DAILY HOMILIES

If making money stops you from your daily prayers or from attending church as you normally would, if you find yourself doing things that go against your conscience to make money, the truth is that money has become your master. If, as a minister, you only attend to members of your flock who are rich and ignore those who seem to have nothing to offer, then money is your master.

Like the steward who had to let go of what would have come to him as profit, Jesus is telling us today to make sacrifices, to let go of the vain things and fleeting pleasures of life for the greater good of making heaven. Our attachment to wealth and material possessions often obstructs the practice of our Christian virtues.

Bringing back the lost requires great discipline, courage and integrity. You cannot give what you don’t have. To be successful, you must be detached from the world. You must, like St. Paul says in today’s first reading, “count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus.”

If being a Christian does not inconvenience you, you are not behaving like Christ. If it does, carry your cross in silence. St. Paul tells us in today’s first reading: “Do all things without grumbling or questioning that you may be blameless and innocent children of God without blemish amid a crooked and perverse generation among whom you shine as lights in the world.” (Phil. 2:14-15).

Attaining sainthood is not impossible, but your desire for sainthood must be stronger than any worldly aspiration. You must long for it even more than you long for food or sleep. One of the beatitudes is: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” This means: “Blessed are those longing for sainthood; they shall never be disappointed.”

The moment we begin to see ourselves as better than others, the moment we begin to talk badly about others as “good-for-nothings,” God teaches us a lesson; He humiliates us before their very eyes. Like a party host, God politely asks us to step aside, and He does it in so many ways.

Love is the ability to see God in others, especially in those suffering, hungry, thirsty, homeless, sick, etc. No law is superior to the law of love. On the last day, we shall be judged by how we kept this law of love: how we helped others and how we behaved, not like the Pharisees.

Some Pharisees told Jesus to flee Jerusalem to protect himself from Herod. Recall that, as a child, God sent an angel in a dream to warn Joseph to take Jesus and Mary and flee to Egypt. Jesus did not flee from Herod again because He knew His time had come. On the other hand, Jesus did not need to run because He knew Herod wasn’t the one to kill Him.

After many years of evangelising after Jesus’ death and Resurrection, these men are said to have suffered martyrdom together after going as missionaries to Suanis, a city in Persia. For this reason, we honour them on the same day. (28 October).

Love is a fire; if it is not properly fed with fuel, it quenches. Instead of trying to win that fight or argument, focus on feeding the fire of your love. One lesson the story of “Beauty and the Beast” teaches us is that love brings out the best in people. Every “Beast” needs “Beauty”. Love your spouse not because they deserve it, but because you are beautiful.

For eighteen years, the Pharisees watched the woman come in and out of the temple, and not once did they feel any concern for her. Even when Jesus cured her, instead of rejoicing and thanking God for her, they took offence at Jesus and were plotting how to kill Jesus. As a church leader, have I become a Pharisee of sorts? Am I sincerely interested in the welfare of my flock, or am I only concerned with what I can gain from them?

“If you do afflict them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry; and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.” (Exodus 22:23-24). Proverbs further drives this point home: “He who closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself cry out and not be heard.” (Proverbs 21:13).