The Second Plank after the Shipwreck

Twenty Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

Most folks would be familiar with the other parable involving two sons, though the focus in the Gospel of St Luke seems to be on the younger son who is a wastrel, but ironically called the Prodigal Son. The two sons in that famous parable are morally ambivalent - they are neither purely good nor purely bad. This is understandable since the focus is on the character of the father.

But here, in Matthew’s parable of two sons, the moral lines are clearly drawn between good and bad, light and darkness. And yet, Matthew acknowledges how someone good may end up bad and someone bad, may eventually turn good. Those in the light can fall into darkness as easily as those who are in the darkness can be redeemed and brought into the light.

The parable draws a contrast between the early response of the two sons to the father’s request to “go and work in the vineyard today” and their actual response at the end of the story. Don’t be too quick to judge either son. We need to stay around till the end to see the actual outcome and we will be surprised by the ending. The son who refused at the beginning, relents and then does the job. The other son acquiesces without any protest when first asked but then chooses to do nothing. Our Lord poses this question to His disciples, “Which of the two did the father’s will?” And just like the disciples, our answer would be “the first.”

The lesson in this parable is restated by our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘It is not anyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord” who will enter the kingdom of Heaven, but the person who does the will of my Father in Heaven’. It is no use simply saying that Christ is our ‘Lord’, we have to express it in our behaviour.

What is the difference between the first son and the second? The actions of both sons show that no position is written in stone and that they are subject to change - sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. The change that we are looking at as instrumental to our salvation is repentance. If sin is clearly demonstrated as disobedience, the first son, after open refusal, repents of his sin—better late than never—and goes to work for his father. He overcomes and changes from bad to good. After experiencing the negative results of sin, he yields to his father’s instruction, changing direction and does as his father commanded him—the fruit of his repentance.

Repentance can change the outcome of the story of every man or woman, even the greatest sinner. What is repentance? The Greek word we translate as “repentance” is metanoia (the verb “to repent” is metanoeo), and it means “to change your mind.” Metanoia’s Hebrew counterpart is tshuva, which means “to return.” So when the Lord says, “Repent and believe in the gospel,” He is basically saying: change your mind about sin and return to God by believing the good news! In order to be saved, we must repent. Repentance means not just running back to God, but running away from anything that would keep us from God. Our call to repentance is really our call to conversion. It is our call not just to change, but to become our most authentic selves as children of God.

For us Catholics, repentance is not just a private act of contrition where we confess our sins to God directly and hope for His forgiveness. Many often wonder whether God has truly forgiven their sins or continues to hold it against them. There seems to be no way of verifying except to rely on our gut feelings. But the good news is that we do not have to speculate as to whether our sins have really been forgiven or we remain entrapped. One of the most important sacraments, the sacrament of penance or popularly known as confession, provides a penitent with an objective confirmation. Through the ministry of the priest, the penitent will get a definitive answer when the words of absolution are pronounced over the person: “God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, + and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” It is a shame when this sacrament is so underappreciated and so underutilised for our growth in holiness. It is important to remember that long lines for holy communion is not the barometer for a spiritually vibrant church unless it is matched by long lines to the confessional.

I like the image found in the description of the early fathers of the Church when they call this sacrament “the second plank [of salvation] after the shipwreck which is the loss of grace.” (CCC 1446). Imagine that: God throws us a plank after the shipwreck of sin which has caused us to lose saving grace. This sacrament is visible assurance that God has not abandoned us. He has not written us off as incorrigible. He has not dismissed us as irredeemable. Just like the first son, we too may have said “no” to His invitation to go into the vineyard and work, but He always keeps a door and window open for us to return and make up for lost time and opportunity. God throws us a plank after our lives and the lives of others have been shipwrecked by sin!

Most of us know what it means to live with regret. Lost opportunities may never be recovered. But not in the area of grace. God offers us countless opportunities before our death to repent, to amend our lives, to change our decision and remake our path before it is too late. But let us not live with the presumption that we will have more time which gives us cause to delay our repentance and return to do His will. Let us not think that we are secure just because we have got it right at the start. The challenge is to keep on the right path faithfully to the very end and to immediately repent, should we stray. As the prophet Ezekiel warns us in the first reading: “When the upright man renounces his integrity to commit sin and dies because of this, he dies because of the evil that he himself has committed. When the sinner renounces sin to become law-abiding and honest, he deserves to live. He has chosen to renounce all his previous sins; he shall certainly live; he shall not die.”

The Economics of the Cross

Twenty Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

One of the most common vices which has taken a firm grip on us is our penchant to whine and complain. Who hasn’t complained, grumbled and ranted about others or a situation? We constantly complain about our parents, our children, our spouses, our leaders, our bosses, our subordinates, our fellow church members, our priests, and of course, God - no one has been spared from our list of complaints. What underlies our disgruntled feelings, unbeknownst to most of us, is our sense of entitlement. But here’s the irony. We feel entitled to respect from others, often without giving respect in return. And worse-yet? We feel that God owes us everything because we feel that we’ve either earned it or deserved it.

The sense of entitlement rears its ugly head in today’s gospel parable. It is what transforms the initial sense of gratitude into a gnawing sense of resentment. The story is told by the Lord in response to Peter’s question. A modern rephrasing of Peter’s question would sound like this, “What’s in it for us?” Peter wanted to know what reward would be given to those who give up everything to follow Jesus. In a sense, Peter wanted to know what his entitlement is.

Yet there is something in Peter’s comparative attitude and his need for the assurance of reward that does not fit well with labouring in the Lord’s vineyard. If Peter is worrying about a poor payoff which does not match the sacrifice he is called to make, the Lord overwhelms him with vision of gratuitous abundance. To Peter’s self-serving motivations, our Lord proposes another paradigm, that of generosity – a generous heart is one filled with gratitude and sees everything as grace. A generous heart considers the struggles, difficulties, the welfare of others, instead of just focusing on the injustices that life has dished out to us.

The story starts out with a conventional plot, hiring day workers, which already suggests that they were unemployed till that moment. But it has an unconventional ending - people who worked the least got equal pay, and got paid first. The owner of the vineyard orders that all be equally paid a denarius, whether you had worked the entire 12 hours or less than an hour. Something immediately strikes us as wrong. Conventional social dealings would dictate that those who only worked one hour would receive a twelfth of what the first group agreed to. But there is a greater surprise. To add injury to the already incensed members of the first group of workers, the latecomers get paid first. The master’s generosity, which is a pleasant surprise to the latecomers, becomes a cruel disappointment to the early birds.

The dissatisfaction of the first group of workers is understandable. They had endured the unrelenting heat of the sun, the hot scorching desert winds throughout the whole day, while the others worked for far less during the cool of the evening. Economic justice would demand that “to every man (be given) what he deserves.” Weren’t these workers entitled to a larger pay-out and extra benefits for the time and effort which they had put in? Therefore, thinking in terms of standard social and economic conventions, they expected more. But was their complaint justified? Didn’t they get what they deserved, what they had agreed upon at the beginning, and even more than the prevailing market standards? The landowner’s offer of one denarius for a day’s work is indeed generous. They had accepted it happily at the beginning. Furthermore, where vineyard day workers were victims of an exploitive socio-economic system, the graciousness of the landowner to provide work opportunities to them at a wage that was unequal to their job, was not a sign of meagerness but rather generosity.

We, therefore, come to realise that the root of their indignation came not from an exploitive wage scale but from seeing the good fortune of others whom they felt were not deserving of the same. The landowner had not been unjust, he has every right to do what he wants with his money. The real problem is that the grumblers harbour envy. The master’s generosity is an expression of gracious freedom, not callous arbitrariness, while workers’ complaints are an expression of their loveleness, not of their unfair treatment.

It is here that we see the radical difference between their sense of justice and that of the landowner, who symbolises God. The parable thus shows that God’s justice is not according to man’s calculations. God’s justice bestows mercy on the hapless and rebuffs the proud claims of merit. In contrast to human justice which rewards “every man what he deserves,” the divine principle of justice accords “to every man what he needs.” This is the economics of the cross. Our Lord Jesus died on the cross for us not because we deserved it. He died for us because we needed His perfect sacrifice of love. Thus, the bestowal of grace is not correlated to the work done – the sacrifice made, the amount of prayers offered, the expanse of one’s missionary efforts. It flows from the nature of God who is good, loving and gracious. Grace operates on the basis of the free choice of God, who dispenses his gifts with generosity.

Our society has truly been infected by an epidemic of envy and complaints. Rather than blaming God for the injustices in the world, the parable calls for honest self-examination – have we truly allowed our obsession with self-interest to dampen our joy and blind us to the needs of our neighbours? Pope Francis rightly states the problem in the second paragraph of Evangelii Gaudium, “The great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience. Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor. God’s voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades. This is a very real danger for believers too. Many fall prey to it, and end up resentful, angry and listless.” (EG 2)

The generosity of God should always awaken us to greater mercy, compassion and generosity, rather than be a cause for complaint and grumbling. At the end of the day, for Christ’s disciples, all rewards are really “gifts” or expressions of divine favour and not earned “wages” or “mercy”. Don’t ask “what’s in it for me?” but rather, “What’s in it for the other guy?” That is a hard lesson to learn, because oftentimes when we go to God in prayer we think we deserve something from Him. We believe He owes us something. The same goes with service offered to the community of the Church. This parable is a painful but necessary reminder that what we receive from God is an undeserved gift. The Church owes us nothing. God owes us nothing. In fact, we owe the Church and God who works through the Church, everything.

A wise priest once gave me this potent piece of advice, “in God’s business, rule number one is that no one works for himself. Everybody takes care of somebody; in that way, all our backs are covered. If you doubt this kingdom paradigm, you will never be happy… so instead of looking at your neighbour as a nuisance and a burden, pray that he be your opportunity and strength.”

Forgiveness and Generosity

Twenty Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

One of the hardest things for a priest to do is to ask his congregation for money. You may somewhat understand this if you acknowledge that it is extremely hard to beg and grovel. It is demeaning. It always seems that there are so many strings attached to any act of giving. I have to be prepared to return the favour in some way or another because when people give, they always expect something in return. Even when the favour is not called in immediately, it emerges whenever special requests are declined. Accepting a gift from someone ends up like owing the person a lifetime of favours which can never be satisfactorily repaid.

Why would I raise the issue of generosity when our readings speak of forgiveness? This is because generosity is necessary for forgiveness. “Giving” is the root word of “forgiving.” It’s almost safe to say they come from the same “root.” A popular Arab saying suggests that a forgiving person is “karim”, generous. Generosity and forgiveness come from one source: “compassion.” Forgiveness is a sign of largesse, an act of generosity. Unforgiveness, on the other hand, rises from a calculative attitude that is unable to let go of what is due or what we believe to be due to us. True forgiveness is basically an act of bestowing and receiving generosity from another. Lack of forgiveness is one manifestation of self-absorbed non-Christian living and the reading from Romans reminds us that we should not live for ourselves.

If you can’t see the connexion, our Lord’s parable in today’s Gospel passage perfectly illustrates this point. In the parable, we see two instances where a debt is owed. In the first case, the servant brought before the king owed a huge amount of money. In the second circumstance, the servant wanted to collect a paltry sum from a fellow servant. Looking simply at the amounts owed, one sum is gargantuan and the other is miniscule. If one were to find a suitable analogy, it’s like comparing a national debt with what you owe on a month’s unpaid utility bill.

When we hear this story, we have a reaction equal to the other servants concerning the injustice of the situation. The king acted generously while the wicked servant exacted what was his due even when he could and should have forgiven the small debt owed to him by a fellow servant. A sense of right and wrong cries out against the calculative attitude of the unjust servant. The issue is not so much about the incomparability of the money owed as it is the lack of generosity on the part of the first servant. He was forgiven so much, why did he forgive so little?

