Life Owes Us Nothing

Twenty Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

“If there is such a thing as a basic human quality: self-deception it is,” observed British anthropologist, Collin Turnball. You are most likely not going to agree with this statement. How could you? The beauty of self-deception is that you are never aware of your own delusions. We are so good at fooling ourselves that we do not recognise the lie. We find ourselves in the curious position of being both the deceiver and the deceived. Our penchant for self-deception often gets expressed in delusions of grandeur and a sense of entitlement. We feel that the world, and perhaps even God, should bow down before us and that everyone should accede to our request because it is our right – they owe it to us. Though most of us would be appalled at the wickedness of the initial group of tenants in today’s parable, and never see ourselves filling their shoes, we may be surprised that we actually share much in common, namely self-deception and a wicked sense of entitlement.

The Parable of the Vineyard or the Wicked Tenants must have been an important parable as this is attested by the fact that it appears in all three of the synoptic gospels, with St Matthew’s account being the most complete; it provides us with a clear ending whereas the other two versions leaves us guessing. The context of Matthew’s version is Jesus teaching in the temple. While He was teaching, the chief priest and elders confronted Him with a question regarding his authority. According to rabbinical norms, a teacher had to first establish his authority to teach, usually by demonstrating his rabbinical lineage – that he was a student of so-and-so, who was a student of so-and so and so forth. In his usual manner of taking charge in the face of opposition, Jesus answered their question by posing a question of his own. Jesus now questions their authority and ability to discern the nature and source of the authority of another contemporary and popular preacher, his cousin, St John the Baptist. Since they are unable (or rather refuse) to answer his question, it figures that Jesus is also not obliged to answer theirs. This exchange leads to the escalation of the tension between the religious leaders and Jesus, thus sealing the fate of the latter.  Jesus then narrates two parables: the Parable of the Two Sons, which we heard last week, and the Parable of the Vineyard, or the Wicked Tenants. Both parables point at their disobedience and its consequences.

The second parable, the parable of the Wicked Tenants finds inspiration in the prophecy of Isaiah, which we heard in the first reading. But, here, Jesus adds additional characters to thicken the plot. The parable falls within the category of an allegory and relates to the story of salvation history. God entrusted his kingdom to the Israelites during Old Testament times, here symbolised by the familiar image of the vineyard. When they steered off course, God did not immediately remove these wayward tenants but rather sent the prophets to try to correct them. Their failure to listen to the prophets seems inevitable. Finally, God decided to send his son Jesus to make clear God's message. But the leaders turned against Jesus and finally had him killed. Then the majority of the Jewish people refused to accept Christ. So the kingdom was given to a new people, the Church.

There you have it, the meaning of the parable in a nutshell. It seems so easy to now just bask in the knowledge that we are the good guys in the story. But the parable allows no self congratulation on the part of the New Israel, the members of the Church. The Christian community is now in the position of being the tenants, and the parable begins all over again. Now we Christians are subject to the scrutinising lens of the parable. It is we now who are responsible to God for the harvest of the vineyard; now the church is challenged to be “a people that produces the fruit of the kingdom.”

What’s wrong with the wicked tenants and why should we guard against repeating their mistake? Well the answer is that at some point the tenants got so used to running things their own way, imagining that there is no accountability at all, that they become confused about who is the owner of the vineyard and who is the tenant. If your sense of entitlement turns on yourself, then there is no accountability for what you do. The parable exposes a dirty little secret about us. We are constantly tempted to think that the vineyard, be it the world, the Church or even the Kingdom of God, is ours and we can do what we want with it and we can treat each other in any way that we want, and there is no holding us to account for it. But in the parable, that is all turned around. The vineyard that we treat as our own belongs to another who expects us to make good on our responsibilities. We are not owners in this vineyard, we are tenants; we are merely servants, not masters. God doesn’t owe us anything; on the contrary, it is we who owe God an account of our stewardship. That’s irony!

