September 4, 2022 (23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time)

“God’s Labor of Love”

by Fr. Dominic DeLay, O.P.

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

If we hear today’s gospel in light of Labor Day, Jesus sounds like a really abusive employer: If anyone comes to me without hating their family and themselves can’t work for me. And, by the way, if you don’t have what it takes to finish the job, stay home.

Today’s passage from St. Paul also clashes with Labor Day. He returns an apparently runaway enslaved person to his enslaver. Without diminishing the tragedy of actual slavery, past and present, some of you might feel a kind of enslavement to your work.

While on the one hand, I’ve noticed that many of you grad students have decided to let go of some of your undergrad obsession with schoolwork and establish a more balanced life for yourselves, I’ve also noticed that, at the same time, some of you feel pressured to be a year-round 24/7 lab rat.

Catholic teaching proclaims the dignity of workers, a dignity that should be honored with dignifying work, good conditions, a living wage, and the right to form unions. While the pandemic has led us to abuse often already overworked and underpaid essential workers, it has also breathed some life into unions. Also during the pandemic, some non-essential workers have been in the economic position to take a more balanced, and hopefully enduring, approach to work.

So back to today’s scripture. I’m not sure I can do much to reconcile St. Paul’s perspective on slavery to modern Catholic teaching except to note that he asks, even if unrealistically, that the enslaved man he returns to his enslaver be treated as a brother. It’s unclear whether he’s asking for the man’s freedom.

And what about Jesus? What precisely is he asking of us today when he says that in order to be his disciples, we need to hate our family and ourselves, carry our cross and follow him, consider whether we really have what it takes to persist, and renounce all our possessions? Is Jesus an abusive employer?

No, he’s extending a passionate invitation to us to live in the fullness of dignity and freedom. He would tell us to hate, not only our families and ourselves, but our work as well. And our possessions, including the plans, ideologies, fears, and joys we hold on to so dearly.

And by hate he means not defining ourselves by these things alone but putting them into perspective. We are first of all, most of all, God’s beloved children. We are God’s labor of love. Our Sabbath observance and tomorrow’s day off from work – for most of us – are meant to help us cultivate this perspective.

Do we have what it takes? Are we willing and able to pay the cost of following Jesus, putting our relationship with him first? Probably not all at once, but by the grace of God working in us, we can make progress toward freedom.

May our Labor Day weekend celebration move us forward in acknowledging the dignity of workers, the unemployed, and those who can’t work, so that we all have the freedom not to define ourselves by our work or by anything less than the work of love Christ does in us.