If the wicked servant had really understood this generosity he would have been willing to forgive the debt of his fellow servant. The Lord presents the two cases as if they were parallel. That is, the issue is not really about money but our willingness to forgive in the same manner in which we have been forgiven. What is our attitude when we have accepted forgiveness from another? Are we willing to do likewise when we need to forgive? One thing that is evident in the parable is that genuine forgiveness entails generosity on the part of the forgiver and the forgiven.

If we are able to understand the connexion between mercy and generosity, giving and forgiving, we will then understand that Peter’s question at the start of today’s passage is actually the wrong question: “Lord, how often must I forgive my brother if he wrongs me?” Peter thought that forgiving seven times was being sufficiently generous. Our Lord counters with His own number, “seventy-seven times”, or in some translations, “seventy times seven.” The number isn’t important. We are not witnessing a back-and-forth haggling between Master and disciple. Our Lord is merely reminding Peter and all of us that mercy is never a matter of accounting. Don’t look at our calculator, rather look at the blessing we’ve received from God and which we are now called to share with others. God’s blessings and mercy outpaces any calculator. Our forgiveness should be given in abundance – it’s one thing that’s truly free. It costs us nothing to give it away. And the supply is endless. In fact, the more you give, the more you receive. Perhaps nothing can better describe the faithfulness and mercy of God, and the depths of His love to send His only Son to sacrifice once and for all for the forgiveness of our sins.

Perhaps it is hard to forgive because we have been expecting in the human that which is found only in the divine. Admittedly, it is hard to forgive when the faults of our enemies are so clear to us and the pain of the injury we have suffered at their hands run deep. The parable tells us to focus elsewhere - not on the failings and limitations of man but on the immense mercy of God - the ocean of God’s mercy. The Lord made this promise through St Faustina “whole ocean of graces upon those souls who approach the Fount of My mercy.” The image of God’s mercy as big as an ocean is actually scriptural.

The prophet Micah cries out to God and implores His mercy on the people: “You will again have compassion on us; you will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:19). On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Jews according to their custom would cast breadcrumbs or empty whatever valuables they have in their pockets into a body of water, as a symbol of casting their sins into the ocean of God’s mercy. No matter what rubbish or emotional baggage or hurts or resentment we choose to cast into that sea, we know that we will never be able to plunge its depths or displace its waters. God’s mercy will always be bigger than my sins, than my emotional baggage, than my pains and hurts. If God can show such great incalculable mercy to me, though unworthy, could I not afford some level of mercy to my neighbour whose debt comes nowhere close to what I owe God?

It’s by the grace and providential hand of God our sins are cast into the depths of the sea. A sea of forgetfulness is akin to God’s memory of our wrongs. The world continues to live under the curse of sin. We continue to hurt each other and be hurt by others. We will never fully escape it, nor its effect on our ability to shake sin completely this side of heaven. One step, one confession, one day at a time, we will become more like the person God created us to be. It’s a change God makes in us because long before we breathed our first breath of earthly air, He chose us. In Him will we always find not only an ocean of mercy but an ocean of love.

Admonish the Sinner

Twenty Third Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

Minding our own business seems to be a useful thing, a most basic survival skill. We’ve been taught since young: if you see a fight, walk away. If you see trouble brewing or coming over the horizon, walk away. If you see your colleague engaging in something illegal, walk away. If you hear someone spewing lies and untruths, walk away. Tell yourself: “it’s not your fight. Just walk away!” As pragmatic as this piece of advice may sound, is this really what we are supposed to do? Yes, in the name of self-preservation, it may be the best option. But in the name of Christ and our moral duty to our neighbour, walking away betrays a lack of charity. As the old adage erroneously attributed to the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke goes, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,”

Minding our own business or shirking our social responsibility is as old as Cain. When interrogated by God as to the whereabouts of his brother whom he had murdered, Cain’s answer has become a rallying cry of all those who sought to avoid sticking your nose into other people’s affairs: “am I my brother’s keeper?” This question is ludicrous since he was fully aware that he was responsible for his brother’s death. In the first reading, God gives this warning to Ezekiel: “If I say to a wicked man: Wicked wretch, you are to die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked man to renounce his ways, then he shall die for his sin, but I will hold you responsible for his death. If, however, you do warn a wicked man to renounce his ways and repent, and he does not repent, then he shall die for his sin, but you yourself will have saved your life.” In short, we would not be faulted if the other refuses to heed our warning but God would hold us accountable if we fail to issue that warning in the first place.