Most of us cannot imagine ourselves taking the path of the wicked Tenants. But here lies the power of self-deception. The parable, in fact, exposes the lie that we have sold ourselves. It is the cult of self that is killing our culture and society. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy and to become famous. Once our goals are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Most adults, and the overwhelming majority of today’s children and teens, feel entitled to having everything they’re taught to want. As a result, when they have a bad experience, lose a person or possession they value, fail to get the award, the increment, or position, or even just have to do something less than fun, they feel slighted—victimised by life. Anger and a “poor-me” pity-party ensues, and the structure for a miserable existence is reinforced. It repeats without end.

The painful truth is that life doesn’t owe us anything. Our parents don’t owe us an inheritance or even our future wellbeing. The government doesn’t owe us a subsidy for every commodity. God doesn’t owe us a blessing or even an answer to our prayer. No one owes us kindness, love, recognition, empathy, apologies, or understanding. In fact, no one owes us anything at all. These are hard truths, but with every truth lies a treasure. The gift in acknowledging and accepting that life owes us nothing is that we realise that every single thing we have is a blessing. God owes us nothing, and yet look at all we’ve been given. This is the point where people often only remember the tragedies of life and conveniently forget or discount the many blessings that have been rained on our lives. Our lives are overflowing with treasures, if we are only prepared to recognise them. God is not a demanding task master, but rather a patient, generous and kind deity who continues to reach out to us till all means are exhausted.

The parable of the Vineyard and the Wicked Tenants thus illustrate both the justice and mercy of God. God is merciful. He is patient and generous. But we should never mistake this for moral permissiveness nor should it be seen as negligent supervision of creation. Grace is a free gift, but it is also an awesome responsibility. In our petty pursuits for position, honour and recognition within the Church, we must never forget that Jesus, though he may be “the stone rejected by builders,” has always been and remains very much the “cornerstone.” And so we must not allow our sense of self-importance and entitlement to blind us to this truth and lead us to usurp the place of the rightful heir in whom all humanity’s destiny rests. Ultimately, it is Christ who is the chief corner stone that adorns, strengthens, knits, and keeps together, the whole building; in which saints and sinners in all ages and places are united together. Without Him, the whole edifice will crumble.

Good intentions are never enough

Twenty Sixth Ordinary Sunday Year A

A few months ago, I was out for lunch with a friend who “just happened to be in town.” The topic of conversation eventually led to a discussion about our current pope, Pope Francis. Like so many others, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, my friend expressed his profound fondness for the present pontiff and admired him for his casual, simple and down-to-earth manner. He remarked, “You know, He really makes me feel like going for mass everyday!” Now this was a surprised because I never imagined my friend to be the religious and pious type. And so I quipped, “Have you? Have you started attending mass daily?” His reply was unabashedly quick, “Of course not, but he still makes me feel like doing it.”

I guess that what often makes us tick these days. The thought that we might actually make changes in our lives, do something special, go out on a limb, seem quite like the real thing. But the truth of the matter is that good intentions are not enough. This reminds me of the riddle: Imagine, five seagulls are sitting on a dock. One of them decides to fly away. How many seagulls are left?

It seems like a no-brainer answer -“Well … four.”

You should know by now that riddles are never meant to be that simple, there’s always a catch. The actual answer is five. This is because deciding to fly away and actually flying away are two very different things. Despite popular belief to the contrary, there is absolutely no power in intention. The seagull may intend to fly away, may decide to do so, may talk with the other seagulls about how wonderful it is to fly, but until the seagull flaps his wings and takes to the air, he is still on the dock.

In today’s parable of the two sons, Jesus exposes the fallacy that merely good intentions are sufficient. They aren’t. Here, Jesus points to the gap that exists between lip service paid in public and the actions which should have followed our verbal avowals of goodness. The parable begins with a father who gives an order to his two sons to go out and work in his vineyard. The first son was a bit of a rebel. When his father asked him to help with the chores, he railed and ranted and refused. We can almost hear the voice of our teenager defiantly telling his father, “Dad, I have other plans. My friends are coming over. Doing chores is no fun. Just leave me alone.” But a funny thing happened. He changed his mind and did the work his father asked him to do. And then there was the second son who certainly had loads of good intentions. That should count for something. He didn’t rebel when his father asked him to work in the field. He didn’t talk back. He said all the right things. But his good intentions were never translated into action.

