A Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

+ What is the driving force of my daily life? What do I hope to achieve above everything else? What is there in my life that I would freely never give-up or compromise? What actually keeps me going?
 
We do well to ponder these questions today when Our Holy Mother the Church confronts us with Our Lord’s teaching that “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” And we would do well not to dismiss the word “mammon” as merely representing material riches by protesting our poverty, for its meaning can be far wider than mere material goods.
 
Just as I can base my life on the pursuit of wealth and property, so too I can lust for power, influence and prestige—in the Church or in the world. If the ever-increasing prominence of my ego is the currency I desire above all else, all other concerns, and even duties, will become servants of this end.
 
So too I can relentlessly pursue the spread of an ideology such as we see so clearly in the anti-life movements that promote the culture of death through abortion and euthanasia, or in the agendas of those who promote the normalcy of unnatural sexual behaviours or so-called gender-fluidity. Some serve these false gods with their every breath and act and are, at the end their lives are lauded for decisively changing the mores of society ‘for the better’.
 
We see this also in the relentless campaign in the Church by the mitred ideologues determined to “crush” the resurgence of the celebration of the older liturgical rites. In their terror that the usus antiquior may yet live and spread further (and thereby at least implicitly call into question the integrity of the “unique form of the Roman rite”) they serve the mammon of their pride and arrogance, dismissing the unquenchable reality that these rites are of God and lead people to Him and serve His ends.
 
Our lives can also serve, or at least be sustained by, our desire for the mammon that St Paul describes in this morning’s Epistle as the “works of the flesh”: “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like.”
 
Mammon, as St Augustine reminded us at matins this morning, is of the devil, not of God. Whatever form it takes or whatever other name we give it in the different circumstances of our lives, St Paul’s words are more than apposite for us all: “I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”
 
In the face of all these warnings and prohibitions we might be forgiven for thinking that those who seek to serve God and not mammon are destined to docilely give themselves over to be devoured by the lions of this world (or by those who have seized power in the Church) eschewing all spiritual gifts, material things, career advancement or influence for the good whilst the powers of the devil triumph unchallenged.
 
But this is not what the Gospel commands. The Parable of the Talents (cf. Mt 25:14-30) insists that we make due use of our God-given gifts. Our Lord does not teach the heresy of Quietism—that insidious spiritual cancer whereby we do nothing positive and lie down and accept whatever comes regardless of its nature. No. Rather, He insists that we use our talents and opportunities and material goods—but He insists that we do not serve them.
 
There is a French saying, I believe, that one may adore only two things: God and chocolate! With due respect to that great language and culture, and with all reverence to the God-given properties of chocolate, we may not serve God and chocolate. But we may enjoy chocolate and make proper use of it according to God’s Providential design.
 
Thus it is with all goods and talents, spiritual or material: whatever resources, influence, authority or power may be placed into my hands (and not grasped by them!) they are to be used in the service of Almighty God. And I am to lay the profits of my stewardship before His altar, kneeling in humble thanksgiving and adoration—praising God, and not my own supposed magnificence—as so many saints have shown us in history, amongst whom St Louis (IX), whose relics we shall venerate with great devotion and solemnity after this Mass, is a shining example.
 
We need the things of this world in order to live in it. We need strong and powerful leaders to teach, guide and protect us. Just as it is necessary to fast at the proper times, so too it is right to feast at others.
 
What we must not do, however, is place any of these things before God. They must come after Him and serve His ends. Our task is to “seek first His kingdom and His righteousness” in the sure knowledge that if we so do, “all these things shall be yours as well.” By their merits and prayers may St Louis, and all the saints, assist us in so doing! +

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