Homily for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Homily by Fr Nicholas King SJ

Scripture reading: Amos 8:4-7; I Timothy 2:1-8; Luke 16:1-13

What are we to say today to someone today who is asking for full admission into the Catholic Church? And how does that fit with the royal funeral that has been inevitably seizing all our attention, and which finally takes place tomorrow? Well, what the readings seem to be telling us, and perhaps also what the life of HM was telling us, is that money is a good servant, but a bad master, and it can do funny things to us unless we are careful, even turn into an alternative “god”, pretending that it will bring about all that we think we need. Which of course does us no good at all.  

 In the first reading, we were listening to a powerful diatribe against those who give themselves over to money (“you who trample on the needy and destroy the poor of the land”); and we listen to them chatting, looking at their watches and wondering when the great festivals of New Moon and Sabbath will be over, and they can get back to the serious business of making money. I will not embarrass you by asking if there is anyone here looking at their watches and wonder when this sermon will come to an end! But we need to recognise that we can all too easily be seduced by money; and we may want to eavesdrop on God, who is heard muttering in the background: “I shall never forget their deeds”. 

 Then the same theme is played in the psalm, with its invitation to us to praise God, “from the rising of the sun to its setting”; nothing must be allowed to get in the way of that great world-wide act of praise; we need to recognise that our God is different: “Who is like the Lord our God?”. And one of the ways in which God is different is that God is on the side of the poor: “he raises the humble from the dust and lifts up the poor from the ash-heap”. So we must ask for healing from our fascination with money. 

 The second reading does not perhaps talk very much about money, but we may be glad to notice that it encourages us to “pray for Kings”; and of course we have been doing precisely that ever since we realised that King Charles III was our new monarch. It was right at the heart of the life of his mother Queen Elizabeth that, in the words of that reading, there is one and only one God, and that Jesus Christ is the only mediator between God and ourselves. That can be uncomfortable, of course; but the discomfort is part of the deal.  

 Then there was that remarkable gospel, the contrast between the “rich man” and his “steward”; and that immediately conjures up a sense of the asymmetry of the power-relationship between them. Luke tells us that the steward had been “slandered”, which presumably means that he was not guilty of the offence of which he was accused; and we may also notice that he is dismissed without anything resembling a trial. So perhaps our sympathies may be with him? Certainly that seems to be the case, when the evangelist tells us that “the Lord [?] praised the steward for his immorality”. Perhaps we should not speculate too much on this; the bottom line is that “no one can serve two ‘lords’; you cannot serve both God and Mammon”. That is something that our late Queen (RIP) did not need to be taught; and it is a good watchword for all those of us who wish to be full members of the Church.