Homilies & Thoughts

Sometimes we hear this phrase in secular law: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” If you break a law, you can still be punished for it, even if you didn’t know it was illegal. That’s a common principle because otherwise anyone could claim ignorance. And proving what somebody knows is truly challenging for us. So we have to have that rule.

But you’ll notice that God deals with us differently. In today’s Gospel, ignorance is, to a degree, an excuse. The servant who knows his master’s will and does not do it is beaten severely. The one who does not know his master’s will, but still does something deserving of a severe beating, is beaten only lightly. Now, both are punished. Neither gets away without consequences. But the punishment is not the same, because God takes account of what the servant knew.

Notice that these servants are both active and passive. They passively sit and wait. They’re not out in the streets looking for their master to come back. They sit at home and wait. But they’re also active because they are ready. They’re dressed, and their lamps are lit. That detail is important because it tells us what the spiritual life should look like. It has both an active and a passive component.

The Pharisees went to entrap Jesus. They disagreed with him, but they did not come to listen. They were not trying to understand what he had to say. They were not even looking for an honest conversation about their disagreement. They had already decided he was wrong. Now they wanted a reason to silence him, a reason to kill him.

And that decision closed them off to the very thing they needed to hear. The Lord gave them an answer worth thinking about, an answer that could have changed their relationship to the systems of power in their world. But they could not receive it. Their minds and hearts were closed because they had come only to trap him.

“There’s nothing concealed that will not be revealed.”

I remember a lesson they taught us in seminary as they prepared us for life as priests: while you have a right to a private life, you do not have a right to a secret life. As people with a public role, we have to remember that distinction. Not everything about our lives needs to be known by everyone, but we cannot build a secret, alternative life.

“Woe to you, scholars of the law! You have taken away the key of knowledge.” That is a surprising thing to hear, because the scholars of the law are the experts in the law. If you asked them what their goal was, they would have said it was to hand on knowledge: the correct knowledge and understanding of how to live out the law. And yet the Lord charges them with taking away the key.

I like it when this reading comes up, because it’s an unusual moment for the Lord. This scholar comes up to him and says, “Lord, don’t you realize that you’re insulting me too?” And Jesus says, “Yes, I do realize that. And in fact, I have more insults for you.”

But what Jesus says to him is intriguing: “You scholars of the law impose burdens that are hard to carry, but you don’t lift a finger to help.”

In English, we have this term WASP: a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. And whatever else it means, one of its connotations is this kind of merger of religion and culture.

When you hear the term, you picture someone who dresses a certain way, has a particular set of manners, and whose life looks like a particular American ideal. It’s the kind of person for whom using the wrong fork for your salad is probably an equal sin to breaking the commandments. Everything gets merged together.

This Gospel always gets to me at a deep level because I am a messy person. I do not typically have a room that is well swept and put in order. But everyone, even messy people, likes a clean room.

When everything is cleaned up and nicely ordered, and you step into it for the first time, it feels wonderful. It feels freeing. But then you have to keep it that way. And that is where I always fail.

I think it’s easy to struggle with this Gospel. At the surface level, the message we hear is that if we are persistent in prayer, we will get whatever we ask for, no matter what it is. But we know from experience that this simply isn’t true. There are things we could have prayed for for decades and still never received.

So to understand what the Lord is saying, we have to look deeper and see these situations for what they really are.

It’s a striking coincidence that on the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, we hear Saint Luke’s version of the Our Father. And it really is a coincidence: today’s Gospel comes from the weekday readings rather than the proper readings for the feast. Yet the Our Father is a foundational prayer in the rosary.

I think it’s good to understand how the rosary developed, because that very history instructs us in the spiritual life.

Martha has a problem, and she goes to the Lord. We can read her words as a prayer. She brings him what she wants and asks him to act. That is how we pray. But the Lord’s answer to her request is no.

And notice that he does more than deny her request. Martha is complaining that her sister Mary is not helping her. She wants the Lord to tell Mary to change. Instead, he tells Martha that she is the one who needs to change.

We might hear today’s Gospel and think that this is an absurd situation. The landowner has prepared a vineyard. He has planted it, protected it, and provided what is needed for it to bear fruit. He entrusts it to tenants. And instead of honoring the one who has given them this opportunity, they turn against him. They reject his servants, and ultimately they reject his son. How could anyone receive so much and respond in that way?