This is
my first time preaching the Sunday morning Masses here at Holy Infant and,
while I’ve celebrated with the daily Mass crowd and Vigil Mass crowd, I was still
really hoping that for my first time preaching for this gathered assembly, I’d
get a nice easy Gospel passage. I guess
God and the lectionary had other ideas!
But, while this is a very strange parable, I want to start with what’s
clear about it.
Firstly,
let’s start with the very end of the parable: the master commends his manager. He praises him. And, like in most of Jesus’ parables, we’re
meant to apply these stories to our lives with God as the master and us as the
servant. Straight off, doing that, we
come to an awareness of what God has entrusted us with. Huge sums, valuable, precious gifts, all of
the amazing gifts in our lives: God’s goods, given for us to administer, in the
service of His Kingdom. And the end of
the story is God praising us. I don’t
know if that’s an image of God we think of very often, but it’s profoundly
biblical. Just as God proclaimed of
Jesus at his baptism, “this is my beloved son, in whom I am well-pleased,” so in
each baptized follower does God delight and proclaim his love and his good
pleasure. Just as Jesus commended his
own spirit into God’s hands at his death, so for each of us joined to his death
in baptism, does God in Christ commend us.
Just as God looked on his creation and saw, and said, that it was good,
so he longs to do with us, and will do, once he’s refashioned us in holiness,
because his handiwork is brilliant. It’s
natural and human, something we all feel, to desire praise, because we were
made for it (God doesn’t make junk), and that’s what this parable ends with: a
celebration of God’s praise of humanity, of us.
But,
that’s where it ends. We need to back up
to where it starts. It starts with the
news that the manager, the servant in whom we’re meant to see ourselves, has
royally screwed up. He’s squandered his
master’s property. Not necessarily
through any ill will, quite possibly just through carelessness. And as much as we resonate with the desire to
be praised, we probably also resonate with this feeling: the awareness that we
have not used the gifts God has given us as they ought to be used; we have not
lived lives of stewarding all of our gifts for the greater glory of God. And maybe we feel we’ve been there with the
manager in knowing the shame of having been found out, or maybe we are reminded
of our fear that something we’ve done or haven’t will be exposed, or maybe we
know a little bit of both, for different aspects of our sinfulness. Regardless, looking at the beginning and end
of our story, we see our fear and our hope, our shame and our glory; the
awareness we’ve sinned and squandered, the longing for praise, the faith
conviction that God is bringing us there.
That
dynamic, that tension of being caught between those two things, is capture
brilliantly in what I think is one of the most beautiful prayers of the
Mass. Right after the Our Father, the
priest prays in our name to Jesus that he might “Look not upon our sins, but on
the faith of your Church.” It’s a prayer
that recognizes the reality of our sin, but asks God not to look there; to look
instead on the faith that gathered us together.
It’s a pray prayed in every Catholic Church. It’s a prayer prayed with confident, daring
hope that God will answer it. God will
look not upon our sin, but upon our faith, and rejoice and erupt in praise.
Note
that it doesn’t say, “look not upon our sin but upon our accomplishments;” our
resume, our transcript, our merit badges; no, upon our faith. I think in this way, the liturgy interprets
our scripture for us. For what does the
man do when he realizes he’s getting the boot?
His first step is to take an honest inventory of himself, to become
aware that he can’t do all the things, that manual laborers and beggars (people
he probably looked down upon) have gifts that he doesn’t have. He doesn’t doubt that God has given him
gifts, but he comes to a deeper awareness of his limitations, and of others’
giftedness.
And this
equips him for action. Now, it’s not
entirely clear what he does. Some
commentators have suggested that the money he’s writing off is his own
commission, and while that’s not clear from our text, it remains a
possibility. As a lame duck debt
collector, he really has the opportunity to do whatever he wants in this last
day or so, or, should I say, extort whatever he wants. But, he doesn’t. Rather than making a quick buck on these
hapless clients of his soon-to-be-ex-master, he plays the long game. Or, we might say, he plays the trusting game,
he plays the game that assumes the best of others. His ploy only works on the basis that he
assumes that if he’s kind to people now, they’ll be kind to him later. In short, he assumes the people around him are
people, basically good people, not pawns (like the poor being cheated by the
merchants Amos castigated), and not out-to-get-him. He has respect for other people’s gifts, and
faith in their good nature.
And the
Lord looks not upon his sins, but upon his faith, and praises him. We want our faith to be so much bigger than
that. But a grand faith is big at every
level; our faith in God’s love and mercy grows as we nourish it at the lower
levels, as we grow in our respect for and trust in humanity. Not as Pollyannas, who deny sin, but as
faithful people, who call out our own before suspecting another’s, and live
lives of trust that God is working, not just in us, but in each and every
person we meet. When we ask God to look
upon our faith, that’s not asking him to look on something amazing we’ve built,
but to see that we’ve seen his handiwork, our awe at what, and whom, he is
building up around us. The opposite of
faith isn’t so much doubt, as suspicion and pride. Lord, look not upon our sin, but upon our
faith, and help us live it.
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