25 Sunday A in Ordinary Time Mt 29,1.16

When a cosmonaut returned from a distance of five hundred kilometers from Earth and declared that he had not seen God there, many religious believers considered it blasphemous to God. This statement means, “I did not see the idea of ​​God there, the image of God that I learned about as a child. As a child, I imagined that God was an older man with a chin above the clouds. And when I flew high above the clouds, I didn’t find him there. So it is not so much blasphemy against God as a protest God’s misconception from childhood. God, himself is against misconceptions about God. That’s why he forbade people to paint it. God’s Son gave us the right idea of ​​God. That is why all his statements about the Father are so precious to us. For example, in today’s Gospel, he tells us of the heavenly Father by likening him to a farmer who, in paying the workers who worked for him in the vineyard, behaves quite differently from the earthly stewards.

At first glance, you must have noticed that the Lord did not want to say anything about the social or labor issue, about the fair or unjust wage, about the relationship between the worker and the enterprise director. He means something else. He wants to subvert the idea of ​​his times about God. In his day, religious people imagined God as a master who was obliged to reward man for fair wages. And so they set hundreds of precepts for God to make to reward them. They set out in detail the rules about what may be eaten, how one may eat, when one may eat, how one may bathe, when one may bathe, how one may wash, when one may wash, what must be sacrificed in the temple treasury, what must be sacrificed on the altar, what for the priest, what for the temple. What can be done on Saturday, what must not be done, how many steps can be taken on Saturday, how can a fire be lit on Saturday, and so on? He who keeps these precepts is just before God, and God must reward him according to his performance. It was a dangerous idea because man’s whole relationship with God was crammed into regulations. For the very precepts, God was lost from the horizon of man. The Lord Jesus wants to reject this idea and replace it with a new one. He says that God does not evaluate us according to our hours worked, according to our performance (Trailing, 234). He rates us four times, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times higher than we deserve. The good news of today’s Gospel is that God is incomprehensibly good, prudent, to us far beyond our merits.

Goodness attracts as the magnet attracts small iron filings. You know from experience that every good person is attractive. Therefore, in today’s parable, the Lord Jesus revealed God’s goodness to make God attractive to us. God really attracts anyone who knows about his goodness. Conversely, if I were an atheist and wanted to turn someone away from God, I would have to tell him about God being evil, cruel. For example, people in hell have clothes from the fire, eat hot fruits, drink a disgusting drink. Those who were greedy are eaten by disgusting worms. Immortals lie in mucus and mud. The dogs bite the thieves with diamond teeth … To prevent them from escaping, they are tied with a chain that passes through their mouths and stomach and is tied so that their left hand is attached to the fiery furnace, the right one is thrust into the heart and protrudes back between the shoulder blades. And the infernal beat them with pitchforks. Such descriptions of hell really evoke the idea that God is cruel, heartless.

However, you may say that the Gospel also talks about hell, in which there is eternal fire, a gnawing worm, weeping, and gnashing of teeth. But this language of the Gospel is figurative and represents not God’s cruelty, but God’s attraction. Behold, a man who freely and voluntarily says to God radically “No”, renounces God definitively, rejects God forever. In the other world, he will know how good and attractive God is. So attractive that he longs for him and thirsts with his whole being and the whole his being burnt in the fire of an unquenchable desire for God infinitely appealing, and his conscience gnaws at him like a worm for unreasonably rejecting such a good God, and therefore cries over himself and gnashes his teeth. It is similar to a son who has left his Father unreasonably abroad and is abroad, and there he realizes that his Father is good and loving. When the Son suffers so much, the greater Son’s pain, can we say that the Father is cruel? On the contrary, the Son, therefore, suffers that the Father is good, attractive.

I believe that if God were not good and attractive, man would not suffer because he left God. It is similar to a son who has unreasonably abandoned his Father and is abroad, and there he realizes that his Father is good and kind. How sorry and painful he is that he can’t go to his Father! The better the Father, the greater the son’s pain. When a son suffers so much, can we say that the Father is cruel? On the contrary, the son, therefore, suffers that the Father is good, attractive. And so hell in Jesus’ ministry is only a consequence of the goodness and infinite attraction of Heavenly Father.

But God’s attraction is already evident here in the world. You may have been surprised to hear that they opened the gates of a monastery wide and called on the nuns to go into a world full of music and dance and fun and pleasure in some country. And those sisters stayed among the walls and for no promise of this world they did not want to leave their religious life, how do you explain that? Only by recognizing the goodness and attraction of Heavenly Father in the world. And then nothing can tear them away from the love of God. Or even St. Paul recognized God’s interest here in the world when he said, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Is it tribulation, anxiety or persecution, hunger or nudity, danger, or the sword? … I am confident that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present, nor future, nor power, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, can separate us from the love of God” (Rom. 8). 35-39).

Or the attraction of God on earth was also recognized by the Christian woman who, as Father Scherer writes, stood in the square in Alexandria with a burning fact in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. People asked her what that meant. She stood on a high place and said to the assembled crowd in fiery words, “With this burning torch I would like to burn or with this bucket of water I would like to put out hell so that we Christians will not be blamed to God for the heavenly reward or fear of eternal damnation, but only because he is infinitely good and infinitely loving our heavenly Father, who draws us to himself only by his goodness and kindness. “People thought about it, and because they knew her as an honest and good Christian, they encouraged Dear brothers and sisters, we would be inspired today by the words of the Lord Jesus, which he told us today about the heavenly Father! Let’s correct the idea of ​​the Lord God in our minds so that he is ours. Infinitely good Father, so that his goodness may draw us more and more to him.