We Are All in This Together

33rd Sunday of the Year

Maybe you have heard before that the way readings are arranged for our liturgies changed after the Second Vatican Council. Before the Council, fewer readings from the Old and the New Testament were used for Sunday Masses—about 1% of the Old Testament and 17% of the New Testament were heard by the faithful during the liturgical year. Many times, the readings from Sunday Mass were repeated throughout the following week. But the readings were in Latin and not everyone used a missal to follow along with the Mass so many people, I guess, never noticed the limited selection of scripture used for the celebration of the liturgy.

The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, drafted by the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, called for a wider selection of scripture to be used during the liturgical year. The use of scripture for Mass is now based on a 3-year cycle, and during those three years, about 14% of the texts from the Old Testament and 71% of the texts from the New Testament are heard by anyone who is coming to Mass on Sundays—not perfect, I don’t think, but a good step forward. More scripture at Mass makes sense to me.

The new design to the reading cycle for liturgies also wants the faithful to see the connections between the Old and New Testaments. The Fathers of the early Church used to say that every letter of scripture, somehow, is about Christ, and one of the goals of the new reading cycle is to help the faithful find Christ in the Old Testament. So, the first reading for Mass on Sundays—taken from the Old Testament—always reflects or captures a theme that is found in the Gospel. There is a connection between the first reading and the Gospel that matters. If you can identify the theme, the connection, then you will understand what the Church wants you to know about the Gospel passage and the Christian life.

I wanted to take a few moments to explain the new design of the reading cycle for liturgies so that you would better understand my frustration when I tell you that I had a very hard time finding any kind of connection between our first reading from Proverbs and the Gospel for today’s Mass. What does the good wife described in these few verses from Proverbs have to do with the wasting of entrusted resources that Christ describes in the parable? Most weekends, you can find the connection between the Old Testament reading and the Gospel without too much trouble. But for most of the past week, I struggled.

I finally gave up on sorting things out for myself and pulled off my shelf a small commentary on the reading cycle written by one of my favorite authors. He made the connection immediately: the good wife described in Proverbs is the Church, the Bride of Christ, who has been entrusted by Christ with the work of salvation in the world. The Bridegroom is away on a journey and has entrusted his possessions to his spouse. The Church, in turn, must remain faithful to her husband and make good use of everything with which she has been entrusted.

Maybe I have told you this before in private conversation, but I do not follow the news cycle about the Church at all. My thinking is that for maybe 18 or 19 centuries—at least for a good 12- or 1400 years—most Roman Catholics had absolutely no idea what was happening with the Church. Most Catholics for most Christian centuries probably did not know who the pope was, never met their bishop, never picked up an encyclical, and never read a press interview with a Vatican official or academic theologian that caused a controversy. For most Catholics of most Christian centuries, to live the faith well was a matter of local politics, local issues, local problems grounded in a small community. I am determined to live that kind of life—less anxiety, less stress, more trust in the Christ’s promises, more focus on what is happening around me.

I guess I did not need to give you those details, but I want you to understand that you don’t need to follow a news cycle to know that our Church, the Bride of Christ, continually fails to meet the standards of the good wife given in Proverbs. The Church too often fails to care for the resources entrusted to her by Christ—there is scandal and abuse and false teaching and confusion. Our problems in the Church are real.

Our problems also come from us, the individual members of Christ’s body which is the Church. There is no denying the truth that just as the Old Testament reading from Proverbs identifies the reality of the Church and her obligations, so does the Gospel identify the reality of every believer and his or her obligations to make good use of what Christ has entrusted. There is an unhelpful dichotomy at work in the Church today, a way that more and more Roman Catholics are comfortable with saying ‘The Church is the problem’ without realizing the fact that the problems of the Church come only from the individual members that constitute Christ’s body. St. Paul says of the Church that if one member suffers, the whole body suffers with it. He is right.

What I want to say is that the Church is the bride of Christ who is charged with making good use of the resources that Christ has entrusted to her. But we are the members of Christ’s body and to each of us has been entrusted a mission, a purpose, so many goods and resources to be cared for and stewarded. The good work of the Bride of Christ depends on the good work of the members of Christ’s body. We are all in this together.

So, to my mind the question that today’s Gospel leaves us with is: how do we become good members of the body of Christ, caring well for whatever Christ has entrusted us? There are different answers to the question, but here is one answer that I like quite a bit: make sure that you really know Christ. There is a tragic reality in the background of the Parable of the Talents, that the servant who fails is also the servant who does not know his master. He thinks that his master is a corrupt, avaricious man, and so the servant makes the wrong decision about how to care for talents with which he was entrusted.

If we don’t really know Christ, we will struggle to make good use of whatever Christ has entrusted to us. There is a theologian who said of the Second Vatican Council that for some time after the Council, with the life of the Church becoming fragmented and a tidal wave of change and controversy consuming the Church, he always thought that our problems were ecclesiological. What he means is that the division is the Church comes from the fact that many people do not agree on what the Church is, what the Church needs to be doing— there is confusion about the mission and identity of the Church. But one day, he realized that our confusion is really about Christ. There is confusion, far too much confusion, about the mission and identity of Christ. And that confusion has been wounding the Church for decades.

The line of argument makes sense to me. You can’t serve the master while he is away if you don’t really know the man. We need to make sure that we really know Christ. How can we give ourselves the best chance of knowing Christ? I’m going to make one suggestion for a place to start.

Here it is: get honest with yourself, come to terms with whatever ideological leaning you have about Christ, and kill it. Let whatever ideology is in you die. Is Christ for you the Christ of mercy and love but little divine judgment? Let that ideology in you die. Is Christ for you the Christ of divine judgment and personal accountability but rarely love and mercy? Let that ideology in you die. Is Christ for you the Christ of social justice initiatives and social inclusion with no regard for truth or teaching or inherited doctrine about the dignity of the human person? Let that ideology die in you. Is Christ for you the Christ of truth and moral command and rule-following with little concern for those who are outcast or deeply struggling with the hardness of human life? Let that ideology in you die.

Those are just of few of the ideologies out there about Christ, a little reduced maybe, but each in its own way a reduction of the mystery of Christ. And we all have our leanings. We are hardwired to get at the mystery of Christ through the lens of politics or culture or family obligation or career ambition or personal desires or whatever other forces make a claim on us and become the foundation for how we approach the reality of Christ. Those forces skew our vision of Christ and reduce the mystery of Christ to something lesser. And then we make choices about how to live.

The tragedy of the servant in the Parable of the Talents is that the man thinks he knows his master but is wrong in what he thinks. Whatever the cause of the man’s certainty—pride, arrogance, intelligence, simply a bad error in judgment—the effect is a violation of trust and a wasting of resources. When we get Christ wrong, we get the Christian life wrong. And our personal failings impact the Church, the Bride of Christ. We are all in this together.

Homily preached on November 19th, 2023 at the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary