25th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Dear Friends,
Today’s readings reveal to us a portion, and yet the entirety of the mystery of God’s mercy. Here we can find a twofold revelation that can 1) help us love God better, and so help us fulfill the first and most important commandment, and 2) become greater servants.
At first glance it seems unfair that all workers should be paid the same amount. After all, why should one who has labored less be given the same recompense as the one who has labored more, is God being unjust? The answer is no. It is difficult to wrap our heads around this because we refer to God’s mercy and love, which we cannot begin to comprehend. It is a mystery of the same sort as when we go to confession and say to ourselves “How is it that all of my sins are forgiven and God finds no stain in me?” or “How is it that the all powerful and eternal God chose to make himself man, and carry a cross just so that I can know His love for me?” We just cannot understand His love.
The first revelation teaches us about God’s divine generosity, that no matter the hour, we can all obtain the unmerited gift of salvation. At the same time, there are different degrees of glory in heaven according to merits and cooperation with grace, even while all the saved share in the one gift of eternal life. In recognizing this, we recognize who God is and so perfect our love for Him, which is found in the process of knowing Him.
The second revelation reveals our tendency to be self-righteous and attribute our worth on our works, rather than God’s love: “I have worked this amount, and thus I deserve this amount”. To become greater servants, we must find our worth only in His mercy! As human beings, we are meant for unity, in fact an important aspect of our being is that we are constantly looking for a way to correspond more and more with reality— that is we look for way to conform our “I” to something that makes us more known, and in turn live a life of perfect fulfilment, in which one can say “I am man” and recognize what it truly means to be human.
Fr. Luigi Giussani answers the question of what it means to be human in these words: “Existence expresses itself in begging. The real protagonist of history is the beggar. Christ who begs for man’s heart and man’s heart that begs for Christ.”
Jose Martinez
Penn Junior