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 whether we are longtime parishioners or first timers to Sacred Heart, we accept each other at Eucharist without envy or jealousy? Crazy too that we celebrate our equal right to a place at Lord’s altar. Even more, that we don’t ask who’s more entitled to be here. We acknowledge each other’s worthiness by worshipping together.

Isn’t it crazy too that when Mass ends, we sometimes find ourselves doing the opposite? Envious of those we interact with, for one reason or other. Haven’t we resented others who are treated equally as we are? Or, begrudged their better accomplishments because we feel we’ve been treated unfairly or unjustly? When we do, we become those angry, disgruntled and disappointed green-eyed monsters. 

Perhaps this explains why many readily empathise with the longer-serving labourers in Jesus’ parable of the labourers in the vineyard. We know their outrage and dismay. They have worked harder and longer than the latecomers but they get the same wage, nothing more. We feel their pain because a grave injustice has been done against them. So, we join their grumble and lament.

We do because many of us would agree that salaries must be commensurate to the hours of work, the scope of a job, and the reach of one’s responsibility. It’s not uncommon for Christians to translate this logic into this way of thinking about God: He rewards us when we pray more, practise penance more and do more good works.

Today, Jesus challenges this thinking. For Jesus, “the last will be first, and the first will be last” in God’s eyes. Everyone is entitled to the same love of God. Whether one comes in the first hour or the eleventh to work, God pays the same because all are equally worthy to receive his love.

For those of us who picture God to be only loving and rewarding when we pray more, sacrifice more and do more good works, Jesus’ message can be shocking. He says it plainly and truthfully with this parable. God gives his unconditional love to everyone. God’s love is not an economic exchange, like “we do, God rewards; we do more, God rewards even more.”

For Pope Francis, God is not and never calculative. God’s heart is so big with mercy that keeps pouring out onto everyone and saving all, again and again and again. God withholds nothing back of His mercy. God lavishly wastes it on everyone, especially the sinful. God never calculates who deserves mercy; His mercy is for all.

Jesus teaches this parable to also open our eyes to how God really measures our worth. In God’s eyes, worthiness has nothing to do with how much we do or have, how much we earn or give away, how devout or perfect we are at being Christian. For God, worthiness has to do with the goodness of our human hearts to trust Him. 

We see this goodness in the workers who come to the vineyard last. Nothing is said about their wages. They work because they trust the landowner choice to call them. They are the last who are now the first, Jesus declares. They are because their trust allows them to share in the landowner’s work, like those who are already working.

We are all those workers too. Whenever Jesus calls us to Him, he is inviting us to build the Kingdom of God.  Some of us are already doing this. Some others are just beginning. Other will join later. Everyone has a choice. Jesus’s call is however faithfully constant.

Whether we join Jesus to build God's Kingdom in the first or eleventh hour, or whether we are saintly Christians or those struggling, when Jesus bids us come to him, He bids us enjoy his delight in everyone of us. He especially delights in those who are at the peripheries of the Church and society: the marginalised like the migrants and divorcees, the disliked like the refugees and LGBTQ persons, and the sinful that more self-righteous Christians and upright citizens shun and ignore.

That Jesus, the landowner of all our souls, each God’s human vineyard, chooses to treat the first, the last and all in between equally reveals his innermost attitude towards us. Jesus respects and values each one of us as we are -- as His own, never otherwise. This should assure us all of how much He loves and blesses everyone alike. Indeed, everyone who comes to Jesus will receive the same, and it will be wonderfully good.   "Come and see." "Come and follow me." "Come and abide in me." And today, Come into my vineyard." Whenever Jesus calls, whatever He calls us to, the truth is that he call us personally to Himself. How should we respond? Honestly, without any expectation; only with faith that trusts in Jesus. Dare we come?

I say “dare” for when we do, we will learn how much God fulfils each of our hopes in Jesus. The craziness of God is that all of us will receive His love – equally, yes, and always with mercy and justice. Then Isaiah’s proclamation that God cherishes each one of us in His own special way will ring true and loud: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.”  

This is the Good News today. Do we hear it?





Preached at the Church of the Sacred Heart

Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 24 / Sunday 

Readings: Sirach 27.33 -28.7 / Psalm 102. 1-2, 3-4, 9-10, 11-12 (R/v 8) / Romans 14.7-9 / Matthew 18.21-35

Jesus’ parable about debts owed in today’s gospel illustrates this Good News. In one case, a debt is forgiven. In another, it is demanded. Listen again.

