HOMILY FOR THE 25TH
SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME, YEAR A
This passage of the Gospel is not a
treatise on social justice. It does
not speak of a just salary to pay the hired workers, but it concerns the pagans
who will receive the Good News and enter first into the Kingdom while the
Jews, for the most part, will refuse this Good News.
The Fathers of the Church found here so many allegorical applications
that it is doubtless permitted that we also apply it allegorically to our
present situation.
The principal teaching of this text
is that God is good, generous and merciful; and that all that we receive from
him is pure gift. Each time we think
that we merit something or have
acquired certain rights, we are
wrong. This is true in our relations
with God and in our relations with our brothers or sisters at the heart of
our communities. This is also true
in the relations between communities at the heart of a monastic Order and
also, without doubt, in the relations among the Capitulants during a General
Chapter.
At the moment in which each one of
us will encounter our Creator when we disembark on the other Side, the fact
that we have served Him faithfully in the monastic life for 50 years or 10
years or 10 days will make no difference in itself. Then, all that will count will be the intensity of our love at that
moment. Also, the errors and even
the stupidities that we will have made in this life will count for little,
as well as the humble or illustrious services that we have rendered to our
communities or the Order. For each
of us, the invitation to enter into the Joy of our Father will be purely gratuitous.
This does not invite us to be careless and nonchalant, but to do everything
with total gratuitousness, through love, and not with the hope of acquiring
merits and even less in the simple hope of avoiding punishment.
Because of our cenobitic monastic vocation,
our communities are called to be places of the presence of God, signs of His
gratuitous love toward all His sons and daughters. Whether we are three, thirty or three hundred
in a community, it is the same love of God that unites us, the same love of
God that desires to manifest itself in our daily life, the same love of God
that wants to transform the universe in gradually transforming us into His
image. This witness is the same whether
our community has 1, 10, 100 or 1000 years of existence. All the rest is vanity of vanities, as Ecclesiastes
says.
Our second reading this morning is
taken from the letter of Paul to the Philippians, a letter of great beauty
and also a certain freshness. Philippi
was the first city in Europe to receive the Christian message, during the
third missionary voyage of Paul. It
was a very tiny Christian community, with which Paul, the apostle to the Christians
at the last hour, had a very beautiful relationship, similar to that of Jesus
with Martha, Mary and Lazarus – another small community (whose precariousness
will be evident at the death of Lazarus).
In his letter, written in captivity, Paul speaks in a personal and
even intimate tone. Even though he
is a prisoner, he is a happy man.
At the moment he is writing, Paul had already appeared
before the tribunal but had not yet received his sentence. This sentence could be his liberation as well
as his execution. It is generally
admitted that it concerned the captivity of Paul at Ephesus and not his last
captivity in Rome. Therefore, he
was not an old man; but rather he was at his peak, toward the end of his 40’s
or the beginning of his 50’s. He was
a man who, through the years, with suffering and battles, had acquired a good
dose of self-knowledge and was capable of recognizing the different, sometimes
contradictory, desires of his heart.
He was overflowing with joy at the
thought of the love Christ had for him. Thus
he wanted to die and to be with Christ forever. But he also knew that Christ was his life,
even here below. He wanted to continue
to preach Him and to live near his friends, especially the Philippians. He did not know if he should prefer to die
to be with Christ or live to preach Him.
However, he knew that, in one way or another, Christ would be exalted
in him.
Paul is a happy man because he is free
– free from fear, free from personal ambition, free from everything that is
not Christ. If we want our personal
lives as well as the life of our communities to be filled with this same joy,
and that they manifest the presence of Christ, we must ask for the grace of
this great interior freedom, like that of Paul, that makes us also, just as
disposed to disappear in order to be united to Him, as to continue to work
in order to make Him present in our world today.
Nothing is merited and nothing is tragic.
Everything is grace.
Armand VEILLEUX