Our social responsibility to our neighbour is spelt out in the third spiritual work of mercy. It is one that few of us like to engage in: “admonish the sinner.” In fact, many today erroneously believe the opposite - that it is an act of mercy to bite our tongue and refrain from correcting others.

But our Lord in today’s Gospel passage lays down clear steps in engaging in fraternal correction. First, we do it privately instead of publicly. Something which is hard to do in an age of social media, public shaming and trolling. Second, if a private meeting fails to resolve the issue, bring in others for mediation. Lastly, if this still does not work, submit it to the adjudication of the community. When even this last step of reasoning and conciliation fails, that person should be treated like “a pagan or a tax collector.”

Many would construe this as a command to excommunicate the person. But let us consider how our Lord dealt with the pagans and tax collectors. He came to bring the gospel to them, heal them, reconcile and save them. Even should this last point be deemed a form of excommunication, the Church teaches that excommunication is not meant to be punitive but is regarded as an act of charity and a means of saving the soul of the person by demonstrating the eternal consequences of his action. Should a person die in mortal sin, he would be eternally separated from God. Excommunication gives a taste of this.

It is important to note that the Lord refers to the person as “your brother.” This highlights the fact that admonition is best done in the context of an established relationship. A person is much more likely to listen to a trusted friend or relative, rather than a street preacher holding a sign that says: “Repent! Sinners go to Hell!” While the message might be the same and true, it does not mean it will be effective. The question is not whether a billboard that says, “Hell is Real” is true (which it is); the question is, “what is the most effective method of ‘admonishing the sinner’ in the modern world?”

Saint Paul echoes these words when he writes, “If any one refuses to obey what we say in this letter, note that man, and have nothing to do with him, that he may be ashamed. Do not look on him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother” (2 Thessalonians 3:14). St Paul is reminding us that we need to look upon someone you admonish as a “brother” and not an “enemy.” Sometimes it is easy to see certain sinners inside and outside the Church as “enemies” and we make it our mission to “correct” them. We do not embark on our mission in a spirit of fraternal charity, but we do so as if we were going to war. To admonish the sinner is not to belittle or humiliate the person, but rather to alert him to the danger of a sinful course of action. It is rooted in love, not pride.

The obligation remains for us both to admonish sinners and to accept admonishment ourselves. So remember, to admonish the sinner begins by admonishing oneself. After all, we are all sinners. Humility is the virtue by which we recognise our sinfulness and our weakness, thus realising that we ourselves depend upon God's mercy to forgive us our sins and upon His grace to strengthen us to resist sin in the future.

To admonish others effectively, there are two other points we must keep in mind. First, we must practice what we preach. In other words, we have to be working at striving for holiness and avoiding sin in our own lives if we expect others to do the same. Our words have little value if we are perceived as hypocrites – not matching words to action. The second point is to avoid the terrible attitude of self-righteousness with its judgmental view of others. Self-righteousness puts a person into the mindset of the Pharisees who were quick to condemn sin in others but overlooked it in themselves. To carry out this work of admonishing the sinner, a person must have a sense of compassion for human weakness, and we can only learn that by recognising our own weaknesses. This requires humility and honesty.

We must remember that the goal is not to tell others how terrible they are; this is, after all, a work of mercy. Neither is the goal to win an argument or to feel superior. Rather, the goal is to win the sinner back from a destructive path, to announce the forgiveness of sins available to all who repent. The goal is salvation. Even greater than all our bodily needs, is the spiritual need to be set free from sin and receive the life of God. This is why admonishing the sinner is so important. To admonish sinners is to call lovingly to those in danger and draw them back from the edge of the abyss. To avoid doing this would only betray our real intention - we cannot bear the backlash that sometimes comes when we warn people who do not want to be warned. But if we yield to this fear, we are showing that we love ourselves too much and do not love God and others enough.