For anyone who has, will be given more

Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

Many a successful entrepreneur would not hesitate to share with you the secret of their success; if you want big returns, you must be willing to make bigger investments. “Money makes money”- as the saying goes! This pretty much sounds like the saying of Our Lord, sandwiched between the parable of the Sower and the Seed, and its explanation: “For anyone who has, will be given more, and he will have more than enough; but for anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” Our most common response to this cryptic statement is that it simply is not fair “to give to him who has and take from him who has not”, seems like a perverse inversion of Robin Hood’s famous rationale for economic redistribution – ‘robbing the rich, to give to the poor.’

A second look at this enigmatic statement may reveal that it is anything but cruel. Rather, it may actually be an inescapable law of life. In every sphere of life more is given to the man who has, and what he has is taken away from the man who has not. Let me illustrate. In academia, everyone knows that the scholar who labours to amass knowledge is capable of acquiring more knowledge. It is to him that the funding, the research opportunities are given; and that is so because by his diligence and fidelity, he is more likely to succeed than any other candidate. On the other hand, the student who is lazy and refuses to work inevitably loses even the knowledge which he has. The same may be said of so many other examples. Many a person had some skill in a craft and lost it, because he neglected it.

What seems logical in life, is equally applicable in our spiritual lives. Faith is a verb, it must be exercised. Just like muscles in our body, faith can suffer atrophy when we fail to exercise it. Like muscles that tend to atrophy in zero gravity space, faith which is not challenged, also suffers the same fate. Every temptation we conquer makes us more able to conquer the next and every temptation to which we fall makes us less able to withstand the next attack. Every good thing we do, every act of self-discipline, every prayer said and sacrament received, makes us better able for the next; and every time we fail to use such an opportunity, we make ourselves less able to seize the next when it comes. Life is always a process of gaining more or losing more. If “money makes money,” then "having faith, practising our faith, leads to greater faith".

This is the key to understand the Parable of the Sower and the Seeds. The seed that is sown is the message of the kingdom. The soils are the people, the human hearts, who make the decision about the message. Though God is exceedingly generous and refuses to discriminate in His sowing, the soil of the human heart has the freedom to receive or reject it. There are many reasons why people do not respond by faith to the Word. Some might be hardened in unbelief, only superficially happy about the message, or too entangled with the cares of this world. Out of the four types of soils, only one proves fertile. “For anyone who has will be given more.”

Therefore, rather than exposing the weakness of God or His message, the parable here enables and compels a man to discover the truth about himself. Christ tells us that “the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven are revealed to you (who are His disciples), but they are not revealed to them.” In other words, the parable conceals truth from those who are either too lazy to think or too blinded by prejudice to see. It puts the responsibility fairly and squarely on the individual. It reveals truth to him who desires truth; it conceals truth from him who does not wish to see the truth. The latter is what we call the sin of incredulity.

Incredulity is more than just experiencing difficulty in understanding. Incredulity is, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2089) puts it, “the neglect of revealed truth or the wilful refusal to assent to it.” It is something deliberate. The first three types of soil illustrate this. To say that the Catholic faith is so simple that one would never experience difficulty in understanding it, would be a naïve claim. There is nothing wrong with experiencing difficulties in understanding, but there is a problem with incredulity. Here’s the difference:  The person with a difficulty says, “How can that be so?” whereas a person who is incredulous says, “That can’t be so!” The first statement expresses difficulty, but willingness to believe. The second statement expresses cynicism and unwillingness to submit to both reason and the Church’s teachings. The person with difficulties says, “I believe, Lord; help my unbelief!” The person with incredulity says, “I don’t believe Lord, and don’t bother to help my unbelief!”

The person with difficulties may be struggling, but he is struggling because he desires to understand fully and completely. There is hope here. This story, therefore, shows the relationship between faith and understanding. As St Anselm so rightly puts it, “faith seeks understanding" and understanding brings joy.  Faith always attempts to plunge into the depths of the mysteries of God. When we have faith in God, we will want a better relationship with Him, and it causes us to want to know God better. The two support each other.

Incredulity, on the other hand, is never the product of reason but rather the refusal to submit to reason. You can provide the best rational arguments to support revelation, and there would be those who would wilfully choose to disobey and reject what they secretly know to be true. That is why incredulity is not just merely a position taken, because there is a lack of proof. Incredulity is a sin, since it rejects the very grace of God that comes from His Living Word. By choosing not to believe, people who possess the first three kinds of soils, have cut themselves off from grace, cut themselves off from God, and finally cut themselves off from salvation.

