individuals, but God gives out his love equally because his love is for everyone. I think many of us know God loves all and gives his love to all. I wonder if we know this more in our head than in our hearts.

If Jesus’ parable about equal pay for unequal work does however disturb you, then give thanks. Give thanks because you letting Jesus’ parable turn your views of fairness and unfairness upside down. More importantly, you are letting Jesus help you know God as God is.

Many of us have the image that God rewards those who do a lot for God. And so we do pray more, sacrifice more, and more good work. The more we do, the better God’s rewards will be, we believe. Repeating this belief through our words and deeds blinds us to the truth about God’s unconditional love for all.

Today, Jesus wants to shock us—shock us out of that common but complacent understanding that God only rewards those who do more. Shock us out of this because it misrepresents God. To think that God only rewards those who do more reduces God’s love to an economic exchange.

Pope Francis repeatedly challenges this way of thinking about God: God is not calculative. For Francis, God’s heart is so much bigger than we can ever imagine: it is so large, so deep, so expansive. God’s heart so big yet it cannot contain God’s mercy. God’s mercy wants to always pour itself out to save us all, again and again and again. God cannot contain his mercy: it is for you and me. God does not calculate who deserves mercy; mercy is for all.

Today’s parable is about the utter limitless God’s mercy and generosity. Jesus is challenging us to open our eyes to how God really measures our worth. In God’s eyes, our worthiness has nothing to do with how much we do, or how much we earn in pay, or how well we perform, or by any of the yardsticks we use—like status, popularity, social achievement, wealth, looks. God simply measures our worthiness by the goodness of our human hearts.

The hired workers in today's gospel exhibit this goodness. They come simply because there is work to be done, and they want to do it. They have no expectation about the kind of wages they will get. They simply come because the landowner offers them work.

They are the ones. Jesus teaches, who are now the first. They are first because they simply appreciate the privilege of sharing in the landowner’s work in the vineyard. Jesus wants us to see in them how true reward has to do with the privilege of being called to God’s work. This is the richness of kingdom of God—everyone is being called. Do we recognize this richness God wants to give us by calling us to come to his kingdom, or are we too fixated on rewards we expect from God?

God does not understand fairness and unfairness as the world does. Rather, God works with a different focus, in a different way, and by different standards. So, who deserves to be rewarded by God? The one who comes to God and works with God without any expectation of wages, rewards or benefits, or even the promise of something better to come. God wants to give to all who simply come—come, for no other reason than this truth: that you, I, we are call simply called by God to come and be with him. “Come and see”. “Come and follow me”. “Come and abide in me.”

Anyone who comes is like the latecomer who works in the vineyard. Will we dare come to God like this? Dare to come without expectation, especially every Sunday, without worrying whether we will be first in the queue or last in line? Dare to come and trust that God’s bounty is always more than enough for our salvation and fullness of life?

I say “dare” because we can only live this way if we are prepared to lose ourselves completely in doing God’s work with Jesus. Following Jesus is about losing ourselves in the privilege of being called by God, and in doing so, finding how much God savours us for the goodness of our choice. Such daringness demands we turn our backs on chalking up rewards we expect from God because we have ticked off the list of do’s and don’ts of Christian life.

Isn’t it crazy then that Jesus wants to remind us about this today? I believe Jesus does this because he recognizes something profoundly beautiful and ever present in us—that everyone of us is capable of living the Christian life well. Jesus recognises this because he appreciates we are all intrinsically good and worthy of growing into God’s likeness. This is what captivates him about us, whom he calls friends.

Jesus is driven, I sincerely believe, by a craziness for us. His craziness is his excitement that values each one of us for the good potential we have for change and growth. It is a craziness that believes we will simply come to him as friend.

Can you and I, in turn, be equally crazy to believe this about Jesus? Crazier too to let him teach us how to receive our equal and fair share of God’s goodness, even if we now come to him, late with our repentance to turn our lives around, or late with our willingness to work in his mission, or late in recognising that our difference is not bad?

May be when we dare to come, we will find Jesus revealing how much more crazier God is than we have ever imagined—God whose love is limitless, whose bounty is generous, whose mercy is without condition. Then we know how true these words are that we heard in the first reading: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord”.

Preached at St Ignatius Parish, Singapore

photo: "his hand" by jhopgood (www.bishopinthergove.com)

Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 24 / Sunday

Readings: Sirach 27.30 – 28.9 / Psalm 102.1-2, 3-4, 9-10, 11-12 (R/v 8) / Romans 14.7-9 / Matthew 18.21-35

Sisters and brothers, have you ever felt so “geram” (as my Peranakan elders would say), so angry, so hurt, so violated by someone’s words or actions that you could not forgive? And all you wanted to do in that moment was to speak hurtful words and to take vengeful actions?

We have all had such moments because someone we admired, trusted or loved hurt us, pained us, or broke faith with us. But didn’t we find ourselves at the same moment struggling to love them without limits and to forgive them without condition—struggling to be Christian so that we could forgive and reconcile?

Today’s readings present us with contrasting sets of values for Christian life. One set involves hugging wrath and anger, hateful things, as we heard in the first reading. These deny us life, as they also deprive others of life when we are unforgiving and vengeful. This is sometimes our human way. The other set involves being merciful and forgiving, as our gospel reading teaches. These give life to others, as they also free us to live life more fully. This is always God’s way.

Daily life involves choosing between our way and God’s way. This can be especially difficult when our choice have to do with our relationships with family and friends, with classmates and workmates, even with strangers and enemies. Isn’t it easier to interact with them on our terms, rather than God’s terms? This is why St Teresa of Avila thought that relationships, more than the heights of mystical prayer, are the best spaces to learn that God is for all peoples and that God loves all without limit.

