TRADING IN THE HEAVENLY ECONOMY

SATURDAY, TWENTY FIRST WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

1 Cor 1:26-31; Ps 33:12-13,18-21; Mt 25:14-30

Jesus is our Wisdom, Virtue, Holiness, and Freedom

We established that Jesus Christ is the Gospel wisdom from the passage of St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians yesterday. We based this conclusion on Jesus Christ as the beginning and end of our Christian journey and life. Our Christian journey starts at our reception of Christ’s life and acceptance of our death as symbolised by our baptismal ritual. The profession of the Christian faith is an initiation to death and to life at the same time. It is the initiation of our death process that Christ died for us, and by his death, he removed the sting of death and inoculated the process. It is also the initiation of our sharing in the life of Jesus Christ, who is life himself. Thus, through Christ’s death, the death process, manifested in our trials and tribulations, is now a form of vaccine against eternal death that we merited by our sins and disobedience to God’s will. This inoculated death process is why the language of the cross is the Gospel language that is meaningful only to those on the way to heaven or the fullness of life in Jesus Christ. The life process, which is the second process initiated at the same time as the death process at our baptism, inoculates our death. Because the death process is what is visible to the carnally minded, the language of the cross is foolishness to them. It is only faith that reveals the presence of life in Jesus Christ.

The hidden nature of the treasure of life in Jesus Christ is the cause of his rejection among those who are of substance in the worldly standard. What they are and what they possess in the eyes of the world prevent them from embracing the road or process leading to death. The rich young man in the Gospel of Matthew 19:16f illustrates how our present or material possessions can hinder us from embracing the heavenly life. Our decision to accept the Christian faith is to be nothing in the world. Nothing we have by ourselves has any real value in the Christian economy. This is what today’s passage from St. Paul is explaining to us. “Take yourselves for instance, brothers, at the time when you were called: how many of you were wise in the ordinary sense of the world, how many were influential people, or came from noble families? No, it was to shame the wise that God chose what is foolish by human reckoning, and to shame what is strong that he chose what is weak by human reckoning.” It is not that the rich cannot receive the Christian faith. They embrace it only when they understand their poverty in the heavenly or Christian economy. They embrace the Christian faith as paupers in the economy of heaven or eternal life, in which their earthly possessions are completely nothing and useless. In this sense, nobody can boast before God; hence, St. Paul posits that Christ is our wisdom, virtue, holiness, and freedom.

The heavenly economy provides the setting for our understanding of the parable of the talents. In the Christian economy, all of us are entrusted with spiritual gifts by Jesus Christ, who has purchased us with his death. The eternal life we have received by our profession of faith is the most precious of these gifts; though it is present in us as a process going to its fullness, we are to trade our death for fuller life. In the heavenly economy, there is no loss, for the system is insured against loss, as we have already mentioned. The inoculation against death insures against loss. But faith is a necessary condition to trade and make profit. Again, everything is provided or given to us by the Father. We are only required to cooperate by dying in obedience to the Father. Thus, the number of talents is not an issue, but an opportunity given to each person to exercise the gift of faith from the Lord and increase his love capacity. Thus, the sin of the man with talent is not in the number of talents given to him but in his lack of faith in the Master, who gave him the gift of eternal life he refused to exercise. Because he denied his gift, the life process did not run its course in him; he lost his insurance. “You wicked and lazy servant! So you knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered? Well then, you should have deposited my money with the bankers, and on my return, I would have recovered my capital with interest.” He collected back the gift of life already given to him and allowed death to happen to him. “As for this good-for-nothing servant, throw him out into the dark, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.”

Let us pray: Grant us, Lord, the grace to understand the meaning of the gift of heavenly life you have entrusted to us, that obeying your will in all things, we may truly die to this world and its attractions and enter into the fullness of glory which you promised us in Jesus Christ your Son.