Sunday Readings in Brief 26 A
Eze 18:25-28; Ps 25; Phil 2:1-11; Mat 21:28-32
True humility and conversion.
Dear friends, today is the 26th Sunday of the Ordinary Time. A refrain says, “Do not judge the book by its cover”. How many times do we look at people and pass judgment upon them only later, when we get to know them better, realize that we were wrong about them? Jesus also warned, “Not everyone who says Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven but those who do the will of my father” (Mt. 7:21-23).
Today’s readings are connected by the theme of humility and conversion. In the first reading Ezekiel tells us that if a wicked person is humble enough to recognize his or her bad ways and convert to good, the Lord will forgive his or her sins. However, if a good person turns to evil, his good past will be eroded by his bad present. I have heard people say that sometimes God is not just when they see people whom they thought to be wicked thriving and those they thought to be good suffering. Well, using our own judgment and standards we label people as good or bad. However, God’s judgment is not based on looks but on the person’s interior: the intentions, motivations, struggles and so on. We look on the outside but God looks on the inside.
Sometimes we regard ourselves as good or even perfect using our own standards and attitudes towards our actions. However, subjected to external criteria we could be very wrong. The best measure of good is always the yardstick of Jesus. If all our actions, words, and thoughts towards others were to be guided by the example of Christ, then we could say that the Lord we are good.
St. Paul urges us to imitate Christ, who, though he was God, did not count that to be a cause of arrogance. He emptied himself and became lowly. Jesus’ lowliness was and still is what conquers the hearts of many to conversion. In our times, preaching the Gospel has turned out to be a means to achieve personal glory and power for the preacher. The tone, setup, and equipment used in worship today do not demonstrate any kind of humility but power and greed for wealth. Christian worship has turned to the mining of miracles for prosperity. Where is Christ’s humility in all this?
Sometimes or many times we promise people things that we are not even planning to deliver. We only promise to look good and be admired by people. In our Parish, we decided not to accept any pledges during fundraising because we realized that many people pledge without the slightest will to deliver on their pledges. They pledge big donations to look great and use the platform to advance their own selfish political ambitions. After the fundraising, they are nowhere to be found. The people go home with large figures of money raised in their minds. After learning about this stand, many politicians do not attend our functions anymore. This has also helped our people to be more self-reliant and not wait for big shots to massage their hopes with empty promises.
In the Gospel passage today, the man who asked his first son to go to work in his vineyard must have been very disappointed by his outright refusal. Of course, this is understandable because he was the father and the son ought to have obeyed his instructions. However, after giving it a thought, the first son realized that he was wrong in disobeying his father and so he went ahead to accomplish what was needed of him secretly. The second son accepted immediately and promised to do the job, but he did not. The father must have liked him and may even have planned to bring him a gift on his way back. Sometimes we behave like the second son to look good.
Jesus is not praising the first son for not accepting his father’s will but because he changed his mind and did what was asked of him. Repenting alone is not enough. We have to go a step further and accomplish what is required of us. Showing to be good and doing the opposite is what Jesus is condemning.
People we may consider evil because we judge them from the outside may be much better than us. Hypocrisy is something that Jesus condemned vehemently. God looks into our hearts and not what we want people to believe that we are.
My dear friends, it does not matter how much makeup we put on ourselves to make people believe that we are good. It matters what we really are. When we go back to our rooms and are alone, let us ask ourselves if we are good or if we spend a lot of energy and resources pretending to be good. We might be wasting a lot of precious time because in the end, pretense just like makeup is washed away and the reality is revealed. Let us ask Jesus to help us embrace true conversion.
Have a blessed conversion Sunday.
Fr. Lawrence Muthee, SVD
SVD JAMBO KENTAN 