Vigils Reading – 25th Sunday

OUR HOMELAND IN HEAVEN

From a commentary by Gaudentius of Brescia

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The Lord Jesus, true teacher of the precepts that lead to salvation, wished

to urge the apostles in his own time and all believers today the Christian duty of

almsgiving. He therefore related the parable of the steward to make us realize

that nothing in this world really belongs to us. We have been entrusted with the

administration of our Lord’s property to use what we need with thanksgiving,

and to distribute the rest among our fellow servants according to the need of

each one. We must not squander the wealth entrusted to us, nor use it on

superfluities, for when the Lord comes we shall be required to account for our

expenditure.

Finally, at the end of the parable, the Lord adds: Use worldly wealth to

make friends with the poor, so that when it fails you, when you have spent all

you possess on the needs of the poor and have nothing left, they may welcome

you into eternal dwellings.

In other words, these same poor people will befriend you by assuring your

salvation, for Christ, the giver of eternal rewards, will declare that he himself

received the acts of kindness done to them. Not in their own name, then, will

these poor folk welcome us, but in the name of him who is refreshed in their

persons by the fruit of our faith and obedience. Those who exercised this

ministry of love will be received into the eternal dwellings of the kingdom of

heaven, for the King will say: Come, blessed of my Father, take possession of the

kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world; for I was hungry

and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me a drink.

But if you have been untrustworthy in the administration of worldly

wealth, who is going to trust you with true riches? For if someone cannot be

relied on to administer worldly possessions that provide the means for all sorts

of wrong doing, would anyone dream of trusting that person with the true

heavenly riches rightly and deservedly enjoyed by those who have been faithful

in giving to the poor?

The Lord’s query above is immediately followed by another: If you cannot

be trusted with another’s property, who will give you your own? Nothing in

this world really belongs to us. We who hope for a future reward are told to live

in this world as strangers and pilgrims, so as to be able to say to the Lord without

fear of contradiction: I am a stranger and a pilgrim like all my ancestors.

What believers can regard as their own is that eternal and heavenly

possession where our heart is and our treasure, and where intense longing

makes us dwell already through faith, for as Saint Paul teaches, Our homeland

is in heaven.