TWENTY-SIXTH SUNDAY OF YEAR "C"

TWENTY SIXTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR

Cycle “C”{Luke 16, 19 - 31}

“Rich man – Poor man”

LOOKING FOR A SUCCESSOR

                According to an Irish legend, there lived a king who had no sons. With a view to having a possible successor to the throne, he sent his couriers to invite eligible young men to show up for an interview with him. Prospective successors to the throne, however, should have these two qualifications: love of God and love of fellow human beings. There was a young man who honestly believed he filled the book, love of God and neighbour. His only problem, he felt, was that he was too poor and shabby to be presentable before the king. His only resort was to beg and borrow until he had enough money to buy suitable clothes and some provisions for the journey. Eventually he set out for the royal residence and after many days of hard walking was delighted to see the magnificent castle loom in the distance. But just short of entering, he was stopped by a beggar, of all people, sitting by the side of the road, ill-clad and trembling, and pleading for help with extended arms. “I’m cold and hungry. Help me, please.” Moved by the beggar’s plight, the young man stripped off his clothes and exchanged them for the rags of the poor man. Without a second thought, he also gave him his provisions. Then, rag tag and without any provisions for his return, and with some uncertainty, he entered the castle. The king’s attendant showed him in and, after a long wait, he was finally admitted to the throne room. The youth bowed low before the king. When he raised his eyes, he was struck with astonishment.  “You !  But you were the beggar by the roadside.”  “Yes,” replied the king. “I was that beggar.”  “But you are not a beggar; you are really the king !”  “Yes, I am really the king.”  “Why did you do this to me ?” the young man asked.  “Because.” said the king, “I had to find out if you do really love God and your fellow human beings. I knew that if  I came to you as king, in gold crown and royal robes, you would have been so impressed as to do anything I asked. But that way I would never have known what you really are at heart. So I came to you as a beggar, with no claims on you except for the love in your heart. And I have found out that you truly do love God and your fellow human beings. You will be my successor and have my kingdom.”

LOST CHANCES

            When the rich man of Jesus’ parable died, he saw Lazarus not sitting on a throne but reposing in Abraham’s bosom. He kicked himself for letting up a good chance of making friends of the poor hunched at the gates of plenty. There is another parable of the cunning steward who was resourceful and quick-witted. He won the gratitude of the poor by reducing their debts. So when he was dismissed from high office, he had many friends among the poor. But in the story of the rich man and Lazarus, the behaviour is the precise opposite of the wily steward’s. The rich man conspicuously does not win friends in low places. Rather, he behaves meanly with the beggar at the gate, even denying him the still edible floor-sweepings. The poor man simply didn’t exist for him. Somebody has said, “The way to know a man is to observe how he treats people he doesn’t need.” So when all wealth was lost in death and the fat cat banished to the torments below, the situation was decidedly reversed, with Lazarus rich forever and the other out of reach of a drop of water.

PERSONS vs. THINGS

                In the teaching of Jesus the old values come tumbling down. Possessions that used to be the sign of God’s predilection could well pave the path to perdition. Earthly wealth is ours for a very limited period.  As the Spanish proverb has it,  there are no pockets in a shroud !  We use what we have in order to make friends among the poor. They will welcome us home in heaven when it’s time to leave it all, and they will have God’s backing in the welcoming.

            Jesus seems to be telling us that we must love persons and use things; not the other way about: use persons and love things. Jesus seems to be saying: “Don’t ever give your heart away to a thing. If you do, that thing, whatever it may be, will gradually become your master; it will own you and lead you around on a leash of addiction, forcing you to compete with others to grab all you can, thereby producing the inversion of priorities. Choosing to run down this road is opting to cheat, bring down others, and cut corners on your integrity. “

MESSAGES FROM THE DEAD

            The Pharisees believed in life after death and here Jesus catapults their imaginations into it. He makes it real through narrating the cosmic conversation across the great divide, the last part of which concerns the five brothers of the rich man. “But if someone comes to them from the dead, they will repent.”  To give him his due, smarting from his own mistake, he thinks of warning his own brothers about the same by sending the ghost of Lazarus  -  the ghost of opportunities past  !  That would hopefully work up a religious appetite. take this charity stuff seriously and push trolleys of the finest fare to all the Lazaruses in their cardboard boxes. Father Abraham dismisses the proposition. “They have Moses and the prophets.”  They have heard the passionate denunciations of the uncaring rich by prophets like Amos. But will they listen even if somebody called Lazarus comes back from the dead ?  In the Gospel of John somebody called Lazarus does come back from the dead, an event that produced unbelief  and opposition in some, and faith in others (Jn. 12, 9 - 11).  And so the open-ended parable draws us in. We too have the law and the prophets. We also have these parables as part of our scriptures. And most of all, we have Someone greater than Lazarus who has come back from the dead !