What sets the last type of soil apart from the other three? What is the necessary condition of the heart to receive the Word of God? The answer is obedience. Venerable Cardinal Newman tells us, “To those who are perplexed in any way, for those who seek the light but cannot find it, one precept must be given — obey. It is obedience which brings a man into the right path. It is obedience which keeps him there and strengthens him in it.” The obedient heart is one which already possesses much and this predisposes it to receive much more.

At the end of the day, despite the widespread incredulity to the message of the gospel, this parable provides us with needed encouragement. Basically, the Lord is reminding us that no matter how good you are at sowing, and no matter how good the seed is, you won’t get a 100% germination rate. So we should not be overly grieved when not everyone receives the message. Our words go whistling down the wind; our message meets the impenetrable barrier of men's indifference; the result of all our work seems less than nothing. We may often wonder;  what kindles a fire in our bones leaves others stone cold, similarly, what thrills and moves our hearts leaves them icily indifferent. There’s more to sowing than the sower and the seed, there is the reception that the seed finds when it is planted. But our comfort is in knowing that nothing in this world happens outside the will of God. Everything has its place in the purpose of God and that somehow God is constantly weaving together success and failure, good and evil in a web of His designing. In spite of all the bad and unyielding heart soils, there will be those who would accept the life giving Word, take it to heart, and produce a great yield. Ultimately, there are no failures and there are no loose ends in the ultimate plan of God. So keep sowing!

Obedience is not a burden but freedom

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

I have no illusion that growing up as a child in suburban Petaling Jaya is quite different from growing up, say in some small rustic rural town or even on a farm. Nevertheless, I can proudly boast that I was privileged to have experienced a mini-farm at the back of my family home. Well, perhaps I should not call it a farm - a few chicken coops do not a farm make! But we had an entire menagerie of animals at one time or another – chickens, rabbits, pigeons (this was before the Avian flu epidemic and health warnings about bird droppings), and some other unmentionable creatures. I considered myself privileged (though a little traumatised as I had to participate in the periodic slaughter of fowl for the dinner table) as I was able to personally witness the entire cycle of life of a chicken from egg to mature bird. I definitely knew that chickens did not come from the supermarket or the freezer. They once had feathers and they ran around. Gulp.

Today’s generation may be considered impoverished as most urban children would not have seen a life animal, apart from their pets and those kept in the safe enclosures of a zoo. So, when Our Lord uses examples from farming and agrarian life, these would surely seem foreign to many of us. A yoke? What’s that? Even if one were to have grown up on a farm, a yoke would still be an alien concept. The reason is that yokes aren’t used much today. Let’s state the obvious by painting a verbal picture of this contraption. It is a wooden harness used to guide oxen or other draft animals while ploughing fields. It has been replaced by tractors or other mechanised equipment.

In a figurative sense, the “yoke”, used frequently in the Old Testament, came to mean something more severe: to subjugate, or force into labour or bondage, as with a beast of burden, or worse, a slave; truly unpleasant ideas in an age that values autonomy above all else. In fact, this may be the very perception of many people who find the rigours and demands of religion excessively oppressive. The famous quote of Karl Marx comes to mind. He taught that religion was “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of heartless world, just as it was the spirit of a spiritless situation.” And yet, Jesus uses this very image to speak of freedom.

At first glance, the Lord’s words in the gospel this Sunday may seem to offer a rather simplistic and strange way to follow. “Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest.” No problem with that. But then the method of finding rest which follows seems like a sick joke: “Shoulder my yoke and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”  It does seem like substituting one burden with another. In fact, we would not be far from Marx’s view if we were to interpret these words as an invitation to accept our labour and predicament without complaint, as oppressed people accepting everything in the hope of finding the pie in the sky! And to clinch the deal, the Lord concludes with this puzzling statement, “Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.”

I think it is fairly accurate to say that the majority of us do not always feel like this is true. There are days, weeks, or even prolonged seasons in which following Christ seems torturous, when His yoke seems unbearably hard and His burden feels crushingly heavy. The reasons for this disconnect between Christ’s words and our personal experiences are definitely worth pondering over. So, how can we properly understand these words?