To the question of Jesus, “Which of the two did the father’s will?” the Pharisees answered correctly: “The first.” By means of his parable Jesus points to something essential for those who profess themselves as his disciples – in the matter of obedience to God’s will – it is better by far to move from bad intentions to positive action, than to remain locked into good intentions and no action. Really and truly, this parable is a powerful lesson in repentance. We evade, we fail, we fall, we slide, we slip, we stumble, we sin, but our loving Heavenly Father is always there, ready to pick us up…if only we open ourselves to repent, to change, to live in harmony with God’s way and will, to become what God has created and called us to be. Repentance takes us beyond good intentions. Repentance moves us beyond our historical baggage.

Just as Ezekiel proposed in the first reading that it is possible for a wicked person to turn from evil to good and vice versa, so the two sons in the parable are not irrevocably tethered by their past. Indeed, the son who said yes but did not go seems to be representative of all those people who possess a smug sense of self-righteousness and who are contented with their noble and good intentions, but never really lift a finger to make a difference. Whereas, the son who rebelled but then acquiesced is representative of people who acknowledge themselves as sinners, whose checkered past would seem to have left them closed to change but ultimately through a change of heart, through genuine repentance, become the actual recipients of grace. The story reminds us that our past background, our previous conditioning, and all the trouble that life has thrown at us and even past sinful habits are really not decisive in charting a course for the future. It is reminiscent of a voice-over commentary that appears at the beginning and at the end of the comic-book to movie character, Hell Boy, where in answer to the profoundly philosophical question of “what makes a man a man?” the answer is, “it’s not how you decide to begin but how you choose to end it.”

Our culture today is obsessed with being nice, often believing that being nice, having good intentions is enough.  Comfortable and complacent, we too easily become very satisfied with the position we’ve settled into and focus on being nice people instead of doing all that is demanded of us in the gospel. We too easily substitute politeness for transformation. We too easily forget that the resurrection is still the defining force in our lives, and that things in our lives still need to die in order for the things of God to be brought to new life. We too easily think we’re just fine – “I’m OK, you are OK … actually that’s not OK”

People on the outside, however, those whose personal lives are in shambles, who are on the fringes, who are marginalised, know they need something. There is an emptiness, a thirst and a hunger in their lives. Those who recognise their neediness are in fact those who are most sensitive to their need for grace. It’s much easier to seek grace when you stand in desperate need of it. It’s much easier to seek radical transformation in your life when you realise how deeply you need it. The church is here to proclaim God’s grace. We need to remember that grace is still and always needed by those inside. And it is always available to those outside.

Every now and then, it’s good for us on this journey to sainthood to be reminded that we’re still pretty much sinners. We have feet of clay. Every time I’ve gotten just a little too comfortable with the correctness of my words, or the correctness of my deeds, it’s good to be reminded that my heart is always in need of transformation. Every time I’ve started to think it’s about me – about my words, and my deeds, and my efforts, and my intentions, I’m reminded that it’s about God – about what God is doing and how I need to make myself available to the ways God is working and moving through me. If it were all about me, I think the hope for the world would be slim indeed. What does most vital, however, is our personal openness to the grace and mercy of God. With such powerful help, even the most tawdry or sordid past can be forgotten and forgiven. For those of us who look back at countless failures and who labour under the heavy burden of a past littered with mistakes, this parable gives hope and encouragement.

And so we return to the parable once more: A man had two sons. One thought his words and good intentions would save him; the other thought his deeds would save him. In the end, it was the love and grace of their father that saved them, love and grace that can transform every human heart, including ones like ours.

What's in it for the other guy?

Twenty Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A

One thing I think a lot of us think about when confronted with a decision or a choice is to ask the question: what’s in it for me? How will this benefit me? As self-serving as this may sound, this is what drives and motivates us. In fact, many good people who volunteer time, effort and energy to serve in the parish, often find themselves laboring under the same questions, though they may be honestly unaware of it. To be fair, thinking of one’s own welfare does not necessarily mean that we are selfish. Since, we spend all day, every day in our bodies and our lives, it is also pretty obvious that you would most likely think about your own life and problems a bit more than you think about other people or things. It’s also understandable that people have to “watch their backs” and make sure they are not taken advantage of.  

