My prayerful question for us is what do we consider our true treasures to be? Our true wealth is to be found in our love and service of one another. Love and hospitality live on in the giver and the receiver and do not fade away like temporary earthly treasures.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is inviting us to reflect on the meaning of our discipleship as we come to understand the true identity of Jesus. Jesus forecasts once again his suffering, death, and resurrection. The disciples’ response is disheartening. They understand nothing and they are afraid to ask any questions. The disciples had been arguing about who was the greatness among them. The conversations the disciples had about who among is the greatest is familiar human behavior, is it not. Jesus rebukes his disciples for thinking that they might achieve greatness without following his example of suffering and service.
What we do and how we live our lives speaks to our commitment to make a stewardship a way of life for us. In stewardship, we start with the basic truth that all is a gift of God -- our life, our family, the people we love, the beauty of creation, the opportunities we have in life. All is a gift of God. Our stewardship response to the abundance of God’s gifts to us is gratitude and a desire to share what we have been given. The heart of a spirituality of stewardship is living with an attitude of gratitude and sharing with others the blessings that we have been given. This is living our discipleship of the Lord Jesus.
Our readings today call us to be unafraid! We are called to have faith, and place our trust in the Lord, even when our friends, family, and institutions fail us! We are called to be open and trust despite how we might feel! We need to be brave enough to let Christ open our ears, eyes and hearts! We have a wonderful sign of the spirit of openness as we see our children return to school this week. We pray for them and we pray that they be a sign for all of us to be open, to be unafraid to enter into new encounters, to let our faith lead us.
In all truth, all of us probably need to acknowledge a bit of hypocrisy when our egos get in the way of reaching out to people in need and reaching out to people whom we find unlovable for whatever reason. There is sin in the world and sin in our own hearts. We always need to recognize our own sinfulness and come before our healing, forgiving God. The North Star of our spiritual lives is rooted in our faith conviction that there is nothing hypocritical about God’s love for us. It is unconditional and unending. I invite you to hold on to the truth: There is nothing we can do to stop God from loving us. God is love.