(Audio)
When you have done all you have been commanded, say,
'We are unprofitable servants;
we have done what we were obliged to do.'"
We don't earn our place at the Eucharistic table by fulfilling the commandments. Simply checking off the boxes to ensure that our souls are in a state of grace does not give us the right to expect the master to wait on us at table. Even perfectly responding to every opportunity for a corporeal or spiritual work of mercy is still only a response to the good works that were prepared in advance for us.
"Who among you would say to your servant
who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field,
'Come here immediately and take your place at table'?
We are the hired hands for whom to work in the field is a privilege. Nothing is thereby earned. Yet this is all the more reason to be astounded when Jesus does call us, unworthy though we are, to gather at his banquet.
The banquet to which we are invited is to feast upon the antidote to death and the medicine of immortality. It restores man to the life for which God originally intended him and exults him far above and beyond even that.
God formed man to be imperishable;
the image of his own nature he made them.
We receive life because we are in God's hands, because he has a plan and a purpose for us. It is not because we ourselves can withstand death by the strength of what we earn. Rather, having exhausted our own finitude we fall at last into the hands of mercy.
But the souls of the just are in the hand of God,
and no torment shall touch them.
If we are tried by God, if we are required to spend hours or days in the field, it is only so that we may be formed into better offerings for him. It is only so that we may be stretched and widened to love to our full potential.
As gold in the furnace, he proved them,
and as sacrificial offerings he took them to himself.
In the time of their visitation they shall shine,
and shall dart about as sparks through stubble;
May the LORD bring us the grace and mercy to work though nothing is earned thereby, to stretch ourselves simply out of love.
The LORD is close to the brokenhearted;
and those who are crushed in spirit he saves.
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