Homily for the 25th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
25th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Sept. 18, 2022
1 Tim 2: 1-8
Luke 16: 1-13
Ursulines, The Fountains, Tuckahoe
Bridgettines, Darien, Conn.
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx

“There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim 2: 5-6).

This is Paul’s message wherever he preaches, that Jesus Christ is our ransom; he redeems us from our sins and from the death penalty that our sins merit.  Nothing else and no one else can save us.

Parable of the Unjust Steward (Jan Luyken)

That contrasts with the example in Jesus’ parable of the dishonest steward.  The parable doesn’t tell us how he squandered his boss’s property.  I’m pretty sure he was doing more than helping himself to the pens and pencils in the office supplies (which I doubt anyone does anymore), or playing solitaire at his office desktop.  We can imagine various scenarios in which our contemporary business executives, shop stewards, and politicians—and clergy, too—take advantage of their position to enrich themselves or gain some public standing.  Such stories appear in our news repeatedly.

Jesus speaks about the wealth that ought truly to concern us.  “Who will trust you with true wealth?” (Luke 16:11).  That wealth isn’t the crops of tenant farmers nor the household goods of the wealthy, as per the parable.  Jesus advises those who have wealth—“dishonest wealth” (v. 9) or unreliable wealth, which will pass out of our hands at death, or ill-gotten wealth that’s come as a result of cheating, lying, or taking advantage of the poor (re-read Amos’s scathing denunciation of the rich and powerful of Israel in the 8th century B.C.)—Jesus advises the rich to use their wealth to “make friends” (v. 9); not friends among our social peers but friends in the kingdom of God.

Our wealth, our possessions, our gifts and talents put at the disposal of God and his people, especially the needy, the unfortunate, the widow and the orphan and the stranger in the land (the classic Old Testament identifications of the needy and helpless)—that’s how the prophets and Jesus urge us to use wealth to make friends and to serve only one master, the one who matters in view of eternity.

For it’s not the crafty and shrewd of this world, not the CEOs, not the media barons, not the glamorous of the entertainment world, not the politically powerful, not Aaron Judge or Tom Brady who will lead us “into eternal dwellings” (v. 9).  It is, rather, the “one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all.”  Thru him God’s will that “everyone be saved” (1 Tim 2:4) can be effected—everyone who truly strives to serve the Lord our God.