25th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isaiah 55:6-9; Philippians 1:20c-24, 27a; Matthew 20:1-16a

The prophet Isaiah commands us,
“Seek the LORD while he may be found.”
But how do we fulfill this command?
On this weekend when our religious education programs resume
it is worth asking ourselves what it means to seek the Lord,
and who this God is whom we are seeking.

In his homily a couple of weeks ago,
Fr. Jerry Lardner mentioned the Baltimore Catechism.
Who remembers the Baltimore Catechism?
I don’t mean, “who remembers that there was a Baltimore Catechism?”
but rather, who remembers what they learned from the Baltimore Catechism?
As those who were taught from the Baltimore Catechism will know,
it consisted of set questions and answers concerning the faith
that children memorized and repeated back.

Let’s try a test:
Who made you?
God made me. 
Why did God make you?
God made me to know Him, to love Him, 
and to serve Him in this world, 
and to be happy with Him forever in the next.

Though the fact might have been lost, at least at first,
on the children who were made to memorize them,
these are profound words.

“Who made you?”
I have been made by God,
the supreme, infinitely perfect maker of the universe.
You might think that, as important as God is,
this task might have been delegated to someone else,
such as an angel or a demi-god.
But the Baltimore Catechism tells us
that each and every one of us
has been brought into existence directly by God,
who shapes our lives
with the intimacy of the potter shaping the clay vessel.

But there is more. . .

“Why did God make you?”
God has not simply brought me into being,
but God has given my life a purpose,
a meaning,
a “why.”
God says to us through the prophet Isaiah,
“As high as the heavens are above the earth,
so high are my ways above your ways
and my thoughts above your thoughts.”
And yet the Baltimore Catechism tells us that that even so
God has made each and every one of us
to know, love and serve God in this life.
We are made by God so that we might seek God out.
Though God’s ways are unfathomable to us,
God has made us so that
we can know God, however imperfectly,
we can love God, however falteringly,
we can serve God, however unworthily.

And even more than this,
our imperfect knowledge,
our faltering love,
our unworthy service
can, through the grace of God
that comes to us in Jesus Christ,
be transformed into a path
to eternal happiness with God
when this life is done.

Though it may have been lost on them at the time,
those who were made to memorize
these words of the Baltimore Catechism
were given a profound truth,
a life-changing truth,
a saving truth.
They were given the truth
that each and every human life
is of infinite significance
because it is a gift from God
that can blossom forth into eternal joy.

Our methods of catechesis have changed over the decades,
but our goal is the same.
We may emphasize memorization less
and understanding more,
but our desire is still
to help the children of our community
to seek the Lord while he may be found.
Our desire is to communicate to them the saving truth
that they have been made by God
and that their purpose in this world
is knowing God with their minds,
loving God with their hearts,
and serving God in their daily lives,
so that their lives can be of eternal significance.

As any parent knows,
we live in a world that increasingly pressures children
to polish their résumés
with a dizzying array of activities and accomplishments.
We Christians, however, have a counter-cultural message
to hand on to our children:
that their lives are significant and important
not because of what they have accomplished,
not because of what they have done,
not because of awards they have won,
but, as in the parable in today’s Gospel,
because of what God has done for them
in calling them into life and redeeming them through Christ,
and that therefore their lives should be lives of gratitude and service.
This saving truth is what our catechists seek to give our children
and what we who are parents must reinforce for them every day
in our deeds and in our words.

And this is true not simply for our children,
but for all of us.

St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote:
"Do you want to know the opportune time to seek the Lord?
The simple answer is: all your life."
Our lives are lives of continual seeking and continual finding.
So we should all seek the Lord while he may be found.
We should seek the Lord who made us
to know, to love and to serve him in this life
and to be happy with him forever in the next.

