Now to him who can strengthen you, according to my Gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery kept secret for long ages but now manifested through the prophetic writings and, according to the command of the eternal God, made known to all nations to bring about the obedience of faith, to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ be glory forever and ever. Amen. Romans 16:25-27
“If, therefore, you are not trustworthy with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with true wealth? If you are not trustworthy with what belongs to another, who will give you what is yours? No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” Luke 16:11-13
Piety
Mary, woman of humility, be with us.
Study
Paul concludes his letter with a reference to one of his main themes: “the mystery kept secret for long ages.” That mystery is that we get our justification and salvation through faith (alone), with all the implications for Jews and Gentiles that Paul has developed in the letter. Those implications are that we must go out and do good work for our God and our neighbors.
Maybe it is fitting that we get this reading just days after the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation – marked from the day Martin Luther “the Heretic” tacked his revolutionary ideas to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral. His “95 Theses[i]” propounded two central beliefs—that the Bible (not the Pope, not the Magisterium) is the central religious authority and that humans may reach salvation only by their faith and not by their deeds.
Maybe it is fitting that we get this as the newspapers and airwaves are already belting out the Black Friday deals and declaring that we are once again in a “December” to remember. Check the calendar, Lexus.
Maybe it is fitting to reflect on this while the stock market is at record high levels although we also are only days away from the anniversary of its two biggest crashes – in 1929 and in 1987.
This “obedience of faith” to God, not money or some other source, give us strength to carry on in that work. We need it because the work is in every way counter-cultural. What the world wants us to do is usually the opposite of what God wants us to do.
The world expected Jesus to be a conquering king or president or general. Instead, he was a humble man who put himself last. Just consider the first Luminous Mystery from the Rosary: Jesus submitted himself to baptism by his cousin John.
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| The Baptism in the Jordan: A Model of Humility |
Psalm 25:8-9 teaches us what it really means to be faithful and obedient. “Good and upright is the LORD, therefore he shows sinners the way, He guides the humble in righteousness, and teaches the humble his way.” How better to guide the humble, the lowly and the common people than to become one.
Where do you find God? Not in the corridors of power and the marble mausoleums of government but in the tiny places. Our almighty God is hidden in the frost of the grass, the leavings dropping from our autumn trees and the rainclouds that hover overhead on the dark days as winter approaches. God is hidden in the figure kneeling on the banks of the Jordan River.
To find God, we must look everywhere – including the places we would least expect to find God. Sr. Joan reminds us that “God is in the energy that surrounds us and in the impulses that urge us on and in the desires we can never satisfy and in the circumstances we do not want…we must be open to everything in life.”[ii] That means the good, the bad and the ugly unwanted developments.
Jesus makes his first public act a total acknowledgment of God. He immerses himself in the same ritual cleansing that everyone in his family and hometown partakes. The first sacrament of conversion and initiation: Baptism.
“Jesus signals for the rest of us that it is in the conscious pursuit of the will of God that opens us to the work of God within us. He acknowledges that God is working in his life, that he himself was sent here to do the will of the One who sent him.”
The will of God has NOTHING to do with building up stores of wealth on earth nor power in the government for we never know when such trappings will be taken away from us. The pursuit of money is the other master. If we serve it, we can not fully rely on God.
Action
The image of Jesus – with nothing but his cloak and his sandals – kneeling in front of his cousin is not an image to inspire the arrogant heart of the Pharisees.[iii] Baptism is our call to start down the path of following the true Master.
[i] “Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” is the formal name.
[ii] “In Pursuit of Peace: Praying the Rosary Through the Psalms” by Joan D. Chittister, OSB. Erie, Pennsylvania. 1992. Pax Christi USA.
[iii] Image credit: From the above pamphlet, by Mary Southard, CSJ, a Sister of St. Joseph of LaGrange, Illinois. Mary's work can be seen at http://www.marysouthardart.org/
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