God’s love, moreover, always absolves. Our responsorial psalm celebrates this truth: God is kind and merciful, slow to anger and rich in compassion. From sacraments to Catechism to Church teachings, from the saints we admire to those who challenge us to become better, from daily prayer to acts of charity, everything in Christian life reminds us that the love of God always absolves. More importantly, they call us to imitate this love of God in deed, not word, and in every interaction we have with someone else, whether beloved or unloved.

Jesus shows us the way to do this: by forgiving. Forgiveness is the best way for us to imitate God and God’s love that always absolves and saves. We know people do not always do right and we need to forgive them. We want to do this but we often struggle to do it genuinely, wholeheartedly, freely. Some of us forgive with condescension. Others say, “I can forgive but I can’t forget”. For an increasing number “forgiveness” is missing from their vocabulary for life. All of us however want to be forgiven, but we don’t always forgive so easily.

Today’s gospel reading helps us consider this reality in our Christian lives. It is the story of a servant who cannot pay his debt to his master who forgives him in mercy but who, in turn, refuses vigorously to forgive a fellow servant.

Let’s imagine that this scene is painted. It hangs in an art gallery. Will you simply walk by it like a visiting tourist? Or, will you pause and consider the scene like an disinterested spectator? Or, will you feel disturbed like the other servants by the servant’s ingratitude and vengefulness? Or, will you and I—with great honesty—recognise ourselves as the servant?

“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. We say these words with every Our Father. We hear these words at every Mass. We repeat it during every Rosary prayer. Do we simply recite them or are we practicing them daily, as best as we can? Jesus teaches us these words. He prayed them. He lived them fully. Throughout the gospels, he shows us the way to forgive through his teaching, his healing, his being with sinners and outcasts. Even when he is dying on the Cross, he forgives in that most unexplainable human act of forgiving those who kill him: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23.34)

How can we forgive like Jesus did? By remaining true to our spiritual DNA and living it always, I’d like to suggest. We are created with this spiritual DNA. The sacraments celebrate its truth in our lives. Christian life calls us to live it fully and joyfully.

This DNA is Christ-like because the fullness of its expression is Jesus, whose life we follow and whose love we imitate. To see Jesus is to see God. By Jesus’ words, his actions and in his entire being, he reveals God. Pope Francis teaches that the name of God is mercy. If Jesus is the living presence of God, his DNA is God’s DNA. Mercy is part of who Jesus is and how Jesus lives. Forgiveness is in his nature.

Scripture proclaims that we too are made in the image and likeness of God. Baptism claims us for Christ and anoints us, Christian. If we believe these to be true, then, shouldn’t we also believe that mercy is in our spiritual DNA—that we were born to be merciful in life, as God is merciful to give us life, especially when we sinned repeatedly?

If you accept these truths, then, today’s good news is that we naturally ordered in our humanity and through our Christian faith to be merciful to all, as God is merciful to us. Mercy is in our nature. Mercy must characterised our living.

God’s mercy expressed through human forgiveness must be limitless. When Jesus answers Peter’s question about how often we should forgive, he says, “not seven times but seventy seven times”. This is not a mathematics for forgiveness and reconciliation. Rather, Jesus is instructing us that there is no limit to forgiveness. More significantly, his lesson is for us to let the infinite power of God’s mercy take hold of all our interactions, especially, with those that have hurt and disappointed us. Only then can we keep forgiving without judgment and limit because we will be able to forgive as God forgives: with kindness and mercy, with a slowness to anger, with a richness in compassion.

At about six lines from the end of today’s gospel, the master summons the servant and says, “Should you not have pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?” Undergirding this question is the point that we can only forgive truly and without limit when we have experienced another’s loving forgiveness. And because we are grateful for it, we want to pass this forgiveness on. Recently, a friend of mine who forgave her husband’s infidelity reminded me of this; I believe she could because her parents had long ago forgiven her for cheating in a school exam.

Forgiveness received begets forgiveness given. If this is so in human relationship, what more of our relationship with a merciful God who always forgives? How can I not share God’s mercy by practising forgiveness?

Sometimes, we find ourselves shackled to that manacle of refusing to forgive, of withholding mercy, of forever feeling “geram” with another. We want to break it. We can by making mercy the cornerstone of our Christian life.

It is good we do so. For, as Pope Francis reminds us again and again, “only mercy saves; only mercy brings peace to families and nations, and ultimately only mercy will bring the definitive renewal willed by God and awaited with joy by the saints. It is time for all in the Church to fully embrace [mercy],” he would insist, “and leave all judgment to God and to always be ready to excuse our neighbour”, because regardless of the objective sin, none of us will ever know our neighbour’s struggles and realities”.* Yes, who you, who am I, who are we to judge another?

Francis challenges us vigorously to be as merciful with all as God is merciful with us. I really believe it would be foolhardy of us to ignore his challenge. It is in fact an invitation to saving grace—because when our merciful actions towards others imitate God what is also happening is God’s saving action at work in us and, particularly, for us and our salvation.

May be when we give ourselves permission to truly practice such mercy by forgiving others, we will appreciate what Jesus shows us through the humanity God created and he took on to be one like us: that being “geram” is not in our DNA; being merciful truly is.

*Stephen Walford, “Pope Francis: Mercy and the Pelagian Problem”

Preached at St Ignatius Parish, Singapore

photo: from http://crecimiento-personal.innatia.com

bukas palad

with open hands, we give what we have first received. and with open hands, we receive what we will divest, once again. this is blessing itself: the giving and receiving of life and love, the sharing of faith and God.

Homily: Come

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Homily: Forgiveness

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