NO CON, THIS

            “Opium of the people” was the phrase to describe religion as the massive scam. Promise the masses eternal happiness to come as the answer to the questions of poverty and exploitation. Not the religion of Jesus Christ, since it is anything but a cheap con. Rather, it is the costliest truth of all  -  that real fulfilment in life is rooted in love and service to all, rooted in the realities of pain and suffering as well as of human goodness and joy. Heaven is not the reward for being poor, nor hell the punishment for being rich. Heaven and hell are here already,  depending on using or losing opportunities to love.

                

CHRISTIAN MISSION

CHRISTIAN MISSION

                                                                                                            

“...but you will receive the power of the Holy Spirit which will come upon you, and then you will be my witnesses not only in Jerusalem but throughout Judaea and Samaria, and indeed to earth’s remotest end” (Acts 1, 18).

THE ORIGINAL MISSIONARY

            Mission begins with God, the God of divine exodus, who leaves his home and writes his mystery into the history of his people. He loves enough to extend himself in a total self-communication. “God is so incredibly in love with his creation that he personally invests himself in it” (Meister Eckhart). He could hardly wait for that day when man would suddenly awaken to the fact of God abroad as man, totally involved in a history and culture, member of a working class family, citizen of a nation oppressed; a God immersed in a world of births and deaths, with its experience of childhood, adolescence and adulthood, illness, insecurity and torture, of unemployment, work and leisure. And all with this purpose, that by the transfusion of the divine all ages and conditions of human living would be transformed, transfigured and elevated.

            In the Word made flesh, not only Spirit speaks to spirit, but Flesh speaks to flesh. Our flesh has ceased to be an obstacle; it has become a means and a mediation. It has ceased being a veil to become a perception. The Son of God did not come wearing his humanness like an overcoat, but rather brought the essence of being human to its capacity of revealing what God is like, The body of Christ is not clothed in idyllic silence, since the Incarnation means what it has always meant: something messy, noisy, smelly, bloody and painful. By becoming human, “God was writing his autobiography in the language of real flesh and blood” (Dorothy Sayers). In fact, he was in the person of Christ pulling and struggling with humanity in first-century Palestine and ever since, with his shoulder to the wheel of the human predicament, truly the Word made flesh, a force let loose in the world for man’s transformation. To believe this is good news, not only for modern man but for all humankind for all time.  A religion that constantly seeks the miraculous, the exotic, the other-worldly and  the defeat of nature, cannot help us to come to terms with our humanity, with the tasks of home and factory, of politics, school and church. Such a religion blinds us to the Risen One in the rising of the bread in the oven and the budding spring flower in the soil. Thus the full force of the tension between faith and hope are brought to bear on the world, thereby expressing itself, not by a flight from the world, but by a definite commitment to it. This is perfectly continuous with the Easter appearances of Jesus, which are quite clearly phenomena of mission. (“Go and tell.....”  “Go out into the whole world...”) Easter proclaims and promises the exodus from the world of sin and misery to one of “justice, peace, and the joy that is given by the Holy Spirit” (Rom 4, 17). It is the summons to transform the world, not fly or contemn it.

CHRIST CENTRED MISSIONARY

            All those who are centred on Jesus Christ must partake of his involvement or mission. And they will find God in the most unlikely places and human situations: in the hungry and naked, sick, criminal and oppressed.

            The secret of Jesus’ infallible insight and unshakeable conviction was his unfailing experience of solidarity with God, which revealed itself as an experience of solidarity with man and nature. This made him a uniquely liberated man, uniquely courageous, fearless, independent, truthful and hopeful. Why would anyone want to arrest, try and destroy him ? They found him too dynamic to be safe, too “missionary” to be pinned down ! He spoke about a power that they never understood: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; then you are to be my witnesses.” He could say that precisely because he had received that power already and increases it continuously by sharing it generously with anyone who is willing to witness to him even to the shedding of his blood, as he did. Those who enter this power by baptism are willing to be equipped for the mission of Christ. They are also willing to reassess their methods in terms of the personal, social and political spheres of human living today. Seminars on evangelisation are continuous with the ongoing conversion demanded by God speaking through the prophets.