Let us examine the context and meaning of the Lord’s words. He was speaking to Jews under the Mosaic Law who were heavily burdened both by their inability to obey the Law and by their corrupt religious leadership. He was inviting them to enter into His New Covenant rest—not a kind of rest that is void of submission and obedience, but a kind of rest in which He supplies the power to submit and obey. He who perfectly obeyed the Father’s will would be our model of obedience. The Lord calls us to come out from under the crushing load of sin and embrace faith-driven, love-saturated, divinely-empowered obedience. What He invites us to discover is; to do by love what we have been taught to do by duty. Too often, however, we fulfil our duties simply by duty, like religious petty bureaucrats without freedom who forget the spirit of our rules and laws. We observe the religious prescripts of worship and moral obligations because we fear reprisal and punishment from God. This is precisely the reproach Jesus made to the Pharisees: to lose sight of the centre implies to make things more difficult.

This is why Jesus says His yoke is easy and His burden light. We should not, however, be under the illusion that the commandments of Our Lord, that His Laws are lighter than those of the Jews. In fact, as the Sermon on the Mount, so rightly demonstrated, Our Lord sets a much higher standard as He reformulates the Mosaic Law. His demands go above and beyond a mere outward conformity to the Law and deal instead with the inner person. The standard is higher because although the law sets limits, Love doesn’t!  And when we choose to do something out of love and not because it is required by the law, we are truly free. 

When we take Christ’s yoke upon us, He begins leading us away from the destructive ills of sin and toward expanded joy and deepened peace in God. And the burden we bear on this journey is light, because our Lord Himself bears the weight of the load. You see the yoke is actually a crossbar that encircles the necks of a pair of oxen, or other draft animals working in a team. We are yoked to Him. To be sure, we do carry some weight in this process. We are charged with the daily task of abiding in Christ so that He can perform His sanctifying work within us. With temptations and weaknesses within and around us all the time, this can be extremely difficult. Yet, even in light of this difficulty, the Lord still describes His yoke as easy and His burden as light. Why? Because the supernatural strength, joy and peace He lavishes upon the one who is yoked to Him far outweighs the difficulties of discipleship.

So then, what precisely is the yoke of Christ for us? It is the vehicle of grace on the path of life by which we progressively and obediently come to know, love and serve God. It means being a disciple of Christ, being true to one’s vocation in life—which may be lived out in many different ways. Our yoke finds many different expressions - It may be a wedding ring, or a clerical collar, or a religious habit, or it may be something less visible but no less demanding—such as an illness, loneliness, or other difficult circumstances.

When the Lord issues an invitation to come and be yoked to Himself, He isn’t picturing a carefree life in which we can do whatever we want while experiencing rest and reassurance from Him. He is issuing an invitation to come and be inseparably linked to Himself, going where He goes, doing what He desires. Being inseparably bound to Him entails the willingness to bear our crosses. But, by choosing the imagery of the yoke, the Lord is highlighting the reality that we can never outgrow our need for Him. Being yoked to Him means He bears the weight of our sin and brokenness and He directs our paths. This shift from being sole responsibility-bearers of all our concerns to taking our cues from God, offers us rest and lightness. The Lord isn’t merely giving us an invitation to rest. He is giving us an invitation to Himself. “Come to me… and I will give you rest.” It is by coming to Jesus, abiding with Him, literally being “yoked” together with Him that our souls find the rest they so desperately need.

Be Warned

Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

No retail outlet would put a huge poster on its store front window with the caption, “Be warned! Items on SALE are very costly,” unless they were planning their own financial ruin or business demise. That may be true of any business, but not Christianity. Christians display their crosses proudly on their churches, as if issuing the following invitation to all onlookers, “Be warned! This is the fate of all who enter,” but would then add, “This is also the quickest way to heaven!”

Nowhere is the sheer honesty of Our Lord Jesus more vividly displayed than here in today’s gospel. Here He sets the Christian demand at its most demanding and at its most uncompromising position.  He tells His men exactly what they may expect, if they accept the commission to be messengers of the King - they must be prepared to undergo great sacrifices, even death itself, if called on to do so for the sake of Christ. The way of Jesus becomes the way of those who would be His disciples. Those who in faith and service continue Jesus’ work will also share His death and ultimately His glory. If you think that the renunciations demanded by the Lord are incredibly radical, He repeats three times that those unwilling to take up these demands are “not worthy of me!” Even though they had only a very vague idea then of what He meant, when the time came, they remembered His words and gladly suffered imprisonment, hardships, and finally martyrdom for Christ.

Three points are made in today’s short gospel: (a) that discipleship is a bond that supersedes all other bonds, (b) that true discipleship will inevitably lead to the cross, (c) that discipleship also has its rewards. While the first two points deal with the proper attitude of disciples, the third deals with the proper attitude toward those who are disciples.

