Tuesday, November 8, 2022

8 November 2022 - no profit motive


Would he not rather say to him,
‘Prepare something for me to eat.

We are called to remember that we are servants, servants who are in fact unprofitable. The one who created all things out of nothing has no need of us. We are indebted to him from before we begin. Our work is never so much as to put him in our debt. We ought never imagine that we are owed anything. Having the proper understanding of who God is, perfectly and eternally happy in the shared life of the Trinity, in need of nothing, and who we are, creatures utterly dependent on God for our being at every moment lest we slip back into the non-existence from whence we came, helps us avoid the risk of presumption. 

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’?

If we remember that we are unprofitable servants we won't act like wicked servant who begins "to beat his fellow servants and eats and drinks with drunkards" (see Matthew 24:49). That individual forgot that he himself was a fellow servant and began to entertain a sense of entitlement that was both self-destructive and harmful to others. 

When we don't insist on God serving us from a sense of entitlement we can instead receive it with surprise as unearned and unexpected gift.

Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will dress himself for service and have them recline at table, and he will come and serve them (see Luke 12:37).

We know that the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, demonstrated definitively in his washing the disciples feet and giving them the gift of himself in the Eucharist. Yet this is not meant to make us proud or presumptuous, as though he were somehow obligated to do these things for us. His offering was entirely free and uncompelled, and all the more beautiful for that fact. We are to remember that Jesus, even when he comes to us as gift, is and remains our master. Although he has no need of our service he still delights to make use of us, to make us increasingly gifts to others as he himself was first a gift to us. He gives us as servants for our own sakes, hoping that we will see that if it was good and noble for him it will be so for us. If it did not impinge on his limitless divine freedom to serve us it need not make us feel subjugated when we act as his servants in the world.

‘We are unprofitable servants;
we have done what we were obliged to do.’

It is actually preferable that we are permitted to be unprofitable, because then we aren't subject to the whims of the market or our own limited abilities. Jesus will not cast us out for being unable to give him something that he did not first give us, since no such thing can exist. We don't have to somehow prove ourselves as worthy. We are permitted to remain unprofitable servants, provided that we are willing at least to continue to act as servants.

What is the point of the service to which we are all called? Jesus himself is training us to be more like him, teaching us how to begin to live the life of heaven even here and now.

For the grace of God has appeared, saving all
and training us to reject godless ways and worldly desires
and to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age,
as we await the blessed hope,
the appearance of the glory of the great God
and of our savior Jesus Christ,
who gave himself for us to deliver us from all lawlessness
and to cleanse for himself a people as his own,
eager to do what is good.






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