PEOPLE CENTRED MISSIONARY

            Groups of people vary in size, location, character and the extent to which they welcome the faith or oppose it. But what they all have in common is the presence of the missionary among them, with the why and what he is trying to do. We find ourselves serving people  whose backgrounds and concerns vary enormously, yet  wonder whether the needs of human beings, as distinct from their temporal preoccupation, ever really change. Surely today, as in the past, human beings are in search of the transcendent, want to be affirmed, need self-understanding, yearn to discover meaning in life, require healing and reconciliation. In the best of worlds, people hinder and hurt one another. So there is the presence of the evangeliser.

            Mission and witness derive from a life that takes baptism seriously. Baptism introduced us into the  life of faith that we treasure above all other goods. We love our faith and love our fellow humans. What better way of expressing our love for them than by giving them our most precious possession, the Christian faith ? It is love that makes for missionary zeal. Bereft of every other talent, this one talent  no one can claim he or she does not have. The missionary heart of Jesus was set on his Father and his kingdom. Being one of us, knowing our pains and joys, Jesus reveals our deepest possibilities. Christ did not exhaust the potentialities of human nature, taken discretely. This would have been impossible in one historical lifetime. For instance, he was not a great painter or philosopher or statesman or a great husband, though we must admit he was an excellent teacher, combining in that activity a great amount of true art and poetry. But the point is that Jesus concentrated in himself all the power and energy that human nature is capable of for activating any of the evocations that a man or woman may choose, and he concentrated it to a degree that no one could muster, a degree so high as to make it fit to be used by God. This power was the power of his self-giving love at the service of the Word. Thus, in preference to all other possibilities, Jesus chose the essential and most distinctively human potentiality of all, the one that has the most radical claim on all men and women: self-surrendering love. Jesus was a person who tested life and was tested by it, searching out life’s meaning by listening carefully to what makes life really valuable, and he lived and died trusting that life and death are not bad jokes.

            Our discipleship is not without moral, institutional and political problems. Since we are wounded by sin, our capacity for commitment is limited. Yet, the value of discipleship is that it inspires a vision and provides a context for analysis and choice. A missionary is nothing if he does not personify Christ. Only a missionary who copies Christ faithfully in himself can reproduce his image in others. An apostle’s life is a tale of friendship with the Lord in order to be capable of acquiescing in a “missionary tension” in the martyrial sense of the example of Therese of Lisieux and Francis Xavier. Without this contemplative and apostolic tension of intimate communion with Christ that leads to the foot of the Cross, a missionary cannot proclaim him in a credible way. Witnessing to Christ is not a piece of mimicry, but a challenge to live our human adventure as authentically as he did.

FAMILY FAITH MISSION

THE  FAMILY’S FAITH MISSION

            The Christian Family is understood as mission, continuous with the church, the body of the faithful who together are the effective sign of salvation turned towards the world. The family as “church in miniature” and as a vibrant cell in the whole body must interact with the other cells to bring about the healthy and missionary vitality of the whole. Weak cells produce an anaemic body. It is no wonder that Pope Benedict XV instituted the Feast of the Holy Family in 1920. Before that there was little need to put up the Holy Family as a model, since family life was by and large in a healthy condition. But then came the Industrial Age and the rise of the cities, fast lanes, mass media, entertainment outside the home. Serious problems began to appear on the family horizon. It is a given fact today that family life has become a most difficult project. Apart from economics, housing and education, one thinks immediately of divorce and broken homes, the scourge of alcohol and narcotics, the breakdown of discipline, the media’s indifference to marital fidelity, its trivialising of adultery and violence against women, and the rest of the unhappy lot.

            On the psycho-moral level the human values of the family must be restored, such values as trust, mutual respect and dialogue. But the really good news for marriage and the family will come from the teaching of Jesus Christ, mediated through the Church which continues the specific actions of Christ called the sacraments, and his teaching in homilies, catechetics, encyclicals and conciliar statements. The New Testament teachings about the family are not abstractions. They remain reassuringly down to earth: the mutual respect that members of a family owe to each other, issuing in empathy, compassion, considerateness, kindness, patience, gentleness, forbearance and forgiveness. What a home it would be were one to find there all the qualities just mentioned !  People would fight to come in and just hope that something of it would rub off on them and their families.

            Marriage as efficacious sign not only represents the salvific love action of Christ for his community, but actually effects it for the salvation of the world, actively re-enacting the paschal drama on the stage of life and thereby helping to re-establish the right relationship between God and man.  Marriage is a prognostic or eschatological sign, indeed, whereby husband and wife possess one another, but not exhaustively, since the person as such is destined for God who is even now taking possession of his creation. The characteristic surrender in marriage is an anticipation of the ultimate surrender to God. If love means working for the good of the other, conjugal love can have no greater intent than to hand the partner over to the ultimate consummation in God. This is coincident with the intent of pilgrimage, the essential dynamic of the Christian life.  Every family helps every other family on their way to the eternal family, viz., the most Holy Trinity, by prayer and the sharing of spiritual and material goods and cultural excellences.

