Wednesday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time
This morning I awoke to a news show describing how the salaries of the wealthiest Americans have increased in the last few years. In 2008, the top seventy four United States wage earners averaged a salary of 81 million dollars for that year. This same group in 2009 had an average salary of 519 million dollars for that year, quite an increase in a short amount of time. This show, whose data was pulled from a Bloomberg News report out today, stated that these seventy four combined salaries were equivalent of nineteen million people’s wages from the lowest paid people in the U.S. If our culture defines these seventy-four rich people as the people at the top, today’s gospel suggests that they “may” be the “first who will be last.”
Being a rich person is not in and of itself a sin, yet that statistic was for me a tangible way of trying to give a modern analogy to Jesus’ parable in today’s gospel. In reality, this parable is trying to show that the people who were the first chosen people were failing to recognize the messiah. The gentiles however were recognizing Jesus as their messiah, their master. Hence the last were becoming the first. In our culture one needs to be rich to be the first among us, or so our culture suggests. Yet how does one quintuple your average salary from one year to the next? Is it possible that the Master for those “first” is money?
Money is of course not the only Golden Idol our culture has created, yet it seems to be the one most easily recognized. Reflect upon that which claims the majority of your attention. Could this be your Golden Idol? Have you become a slave to this Idol? The first reading suggests that there is only one master to whom we need to be slaves. We are called to be slaves of Christ. This idiom may strike us as unreasonable, yet it is right from Paul’s letter. In this case Paul defines our being a slave to Christ as, “doing the will of God from the heart, willingly serving the Lord and not men.” (Eph. 6:7)
Being a slave of Christ is not an easy task. Faithful discipleship often has costs that are not only unpredictable but are despised as nonsense by the culture in which we live. After all, we are to be like the Lord. We are called to lift up those who have fallen, those who are the least among us. We are called to honor and obey our spiritual parents in the Lord. Most importantly, from today’s reading we understand that our main purpose is to build up the Kingdom of God here on earth; so that when we die we Passover to the eternal Kingdom where we will recline at table with the Lord.
Are there idols in your own life? If there are, what changes would we each need to make in order that we become slaves of Christ?
-Michael Montgomery