Let’s begin with the first point. The Lord offers every potential follower the ultimate choice. Choose Me or nothing! Just a few verses before today’s passage, the Lord already tells His disciples that He has come not to bring peace, but a sword. He offers them warfare, a Christian form of ‘jihad,’ not that they are asked to commit acts of violence in the name of religion but that acts of violence would be committed against them. In this warfare, it will often be true that a man’s foes will be those of his own household. Our Lord’s words may be troubling to us today, as it was to His disciples then, but they were not unfamiliar. The Jews believed that one of the signs of the in-breaking of God into human history, the so-called Day of the Lord, would result in division of families. Rabbinical tradition spoke of this, “In the period when the Son of David shall come, a daughter will rise up against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. The son despises his father, the daughter rebels against the mother” etc.  Sounds familiar?

To be confronted with Jesus is necessarily to be confronted with the choice of whether to accept Him or to reject Him; and the world is always divided into those two categories. The bitterest thing about this warfare was that a man’s foes would be those of his own household. Jesus’ invitation to follow Him caused a radical disruption of the status quo and breaches in even the closest relationships because Christianity demanded an absolute and unique commitment. So, when offered a choice, a man has to choose between the closest ties on earth or loyalty to the call of Jesus Christ. St Ignatius of Antioch in his letter to the Romans, written in captivity and while he was being led to his execution, wrote, “Our task is not one of producing persuasive propaganda; Christianity shows its greatness when it is hated by the world.”

Secondly, the Lord offers a cross. Many Christians have literally been martyred by the cross and others through ingenious devices of torture and execution developed by the Romans and other anti-Christian regimes, through the course of human history. In recent history, the cross as a means of execution has reappeared in a horrifying graphic way, in the manner by which ISIS executes Christians, other minority groups and detractors. But the cross also appears to each one of us too. A Christian may have to sacrifice his personal ambitions, the ease and the comfort of life that he might have enjoyed, or the career that he might have achieved; he may have to lay aside his dreams, to realise that shining baubles of which he has caught a glimpse of, are not for him. He will certainly have to sacrifice his will, for no Christian can ever again do what he likes; he must do what Christ likes. In Christianity, there is always some cross, for it is the religion of the Cross.

If a person were only offered the above two options, no one, on his or her own volition, would actually walk into Church and embrace the Christian faith!  Why would they? You have to be crazy.  But then, the deal isn’t done yet. There is a third offer. It is a promise. “Anyone who welcomes you welcomes Me; and those who welcome Me, welcomes the one who sent Me.” Yes, there would be those who reject and curse Christians because of their faith in Our Lord, but there are those who would welcome us and therefore, welcome the blessing that accompanies us. We will become a mutual source of blessing for others and they for us. We are transformed into Christ emissaries.  Alongside you, behind you, following you into every room, invisibly but truly, is Christ. You bring Christ with you. You are yourself, but you stand for more than yourself.

As His representatives, Christians now carry an identity beyond their own. When they travel, preach, teach and heal, it is Christ whose work will be done by their hands. The world will meet Jesus through them: “Anyone who welcomes you welcomes Me; and those who welcome Me, welcomes the one who sent Me.” Thus, Christians enjoy both the privilege and the responsibility to make Christ visible. Hospitality is indeed the new evangelisation. Christ is made visible in the act of welcoming, in giving and receiving hospitality. That is why it is incumbent on us to meet others beyond the circle of our family and Church friends. If we never encounter strangers, Jesus has no opportunity to be made manifest in the welcome.

Here lies the four links in the chain of salvation. There is God, out of whose love the whole process of salvation began. There is Jesus who brought that message to men. Then there is the messenger, the prophet who speaks, the good man who is an example, the martyr who gives witness, the disciple who follows, who in turn, all pass on to others the good news which they themselves have received. And finally, there is the hearer.  It is he who welcomes God’s message, His ambassadors and believes, and who thus finds eternal life for his soul.

The conditions of discipleship outlined in Matthew’s Gospel may appear harsh. There is no place for a policy of safety first in the Christian life. Yet they underline for us a truth—choosing anything with one’s whole heart has consequences. Choosing life with Christ means that every relationship we have, must be understood from a new perspective. The man who seeks first ease and comfort and security and the fulfilment of personal ambition may well get all these things – but he will not be a happy man; for he has been called to a higher purpose. A man can hoard life, if he wishes to do so. But that way, he will lose all that makes life valuable to others and worth living for himself. The way to serve others, the way to fulfil God’s purpose for us, the way to true happiness is to spend life selflessly, for only thus will we find life, here and hereafter. Yes, be warned! The cross is the fate of all who enter this Church, but it is also the quickest and the surest way to heaven!