            Togetherness and punctuality are key factors of home discipline and peace. Where are the children after 9.30 p.m. ?  Where are they at other times ?  Times for meals, for prayers and evening study ? Can the whole family sit together for the principal meals, and pray together for its own stability and happiness ? Or is the home a cheap hotel  where people come and go as they like without permission or information ?  Luke’s gospel tells us, “He went down with them and was subject to them.” How do sons and daughters take that line now-a-days ?  Have discipline and obedience become unmentionable words ?  Shall we insist that our children be educated into integral and competent human beings or turn out to be half-baked specimens of humanity, unable to face a competitive world ? Shall our children learn from us our prayers and refined vocabulary, or monosyllabic expletives and words of destructive criticism ?

            People, especially children, do not become good by being told to; they must be charmed  into goodness which, like love, is not taught but caught.  The environment in which we have been raised and in which we raise our children is essential to our formation and development.  A family is a very human environment, in fact, the first a child is introduced to.  The joy, the pain, the drama and the ordinary events of our lives are lived within its confines. God chose to mould and form his Son within the environment and culture of a family. He hasn’t broken the mould, since, and thrown it away, because in his mind the family continues to be the place of holiness, love and emotional sustenance.  And the Holy Family of Nazareth tells us that in God the family is not extinct.

            May God make the door every home a gateway to his eternal kingdom.

WHY STUDY THE OLD TESTAMENT

 "Why should we study the Old Testament?"

Answer: There are many reasons to study the Old Testament. For one, the Old Testament lays the foundation for the teachings and events found in the New Testament. The Bible is a progressive revelation. If you skip the first half of any good book and try to finish it, you will have a hard time understanding the characters, the plot, and the ending. In the same way, the New Testament is only completely understood when we see its foundation of the events, characters, laws, sacrificial system, covenants, and promises of the Old Testament. 

If we only had the New Testament, we would come to the Gospels and not know why the Jews were looking for a Messiah (a Savior King). We would not understand why this Messiah was coming (see Isaiah 53), and we would not have been able to identify Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah through the many detailed prophecies that were given concerning Him [e.g., His birth place (Micah 5:2), His manner of death (Psalm 22, especially verses 1, 7–8, 14–18; 69:21), His resurrection (Psalm 16:10), and many more details of His ministry (Isaiah 9:2; 52:3)].

A study of the Old Testament is also important for understanding the Jewish customs mentioned in passing in the New Testament. We would not understand the way the Pharisees had perverted God’s law by adding their own traditions to it, or why Jesus was so upset as He cleansed the temple courtyard, or where Jesus got the words He used in His many replies to adversaries. 

The Old Testament records numerous detailed prophecies that could only have come true if the Bible is God’s Word, not man’s (e.g., Daniel 7 and the following chapters). Daniel’s prophecies give specific details about the rise and fall of nations. These prophecies are so accurate, in fact, that skeptics choose to believe they were written after the fact.

We should study the Old Testament because of the countless lessons it contains for us. By observing the lives of the characters of the Old Testament, we find guidance for our own lives. We are exhorted to trust God no matter what (Daniel 3). We learn to stand firm in our convictions (Daniel 1) and to await the reward of faithfulness (Daniel 6). We learn it is best to confess sin early and sincerely instead of shifting blame (1 Samuel 15). We learn not to toy with sin, because it will find us out (Judges 13—16). We learn that our sin has consequences not only for ourselves but for our loved ones (Genesis 3) and, conversely, that our good behavior has rewards for us and those around us (Exodus 20:5–6).

A study of the Old Testament also helps us understand prophecy. The Old Testament contains many promises that God will yet fulfill for the Jewish nation. The Old Testament reveals such things as the length of the Tribulation, how Christ’s future 1,000-year reign fulfills His promises to the Jews, and how the conclusion of the Bible ties up the loose ends that were unraveled in the beginning of time.

In summary, the Old Testament allows us to learn how to love and serve God, and it reveals more about God’s character. It shows through repeatedly fulfilled prophecy why the Bible is unique among holy books—it alone is able to demonstrate that it is what it claims to be: the inspired Word of God. In short, if you have not yet ventured into the pages of the Old Testament, you are missing much that God has available for you.