However, it’s easy to trap ourselves in our own little universe, where we have become insulated and removed from the rest of the world. This can be quite limiting at best, and at worst, develop into selfishness and narcissism. When we are too absorbed in our world, it’s quite easy to always feel that we are getting the raw end of the deal. Cynicism and resentment often trails closely behind. It’s really hard to be thinking about others when we are busy feeling sorry for ourselves. The good fortune of others, instead of being a reason for rejoicing, becomes another sore point leading to resentment. That is why doing something only because it’s beneficial to ourselves may not be enough. Often, we need to do something simply because it is the right thing to do. And sometimes, the right thing to do is more than just fulfilling the burning desire to satisfy our selfish interests.

Self-interest 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 parable of the workers at the vineyard must be read in the context of the verses that precedes it. The story is told by Jesus in response to Peter’s question. A modern rephrasing could 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’s concern matches ours. 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, Jesus overwhelms him with vision of gratuitous abundance. To Peter’s self-serving motivations, Jesus 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 honing in 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 turns at the end to what is totally unconventional, so that the people who worked the least got equal pay. The owner of the vineyard orders that all be equally paid a denarius, whether you had worked for the entire 12 hours or for less than an hour. Something immediately strikes us as wrong. Conventional social dealings would dictate the eleventh hour hired help would receive 1/12 of what the first hired 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.” Therefore thinking in terms of standard social 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 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.

The landowner had not been unjust, he has every right to do what he wants with his property. The real problem is that the grumblers harbour envy because their employer is generous towards those who do not merit such treatment. But his generosity rather is an expression of gracious freedom, not spiteful arbitrariness, while their complaints are an expression not of their unfair treatment but of their lovelessness.

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. The divine principle of justice may be stated as follows, “to every man what he needs.” 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 and gracious. Here, we see how the limiting motivational mentality of the first group of workers actually exposes the true nature of their crime. Rather than be grateful for the grace that they themselves had received and for the abundant gratuitousness shown to others, they could only grumble. The workers should be pleased with what the landowner gives them, and not be concerned with what He gives others. Making comparisons ultimately spawns and fans an epidemic of grumbling and resentment.

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)

Many of us who have suffered similar injustice of the system, where merit does not guarantee reward, can share the indignation of the first class of workers who had sweated and slaved the whole day, unlike the others. But the parable seems to be telling us to go beyond that self-serving question “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 thinking 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. God owes us nothing. In fact, if God were to give us exactly what we do deserve, we would receive condemnation.

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,” “mercy” shown to the undeserving, rather than a “debt” owed by God to us for our good works. Don’t ask “what’s in it for me?” but merely be always grateful for the many graces we most certainly do not deserve. At my recent annual retreat, the Retreat Master reminded us, “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 neighbor as a nuisance and a burden, pray that he be your opportunity and strength.”

Power and Powerlessness

Feast of Exaltation of the Cross

The Cross of Christ, the centre and pinnacle of God’s saving work, is also the centerpiece of our faith. The cross reveals the most profound depths of God’s love: “God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16). Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI tells us that “the cross … is the definitive sign par excellence given to us so that we might understand the truth about man and the truth about God; we have all been created and redeemed by a God who sacrificed his only Son out of love. This is why the Crucifixion … is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he give himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form.” (Deus Caritas Est, 12)

Nevertheless, the cross remains a sign of contradiction – it is both an unthinkable disgrace and yet a potent source of grace. It has inspired confidence in armies to march into battle and others to sue for peace; it has been used as a palpable symbol of power as well as powerlessness. And so it is both despised as well as coveted by one human power or another – Constantine used it as a talisman of power in the civil war with his brother and the Persians claimed it as their greatest battle trophy over the Byzantines.

