For to Me, Life is Christ

September 21, 2008

Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

By Rev. Joe McCloskey, S.J.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. Isaiah 55:8

Christ will be magnified in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me life is Christ, and death is gain. Philippians 1:20-21

“…The last will be first, and the first will be last.” Matthew 20:16

Piety

The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in love. The LORD is good to all, compassionate to every creature. Psalm 145:8-9

Study

http://www.usccb.org/nab/092108.shtml

“Better late than never!” How often have we said that without thinking about how it is finished?

“But better never late!” We are a time management people. We want to do each job as fast as it can be done. It could be said that we are in a hurry to our own funerals.

“Haste makes waste.” We have hurried up so that we can wait more times than we can count. Horace, the Roman poet, had a one line poem.

“Carpe Diem.” It was translated by an English poet as “Pluck the flower of the hour.

Our parable by Jesus catches the essence of all these sayings. The landowner who went out at dawn to hire laborers for his vineyard and went on doing it every hour on the hour captures the essence of all those sayings. But when the landowner pays the first as much as he paid the last, those who bore the blunt of the heat of the day felt cheated. When the landowner asked if they were envious because he was generous, he introduced something special into the equation of generosity and justice. Thus, the last will be first and first will be last introduces mystery into the question. What do we do in life that is worthy of the kingdom of God?

For me, this is where the Sacrament of the Present Moment gets a theological base. It is no longer a question of how much time did we spend doing something. It only takes a moment to make life worthwhile. A moment working for the Lord can be worth a thousand years. Love is what takes the temporal and the limited and makes it into something that heaven is all about. So whether to die to be with Christ or to live to share Christ becomes a realistic dilemma. We seek the Lord while he may be found in this life and we call to him while he is near. God does not do things the way we do measuring what he can get out of what we do. God looks at the love of our hearts and how we are giving ourselves so that we might make him present in the good we do. God’s ways are so much more generous than ours that every comparison we would make limps in
comparison to the reality of his so great love.

We study what we can make of our lives. Christ will be magnified in what we do of good for one another. We live for Christ and we die for Christ. We go on living for the sake of the people we serve in his name.

Action

By our actions the Christ of our lives has visibility. What makes a saint is how Christ is lived out in the today of our world. The saint is the update of Christ. We go into his vineyard to work for him and we give Christ hands and feet by how we reach out and do his work. Paul says it perfectly. “For to me life is Christ.”