Homily for Wednesday, 33d Week of Ordinary Time

Homily for Wednesday,

33d Week of Ordinary Time

Nov. 22, 2017
Luke 19: 11-28
Day of Recollection, Washington Community[1]

“He proceeded to tell a parable because he was near Jerusalem and they thought that the kingdom of God would appear there immediately” (Luke 19: 11).

The parable is actually a double parable.  Luke places it in Jericho immediately after the episode with Zacchaeus.  On the surface, then, it might seem to teach about the proper use of wealth, which Zacchaeus has to some degree just demonstrated.

But, as the Zacchaeus episode isn’t really about money, but about repentance and divine mercy, neither is the parable about money.

Luke sets the double parable in a context that tells us it’s about the kingdom of God.  Indeed, the secondary parable that frames the primary one deals with a king and his subjects.  Luke introduces the parable with an interpretation.  Jesus told it because he was on his way to Jerusalem, and people—not the disciples specifically, but according to Luke (19:1-11) the larger audience gathered around Jesus and Zacchaeus—“they” expected that in Jerusalem he would claim the throne of David.  The blind beggar had just acclaimed him as “Jesus, Son of David” as he approached Jericho (18:35,38).  It’s many of these same people, presumably, who will herald his arrival in the holy city by hailing him as “the king who comes in the name of the Lord” (19:38) in the passage that follows the parable.

We know that Jesus’ parables are based on the everyday life of farmers, shepherds, merchants, women, laborers, and travelers.  William Barclay observes that the secondary parable about kingship is the only parable based on a historical event.  In 4 BC Archelaus, son of Herod the Great, traveled to Rome to petition Augustus to confirm him as king of Judea.  He was trailed by a deputation of Jewish leaders petitioning the contrary.  Augustus did confirm Archelaus, but only as tetrarch—you remember that St. Matthew tells us that Joseph settled the Holy Family in Nazareth when he heard that Archelaus was ruling Judea (2:22).  Archelaus may not have slain the Jewish deputation—“hacked them to pieces,” in Barclay’s translation of Luke 19:28—but he did prove to be a bloody and corrupt ruler, and Augustus removed him after 10 years, installing a Roman procurator instead.  We don’t doubt that this back story would’ve been in the minds of Jesus’ audience.

Luke presents to us another king departing on a journey in pursuit of a kingdom.  Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, where he will undergo his exodus (9:31), as Luke terms his passion, death, and resurrection in the transfiguration story, is the prelude to another journey that will take him away from his subjects for a very long time, viz., his ascension, where at the Father’s right hand he’ll be given kingly power.  And, as the angels tell the gawking apostles when he ascends, he’ll return just as they’ve seen him ascend (Acts 1:11).  In the meantime, they are to preach the Good New everywhere (Acts 1:8), giving to men and women the choice whether to accept him as their king.

The primary parable promises big rewards to faithful subjects, while the kingship parable tells the fate of whoever rejects Jesus as king.  Luke may also have in mind the fate of Jerusalem in 70 AD after the Jewish leaders and most of the people rejected Jesus; later in this same chapter, he will, uniquely, show us Jesus weeping over the city for its not “recognizing the day of [their] visitation” (19:41-44).

But of course Luke is speaking to generations of Christians.  Those who reject the lordship of Jesus are doomed when he returns.  It’s fitting for us to ponder his message on our DOR.  Every day we renew our commitment to our religious consecration.  More fundamentally, we ought to be renewing our commitment to Jesus every day:  Jesus as Lord, Jesus as Dominus—a title the Caesars claimed as their own, and so an imperial title as well as divine.  We ask ourselves on a DOR, does Jesus rule my life? my words, my desires, my decisions, my actions?  To the extent that he is not our Dominus, to the extent that we have rebelled in some way, looking to ourselves rather than to the Lord, we renew our commitment on days like this, and in sacramental Reconciliation and in daily personal prayer.

The core parable of the servants who are entrusted with money to trade with closely resembles the parable of the talents in Matthew.  Here the sums of money are much smaller; the coins are Greek minas, each worth 100 drachmas or 100 denarii.  (A talent was worth 6,000 denarii.)  But, as I said, it’s not about the money as such.  It’s about the trade or the investment, as it also is in Matthew’s version.

Servants rendering their accounts (Rembrandt)

While our king is absent, what is it that he has entrusted to us for investment, for the increase of his revenue?  I propose to you that it’s the Good News of the kingdom.  While Jesus is “away” in heaven, we his followers have what he left us, and he has tasked us to multiply it.  Do you remember Dominic Savio commenting to Don Bosco, “Here at the Oratory you deal in souls”?  That’s the business, the transaction, the goal of our investments.  When the king returns, we hope to hand over to him the great wealth that the Good News has earned for him thru our efforts (in human terms; the real work, of course, is God’s).

You may have heard of the Benedict option—the title of a book and of a contemporary movement in the Church.  It takes its name not from Pope Benedict but from St. Benedict, who withdrew from a decadent Roman society to found a pure Christian community.  One observer defines today’s movement as “the idea of traditionalist Christians choosing to step back from the now-futile political projects and ambitions of the past four decades to cultivate and preserve a robustly Christian subculture within an increasingly hostile common culture. That inward turn toward community-building is the element of monasticism in the project. But its participants won't be monks. They will be families, parishes, and churches working to protect themselves from the acids of modernity, skepticism, and freedom (understood as personal autonomy), as well as from the expansive regulatory power of the secular state.”[2]

I don’t detect much of a missionary thrust there, much of a sense of spreading the Good News.  It seems to me to be more like hiding the Good News in a napkin so that it will be purely but privately preserved, not tainted by the business of dealing with the real world.  Not exactly what Pope Francis has been charging the Church with:  to go out to the peripheries, to live among and smell like the sheep, to man the field hospitals.  And I think that’s what Jesus is telling us in the parable.  “Me and my Jesus” faith is seriously deficient.  Before he ascended, Jesus commissioned the disciples to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8).

As Salesians we know this, and we take it to heart.  We’re working hard to invest what the Lord Jesus has entrusted to us, hoping to hand over to him a great revenue in souls.  The DOR is a refreshing reminder not only of who our King is, but of what he wishes us to do with the vocation that he’s given us—and of the reward, too, that awaits the “good and faithful servants.”

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       [1] Atonement Sisters of the Washington Retreat House also present.

       [2] Damon Linker, “The Benedict Option: Why the religious right is considering an all-out withdrawal from politics,” The Week, May 19, 2015. Online: http://theweek.com/articles/555734/benedict-option- why-religious-right-considering-allout-withdrawal-from-politics