A servant owes the king ten thousand talents. It’s a large amount. In Jesus’ day it is wages for 160,000 work days. In today’s terms about $600,000. It’s a huge debt. This servant begs for time to settle the amount. The king does not do what his servant asks. Instead, he immediately cancels the whole debt unreservedly.

This servant has another who owes him one hundred denari, that is 100 days’ wages or $20 in today’s terms. This amount is no comparison to the exceedingly large amount the servant owed. Though freed of his large debt, he cannot forgive the smaller debt owed him. He punishes the other.

Jesus makes the comparison. His message is clear.

Isn’t this why we cringe when the servant who’s been forgiven so much can’t forgive the other with smaller debt owed? “He’s dumb,” some might say. “He’s ungrateful,” others will insist. For many, “He is a fool.” He hasn't learned enough or well that he has been forgiven so gratuitously that he should, in turn, do to another what has been done to him. 

Though the compassion of the king empowers him to be merciful, he sees himself as entitled to now push other people around. He just doesn’t get it. 

Jesus’ parable is ultimately a wisdom tale, begging us to choose rightly. We need to hear this if we want to live our Christian faith fully, happily.

In fact we hear it again we must  because no matter how familiar we are with this parable, we tend to forget it. Our chores and challenges, joys and sufferings, tend to distract us from the wisdom Jesus is offering for Christian life.

Jesus’ parable reminds us to go and forgive as God does when He forgives us. How can we not forgive, not love, not be merciful, not be compassionate when God lavishes his mercy, without limit, on you and me often and repeatedly?

Not to forgive like God does is simply to be ungrateful and so foolish. This is Jesus’ point in the parable. Do we get it?

In fact, isn’t the servant’s behaviour toward his fellow servant all the more detestable, given the overwhelming, unexpected, compassionate forgiveness of the king? 

Maybe this helps us understand Jesus’ response to Peter’s question about how often we must forgive one another. Not seven, but seventy-seven, that is, to forgive with no limit. Such is God’s forgiveness. We not only know this; we’ve experienced how God grants it – always. 

Anything less when we forgive one another brings the same judgment against us that Jesus renders against the servant: “wicked” are we.

This is why Paul’s teaching today that “the life and death of each of us has its influence on others” must matter. As Christians, we know that we should not live out our faith only in a ‘me-and-my God’ relationship. Rather, we must also live it out through our relationships with one another. How we live our Christian faith does impact the lives of all around us. Just consider: how often has the forgiveness we received from another moved us to repent, convert and come home to God?

Jesus’s teaching about forgiveness should challenge us. That the more Christian thing to do with our life is to make it matter for someone else’s faith in God and life with God. This is how we become more Christ-like and take another step closer to heaven. 

We all know that when individuals, families, communities and nations refuse to practise mercy and love, hate, fear, and disunity scar their lives. This is because resentment, vengeance and unforgiveness are their way of life. Only forgiveness can turn them back to God and each other.

Let us also turn to God with the psalmist. His psalm enables us to appreciate that when it comes to love and compassion, mercy and forgiveness, God always overdoes it. That's how the love of God operates.

When we ask for forgiveness, God says, “I remember your sin no longer.” What is this but the too-muchness of God and of His love. All of Scripture proclaims this. In the Gospels, Jesus is the perfection of this too-muchness of God in his signs and words, in his passion, dying and resurrection. It is Jesus who reveals the boundlessness and immeasurability of God's love, compassion and forgiveness.

At Communion, you and I will experience once again this immeasurability of God in Jesus. More than we deserve, Jesus becomes our food in the Eucharist, squandering himself so that he can be dissolved in us.

He did this once before on the Cross,  giving everything, even forgiving his tormentors. Families and friends also chose to forgive each other when trust is betrayed. Lovers do this too; loving without measure, losing themselves. 

Only love allows this. Love to forget self for another. Love to risk being vulnerable enough to forgive. Jesus assures us this kind of self-forgetfulness is possible for us – with him. 

Knowing this truth, shall we now love and forgive one another seventy-seven times and even more?

Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 22 / Sunday

Readings: Jeremiah 20.7-9/ Psalm 62.2, 3-4, 5-6, 8-9 (R/v 2b) / Romans 12.1-2 / Matthew 16.21-27

"If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me." (Matthew 16.24)

We are all familiar with these words that Jesus speaks in today’s gospel reading.  We know he is addressing us. As his disciples, this is probably the toughest commandment to embrace freely and to live out willingly.

We all struggle because we know what taking up the cross entails: self-sacrificial love. Even more, it means choosing self-denial. For many, this choice is contrary to living fully as humans. Yet Jesus himself did it to save us. His message is the Cross leads to salvation, not death.

We know this and we still talk a lot about following Jesus as his disciples because we honestly want eternal life. Some even brandish their talk like a members-only calling card to heaven, stamped "Christian" in their hands. 

Are we however really walking our talk as Christians? How ready are we to accept and carry the cross Jesus calls us to do, especially as it demands we freely, selflessly lay down our lives - often our selfish wants and needs rather than that one-time martyrdom or sacrifice?

Like the psalmist, we thirst for God. For his kindness that cares and provides. For his mercy that forgives and his love that nourishes. And so, we turn to God repeatedly, especially when life is a painful struggle.  We do because we know God is faithful. God never fails us.  Our desire for God expresses the deepest, sometimes, most desperate, yearning every human has.

With God, we feel accepted, loved, and secure. Christians return God’s love with prayers and retreats, through Masses and confessions, in every act of charity done in word and deed.  We have done and still do these. They are our ways of saying to God, “I want to be with you, I want to follow you, I want to come close to you.”

However, many of our choices and actions in daily life say otherwise: “Not now, not yet, maybe later, God.” Why is this so? Because to be with God totally, and follow him closely, we must live according to God’s ways, not ours. And this scares us: we fear that we cannot do this well and that we will struggle with our worthiness to try. 

It is true that when God bids us come to him, he bids us come and die to our sinful ways. God demands this of us so that we can live as saints. St Paul described the first Christians as saints. For him, they witnessed sainthood in how they lived their Christian faith: in common worship and, even more, by sharing what they had communally, often through self-denial.

“Whoever wishes to come after me,” Jesus says, “must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” This is the cost of discipleship, of following Jesus and living as his saints. We all struggle with this, now and again.

Peter struggled too. In friendship, he wanted to protect Jesus from suffering and dying on the Cross. For Jesus, the Cross is the way to love God unconditionally and to serve our neighbour selflessly. This is how saints, especially, martyrs, lived out their faith, and so gained salvation.  Peter however would prefer following Jesus without the cross. I suspect we would too.

If Christian faith was branded and packaged, a version of this may be ‘Christianity Lite.’ In ‘Christianity Lite,’ God answers all our needs, and even cuts us some slack to do our own thing. ‘Christianity Lite’ is self-preserving; we don’t need to change our lives; there’s no need for conversion. We simply continue living our Christian faith in the same old ways yearly. Our choices and actions will often be selfish and self-serving. Its tagline would be “Everything for us, O Lord; demand nothing more of us.” Too much ‘Christianity Lite’ numbs us to Jesus’ teachings, especially, to take up the cross. For all enjoying ‘Christianity Lite,’ there comes a time when our lukewarm faith feels empty, like something’s sorely missing deep down. Maybe it's the certain hope of what’s next after death.

Today Jesus challenges us: “If you want to preserve your life, lose it.” Lose it, waste it, lay it down for another.  The real worth of who and what a Christian is is revealed not in what we say, nor even in what we do or how much we do. Rather, it is in how we make Jesus’ self-sacrificing love our own love, our own life. Jesus’ way leads us to eternal life.

If we choose to live like Jesus, be prepared to suffer. There will be derision and reproach, hatred and discrimination by others as the Prophet Jeremiah lamented. This is in fact the cross. By proclaiming God and God’s ways, the prophets challenged the unjust, immoral and sinful but they suffered for their faith. 

Our lives are meant to be prophetic too. To walk the talk like Jesus is to proclaim God alive with our Christian lives in today’s realities. Not everyone readily wants to hear and see what our Christian lives proclaim. Many will rebut and reject us. We will suffer. This is our cross.

Yet, Jesus keeps demanding that we take it and proclaim God. Today Paul’s exhortation not to conform to this age but to stay focussed on Jesus can console and encourage us to do as Jesus did: take up the cross, even die on the cross metaphorically, if not actually. We can when we on the mind of Jesus, cloak ourselves in His love and pray to have a heart like His Sacred Heart, meek and humble.

Every Mass ends with the priest rallying us to go on mission in the world: “Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life.” The Mass doesn’t end here; it must continue in our lives and in those around us. And the Mass will when we choose to  go forth and serve all. Then, the graces of the Mass live on in our lives. In those we serve and care for. 

We can do this because in this Mass, in every Mass, the Lord nourishes us with nothing less than Himself. As Jesus is bread broken for us, let us be bread broken for everyone by taking up our crosses with Jesus and so proclaim God’s saving love for everyone. 

Shall we?

Preached at the Church of the Sacred Heart
photo: 123RF.com