September 18, 2022 (25th Sunday in Ordinary Time)

by Fr. Xavier Lavagetto, O.P.

[This is the text composed by the homilist prior to delivering the homily.]

Amos lived over 2700 years ago, yet he would understand our age. He felt the economic and political gloom that haunts humanity still. … Life should have been simple for this small-town boy living 5 miles from Bethlehem, yet God made him his voice to awaken the people in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, where they great prosperity, great poverty, and great distance from God.

The Israelites were great at trading, even “selling the sweepings of the wheat.”  Yet their business zeal eclipsed their religiosity. “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale?” … Amos calls them price gouging cheats who had their fingers on the scales. “We will measure out less and charge more, and tamper with the scales.”

Like our age, they compartmentalized their lives and prioritized the shekel, their dollar, over their God. They celebrated God on Sabbath but failed doing God’s restorative justice to their fellows. No wonder God says: “Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.”

They so focused on business, power and politics that they lost themselves, and precipitated the Assyrian invasion that took their lives and homeland.

We could call them entrepreneurs. … Yes, we have to work to live, but how sad when we live only to work! The danger of the compartmentalized life is that a part takes over the whole, and we lose our very selves. At the end of the day, shouldn’t we ask, “Who am I? … Who am I really?”

Both Amos and Jesus would tell us: Look at your actions if you want to discover your priorities. Jesus warned us: “No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

I confess prefer the older word, mammon. While the word wealth is a good translation, it doesn’t convey Hebrew’s meaning, “of that which you put your trust in.”  We get our word Amen from it.

Now Jesus is not anti-wealth, he is however for the whole person re-discovered and redeemed.  God has given us each a work to do, and part of it in our age is creating wealth, but it is not the whole task.

The creation story surprisingly tells us that God created what he proscribed, an image. He told the man and the woman to “Have dominion”; which is better translated to have sway over. It is not about arbitrary rule, but acting in God's stead.You are called to be God’s image-bearing people, acting in his name as his good stewards of creation for the common good. No selfish aggrandizement here! … But likeness to God in rule and responsibility requires another similarity, to be like God in rest and reflection. “So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work he had done in creation.”

Those northern Israelites kept perfunctory Sabbath by not selling, but they did not keep a Sabbath that adored the Creator, fed the heart, and guided their lives. Rest and reflection remains an enduring duty and dignity. Yet how often at mass, do we eat and run. … Do you delight in the Lord in you?

When I lose sight of the beauty and the goodness, when I no longer savor God’s forgiveness and love, I lose my real self and I lose sight of the real you.  Only with God’s perspective do I see aright; only in restful reflection do I give God spaces to lead me.  

Our stewardship begins with awareness and appreciation of God’s doing in Jesus for us. Yet we can be like the man in today’s Gospel who failed in his duty as a steward. He squandered not only the landowner’s goods; he threatened his own safety when he lost sight of what matters most.

The crisis of his landowner’s visitation spurned him to cunning self-protection. He went to his master’s debtors. ‘How much do you owe my master?’… ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ … ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’  …  ‘And how much do you owe?’ … ‘A hundred measures of wheat.’ … ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’

These sums are fabulous.  Fifty jars of oil, twenty measures of wheat are 900 gallons of oil and 150 bushels of wheat!  That’s over a 1000 days wages!

First century culture demanded that every gift be repaid, and thus the dishonest steward’s actions were his “golden parachute”, insuring he would be very well received.

Nor could the master do anything about it without shame since the steward acted legally with his master’s authority and gained for his master honor and praise for his generosity.  And so Jesus concludes, “his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly...” Jesus does not praise his dishonesty, but his ingenuity.

The shrewd steward placed his trust in money and was determined to keep its security. … He has no divided loyalties! …  He is perversely single hearted. And that begs the question: How dedicated and single hearted am I?

It is easy to profess faith with an Amen, yet it is another to live it by our work and cunning. You can’ buy heaven, but how you spend time, treasure and talent reveals your heart.  That reflection is scary, since it reveals who or what  has my heart’s allegiance.

I love frenetic activity, so I can pretend I’m doing something important, while I often sacrifice the important for the merely urgent. Compartmentalized religion is no living religion!

Today’s Gospel offers not only social critique but an admonition to be good stewards of this world’s goods, but, more importantly, it asks us to identify what really is important. Does God have your heart’ allegiance?

If we don’t feel faith’s conviction, or lack of hope's confidence, or if we act out of fear instead of love, then I need to refocus and rediscover God’s love. When our Lord’s visitation comes, shouldn’t you and I be as single-hearted and shrewd as the dishonest manager, not for ourselves, but for God and his kingdom?