25^th Sunday C 2004

This is a perplexing Gospel, and this new translation doesn’t help making any better sense of it. At first hearing, our Lord seems to be congratulating a bad man for his schemes. We know that can’t be right. What then could this parable mean? Why does an already crooked man who gets fired by his boos and who then goes on to do an even greater injustice to him get praise? “The master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently.” We say, “it can’t be.” In fact, what sounds as a word of commendation is really said in irony, as if one were to say, “What a cunning kind of guy he is!”

This Gospel is a subtle form of complaint. Our Lord speaks of two types of persons, ‘children of this world’ and ‘children of light.’ They are distinguished not only by their deeds but also by their contrasting levels of intensity. Wicked people are so very involved in their evildoing. They expend lots of time, energy and money on doing bad things. How clever the worldly are; how much energy is spent by the lecherous in impure pursuits; how many hours idle away among sinners in their sinning; how many days and nights are concentrated on plotting to cheat and defraud others in order to gain wealth! On the other hand, observe how faithful Christians do comparatively little good. Why aren’t they more enterprising, more zealous? They know that all things here below will pass and eternity alone will matter in the end. So why their slack and easygoing manner?

There’s no answer given in the Gospel as to why the good are so much at ease, so ‘laid back,’ as we say. The reason must have to do with motivators. Sin drives sinners. Passions for pleasure and wealth and recognition drive a man persistently and hard, even unto insanity at times, in order to attain his objective. Sinners are people ‘driven;’ they’re motivated. There is often an frightening intensity about the pursuit for sin. The drives that spark and prod drug dealing, porn making, the illicit rendezvous, swindling, and premeditated hated (to name just a few things) are astonishing in their force.

Now, contrast that feverishness with those who lead the devout life. Picture a humble man or woman of prayer. Here there is silence, simplicity, peace, and a mild-mannered spirit. Where’s the fire, the drive and the tug in the devout towards pursuing perfection, towards attaining union with God, towards amassing the heavenly treasures of grace? They most often don’t have it. The devout rarely match the intensity of the wicked in a comparable measure of effort. There’s a reason for this. It’s because for anyone who wants to become a spiritual person, there is a necessary requirement of surrender. Virtues such as modesty, humility, kindness, sobriety, chastity, charity and prayerfulness aren’t gained by impetuosity but through the patient and persistent subduing of vehement desires.

This difference between the children of the world and the children of light is not one of personality types. It is rather the consequence of willed deeds, of purposeful decision. Sinners are not born sinners, nor are the good born righteous. But in the process of making many choices, one begins to settle into way or the other.

Sin is self-destruction. The pursuit of sin is the life of a hunted man. who is listless, ambitious for the next opportunity, the next deal, the next pleasure, the next drink. He is driven to achieve his desires. But what happens when his desires exceed the capacity for satisfaction, when he wants more than he will ever likely attain? The result is unhappiness: never being able to reach his goal. Life in this case becomes an endless search for fulfillment, a quest, but never a resting place on the way.

The children of light, by comparison, have a serenity of life that must seem dull to the worldly. That lack of excitement and emotional thrill is one reason why many do not want to pursue a spiritual life. Being good is immensely rewarding, of course, but our fast-paced lives need to settle down a bit before we can gain the perspective to see its value.

Here you have the difference between children of the world and children of light. Neither one in this life ever gets all he can desire, but there is a difference: the one remains agitated and nervous, the other acquires tranquillity. Saint Ignatius of Loyola used to use this as a test to know which impulses were from God and which were not: namely, by the peace or lack of it that they gave him. Living a worldly life does have its own sort of pay, but there is a greater loss. Our Lord guarantees that, in the end, sinfulness will fail (that’s an infallible statement). He also promised, in another place, that heavenly wealth can’t be stolen or rust or corrode: that too is an infallible statement.

So, then, being a Christian comes to making a fundamental decision of which way one will live. And this is not only a choice between being compliant or rebellious. There is also the deceptive middle ground. We’re always on the wrong path when we try to have both ways: a little for God and a little for Mammon, pleasure or whatever else. “No man can serve two masters.” Note that they are both ‘masters’: we are ever subject either to God or to the alternative deities that our desires manufacture.

Christ purchased us so that we are not children of this world. We are Christ’s. But we may well need to be more enterprising children of light. Maybe you need a retreat, a weekly holy hour before the Blessed Sacrament, morning and evening prayers, pulling out the old prayer book, doing a little fasting or self-denial once in a while, or reading a spiritual book–the lives of the saints, for example. The wicked are so much more clever than the children of light in scheming to achieve their ends. We might need to do some figuring how we can be better servants of our Master, Christ: better ‘children of the light.’