Friday in the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time, Cycle I
Rom 15, 14-21; Lk 16, 1-8
We are not owners of anything that we have but merely stewards, carers of God's gifts. Nothing we have is really ours. Think of some of the most important thing that you have: your money, your bank account, your car, your house. None of these are yours. They have merely been given to you. You might say, But I have worked hard for them, they are mine. The strength that you have with which you now have all this wealth is after all not yours. It has only been given to you.
Sometimes, we make our possession even negative things. That's a very strange and illogical thing to do. And yet, how often do we do it! We hold to past hurts, we dwell on a negative comment we might have received, we even make sin our possession and convince ourselves that that's the way we are made and that we can never change. We make ourselves possessors of all these things and in the process we become slaves of these very things. We allow them to define us. It is hard to say why do negative things happen in life, why all this suffering, sin, and painful experiences. However we do know that we are not meant to cling onto these experiences, but merely to acknowledge and to move on, even though some might shape us in some way or other. We are stewards - even if dishonest clumsy ones sometimes - but stewards nonetheless!
Now think also of the other things that you might possess, things that money cannot buy, your family members, your spouse, our vocation, our very faith. Not even these are ours. They have merely been entrusted to us and we have been given the responsibility to look after them. The very moment we make them our possession, we lose them: they no longer remain gifts, we start taking them for granted and consider them to be ours by right. That is the moment we lose the members of our family, our spouse, our vocation, even our faith. They no longer remain beautiful in themselves but they become instruments of our pleasure, our status or our well-being.
On the contrary, anything that we have becomes much more precious when we turn to God with the very gift that he has given us in our open hands and we tell him, "Lord, you have given this to me. I know that it is not mine. You can call it back to you at any time, because it is yours after all." This is risky business, and it is painful to do so too, because we finally realise that even the most precious things we have are not ours but God's and that God can claim them at any time. I am thinking, right now, of Abraham who is ready to offer God his only son, Isaac. However, we can be sure that when consider ourselves as stewards of what he has given us, God will keep his promise of giving us not only a freedom that we cannot even imagine, but also that that very thing is transfigured into something much more beautiful because it is blessed by God's grave and love.
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