Homilies & Thoughts

This parable sketches two worlds divided by a gate: a banquet inside, a wounded neighbor outside. Step by step, a life is constructed around that gate—habits, choices, comforts, and blind spots harden into architecture. When death comes, the architecture holds. As Abraham says, “a great chasm is established.” The tragedy is not only punishment; it is permanence. A man who would not cross toward communion discovers he can no longer cross at all.

Imagine being told the audit is coming and you have already blown through the budget and squandered the resources. Your stomach drops. You start thinking, not about excuses, but about how to repair what has been damaged. That is the hard reckoning that forces the manager in the parable to act—and it names us. We have all wasted what the Lord placed in our hands: hours scrolled away, skills left idle, chances to love postponed for “later.” Yet the turning point is not in shame. It is in action.

Every medicine cabinet hides a story. Bottles with child‑proof caps, labels we can’t quite pronounce, doses we would rather skip. Bitter cures seldom feel like kindness in the moment. Yet the physician who truly loves us prescribes what heals, not what flatters the tongue.

Sin opened a wound we could not stitch. Death came as the consequence, and it has torn through families, hopes, and every human story. But listen to the strange mercy of God: the punishment becomes the medicine. The wood meant for execution becomes a tree that bears life. The valley of shadows is turned into a doorway. The cross does not decorate suffering; it transforms it.