So, how is the cross a symbol of power and powerlessness? The symbolism of power hidden in the cross is often lost on us, and is only revealed as a mystery of revelation. The Cross represents the Sovereign authority of God and his providence. This is certainly difficult to comprehend. Yet, what seems to us to be failure is, in God’s eyes, the victory of sacrificial love. It is on the cross, that Christ receives the highest exaltation from God, ironically, at the moment he suffered the greatest humiliation at the hands of men. As Christ was lifted up on the Cross, now by means of the Cross, he lifts up humanity, and indeed all creation. As today’s gospel reminds us, “for God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved”. The Cross possesses the power to forgive sins which are hidden, the power to heal consciences and human hearts. It is there that we have been set free of the debt of sin and liberated from the clutches of death.

But paradoxically, the cross is also a symbol and an instrument of powerlessness. There are few things that can match the depravity of this instrument of torture and death. For a brief moment, where hours seem like eternity, the Son of God gave up His access to the powers of the universe so that He could die at our hands. On the wood of the cross, the most powerful being in the universe chose to be powerless. The Lutheran theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, describes the profound significance of this moment, “God allows himself to be edged out of the world and onto the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us.” So what God has done is that He took an instrument of evil, an instrument that brings death and transformed it so that it gives life, brings goodness and healing, and that’s what we hear Jesus saying about himself, “When I am lifted up, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, then I will give life.” The instrument of death becomes an instrument of healing, life and salvation.

The power and the powerlessness of the cross provide us with the necessary lens to view our own suffering, our daily crosses. St John Paul II, who prophetically wrote his first encyclical on Suffering, and would later suffer that fate in the last years of his pontificate, uses the cross to formulate his answer to man’s perennial dilemma – Why do we have to suffer. The saintly Pope stated, with piercing simplicity, that the answer has "been given by God to man in the cross of Jesus Christ." Each of us is called to "share in that suffering through which the Redemption was accomplished." Through his only-begotten Son, God "has confirmed His desire to act especially through suffering, which is man's weakness and emptying of self, and He wishes to make His power known precisely in this weakness and emptying of self." 

And this is the way we experience God’s power here on earth, sometimes to our great frustration, and this is the way that Jesus was deemed powerful during his lifetime. The Gospels make this clear. Jesus was born powerless, and he died helpless on a cross. Yet both his birth and his death show the kind of power on which we can ultimately build our lives. The cross of Christ, therefore, teaches us that we can find power in weakness, in that which makes us vulnerable and even seemingly powerless.

Perhaps, what makes it so difficult to accept the good news of the cross, is that we are stubbornly hold on to power; we want to have a “sense of control.” Henri Nouwen writes, “What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible?  Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love.  It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.” Most of us fear our powerlessness in the face of illness and death. We would like to retain an element of control, even though we realise that dying often involves the very opposite: a total loss of control, over our muscles, our emotions, our minds, our bowels and our very lives, as our human framework succumbs to powerful disintegrative forces.

Even when those disintegrative forces become extreme and our suffering may seem overwhelming, however, an important spiritual journey always remains open for us. This path is a "road less traveled," a path that, unexpectedly, enables us to achieve genuine control in the face of suffering and even death. The hallmark of this path is the personal decision to accept our sufferings, actively laying down our life on behalf of others by embracing the particular kind of death God has ordained for us, patterning our choice on the choice consciously made by Jesus Christ. As no one had ever done before, Jesus charted the path of love-driven sacrifice, choosing to lay down his life for his friends. He was no mere victim in the sense of being a passive and unwilling participant in his own suffering and death. He was in control. No one could possibly take his life from him, unless he chose to lay it down.

Jesus foresaw that his greatest work lay ahead as he ascended Calvary to embrace his own powerlessness and self-emptying. Paradoxically, it was when he most seemed powerless, that he was most powerful. The cross would prove victorious when meeting our ancient enemies on the battlefield – sin, death and evil would be defeated by the very sacrifice of Christ himself. Jesus' radical embracing of his Passion — and our radical embracing of our own — marks the supreme moment of a person, whose life seems otherwise spinning out of control or into chaos, as God assumed control of one’s life and destiny through our willing immersion into His hope-filled and redemptive designs.