Life is a gift from God, and everything we have comes from God. This imposes on us the obligation to care for these gifts knowing that we are beneficiaries of divine love. The readings of today remind us that we are God’s servants entrusted with many gifts. We are to give account of how we have used these gifts. The rendering of account can happen at any time. This makes it imperative to be always prepared by being conscious and careful about how we conduct our lives at every moment.
Control over Self
The first reading from Rom 6:12-18 invites us to be responsible in the way we conduct our lives. The great challenge is that of fighting against the passions that tend to enslave us. The greatest victory most times is the victory over oneself, over one’s passions and self-indulgences. We are often victims of enslaving passions. That is why the Christian life is a constant warfare against the forces that incline us to waywardness.
The Apostle Paul himself acknowledges the difficulty of this inner battle, as he laments in Rom 7:19-24: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. So, I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
The happy thing is that we have been set free from these forces, which Paul calls the forces of sin that lead to death. All we need to do is to get closely attached to the one who rescued us. In this way we move away from being slaves to evil doing to being servants of righteousness. For Paul, the human frame is too weak to overcome the power of sin and the only way out is faith which makes us righteous. Faith unites us with the power of God in Jesus, the conqueror of sin and death.
Being Responsible Servants in God’s House
The more we become conscious of being custodians of God’s gifts, the more we feel the responsibility of preserving these gifts. This is an important message from today’s Gospel from Luke 12:39-48. It presents a very interesting parable of servants in God’s household. The servant’s success is based on watchfulness and obedience, which make him be at his duty post at every moment. Since the master can come at an hour least expected, he has nothing to fear. He is a responsible servant. We usually begin to derail when we lose consciousness of our mission and vocation. Then we begin to search for trifles and fleeting values. In this way we become like the wicked servant in the Gospel who imagines that his master would be delayed in coming and begins to molest and maltreat those put under his charge. He is irresponsible.
Being responsible means taking one’s function seriously and not being distracted by other things. It means seeing oneself as being on mission at every moment. And always having an eye on the goal of the mission. It means taking good care of all under one’s care and all needing one’s care. And knowing that they are all part of the treasures of the master that one serves.