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Once, while boarding an airliner in Turkey,
I noticed a round blue and white and black object,
about four inches across,
hanging on the wall of the aircraft’s cabin .
I had seen similar objects, in a variety of sizes,
all throughout Turkey:
hanging from rear-view mirrors and around necks,
kept in pockets and purses.
When I asked, I had been told
that they were amulets to protect against the evil eye.
You see, throughout the Mediterranean world
there is widespread belief in the evil eye:
the belief that by looking enviously
upon someone else’s good fortune
one could curse that person with the evil eye,
even if one did not intend to do so.
Being the modern, Western, sophisticated,
academic type person that I am,
I of course scoff at such folk beliefs. . .
though I think I felt just a little bit more secure
knowing that my flight from Istanbul to Kayseri
was protected from the evil eye —
a sort of backup safety system.

Apparently people in Jesus’ world
believed in the evil eye as well;
indeed, the evil eye crops up
in our Gospel reading for today,
though our translation hides it.
Where it says,
"Are you envious because I am generous?"
the original Greek actually says,
"Is your eye evil because I am good?"
As today, so in Jesus’ day,
the eye that looked upon another’s good fortune with envy
was thought to be an evil eye
that brought tragedy upon others.

In fact, in Matthew’s Gospel,
Jesus mentions the evil eye twice:
in addition to today’s Gospel reading,
Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount that,
"The eye is the lamp of the body.
So, if your eye is single,
your whole body will be full of light;
but if your eye is evil,
your whole body will be full of darkness."
Notice that Jesus contrasts having an evil eye
with having a "single" eye,
which means, more or less,
the same thing as being "single minded"
or "keeping you eye on the ball" or,
to use another phrase from the Sermon on the Mount,
being "pure of heart."
Being "single-eyed" is a way of characterizing those
who live their lives focused on God.
So what Jesus is saying
is that if you live your life focused on God —
if you are "single-eyed" —
then you will be filled with light.
But if you are evil-eyed —
if you live your life resenting the good fortune of others —
then you will be filled with darkness.

Notice that what Jesus is saying
is something different
from the standard belief about the evil eye,
according to which
looking upon someone with envy curses them.
Jesus is saying that the evil eye,
in fact, only harms the one who is envious,
the one who casts an evil-eyed glance at another.
When we resent the good fortune of others,
it does no harm to them;
rather, we are the ones who are harmed,
we are the ones who are filled with darkness,
who lose our focus
and so experience a kind of blowback of our own envy,
who find ourselves being made miserable
by the happiness of another.

We can see this at work in today’s Gospel.
Those who worked all day and were paid a fair wage
are so filled with envy at the landowner’s generosity
toward those who came at the end of the day
and were paid the same amount
that they can not see
that they have been justly rewarded for their labors,
and cannot rejoice in the generosity bestowed on another.
The evil eye is blind
to the magnificent, glorious generosity of God,
which means that it is blind to God,
because God is nothing else
but pure, unbounded generosity —
or, as the first letter of John puts it,
God is love.
And if we are evil-eyed,
if we can see the good fortune of others
only as a injustice to ourselves,
then we find ourselves filled with darkness so deep
that even the pure light of God’s love
looks like darkness to us.

Of course, we ought not be too hard
on those laborers who had worked all day.
After all, the evil eye seems to be part
of the fallen human condition in which we all share.
Which of us has not on occasion felt
that twinge of jealousy at the good fortune of another?
Which of us has failed to see God’s generosity
simply because it fell upon someone else?

But thanks be to God that God is so generous.
In the end, today’s Gospel
is less about the envy of the workers
than it is about the generosity of the landowner.
And we know that God is generous
in bestowing light upon us,
in prayer,
through the sacraments,
and in our encounters with others.
The Gospel — the good news — for today
is that God’s grace, God’s generosity,
is powerful enough
to overcome the darkness with which the evil eye fills us,
powerful enough to burn away the envy and resentment
that blind us to God;
for God’s light shines brightly
even in the darkest places of our lives.
Our Gospel gives us hope that it is God’s generosity,
and not human envy,
that will have the last word.