Jerusalem, Notre Dame, 11st November 2006

 

Listening to today’s gospel we can learn some practical truths.

The first is about difficulty of the Scriptures.
The difficult places in the gospel, like today’s gospel, remind us the rule of saint Augustyn: If you have understood something in the Bible, put it into practice, if not, teach yourselves humility, and learn more about it. And if you learn more and you don’t understand yet, don’t lose courage! There will be always something too difficult for us, because God is greater than man.

The second is about consequence of the choice.
“No servant can serve two masters.” Jesus doesn’t speak theoretically. The Pharisees sneered at Jesus. Why? Saint Luke says: They loved money. So it was logically that if they loved money they had to sneer at Jesus, because its impossible to serve God and mammon. This rule works also nowadays.  If we see that the people don’t serve God, we know they have to serve somebody else or something different. We can serve Mammon. There is no anthropological problem. A lot of people serve Mammon and live more or less well. But if we decide to serve the things are not God, we decide to live far from God. We can say. We are free in our choices, but we don’t have any influence on the consequences of the choice.

The last practical truth from today’s gospel is as follows.
The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones. Just one example. I can not understand why a lot of priests and nuns have illegal computer software. In Rom at Pontifical Biblical Institute study about 400 students, the majority are priests and the majority have got one very important program – Bible Works. It costs about 300$. I didn’t make accurate research, but I know only 3 students who bought this program. The others just copied it. For me they are simple thieves. They say: “Not. We don’t steal, we just don’t waste money”.

I don’t want to discuss with this kind of stupidity. What I want is to find small things in which we are dishonest. If we find it, we understand, why we have problems with the great mysteries of our life.