Saturday, September 17, 2016

Reflection for Sunday September 18, Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time; Luke 16:1-13

Gospel: Luke 16:1-13
Jesus said to his disciples, “A rich man had a steward who was reported to him for squandering his property.  He summoned him and said, ‘What is this I hear about you? Prepare a full account of your stewardship, because you can no longer be my steward.’ The steward said to himself, ‘What shall I do, now that my master is taking the position of steward away from me? I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg. I know what I shall do so that, when I am removed from the stewardship, they may welcome me into their homes.’ He called in his master’s debtors one by one.  To the first he said, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He replied, ‘One hundred measures of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note. Sit down and quickly write one for fifty.’ Then to another the steward said, ‘And you, how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘One hundred kors of wheat.’ The steward said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note; write one for eighty.’ And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently. “For the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones; and the person who is dishonest in very small matters is also dishonest in great ones. If, therefore, you are not trustworthy with dishonest wealth, who will trust you with true wealth?  If you are not trustworthy with what belongs to another, who will give you what is yours? No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and mammon.”
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Reflection:
Do you recognize that what you have right now like money, power, earthly wealth and the like is not actually yours? Many of us are acting like everything that we have we earned by the sweat of our brow. So, we get to selfish with what we have we cling to it as if our life hinges upon it.

We fail to realize that we are simply stewards of what we own in this world. We fail to realize that at God’s appointed time we will be accounting for everything that we’ve owned in this world.

And during that time the dear Lord will ask us:  “What have you done to the things that I’ve entrusted you? Such as your talent, your wealth, your time and even your life.” Did you only use it to advance your own selfish agenda in this world?

The steward in our gospel failed miserably in his assigned task to properly take care of the wealth that was entrusted to him by his master.  Therefore everything that was entrusted to him was taken back by his master, the rich man.

We to are merely stewards of what we have right now, we did not earn it by ourselves. God’s invisible hand helped us to earn what we have right now.  

Yet, many of us are acting as if we earned it all, so many of us become worshipper of the God called greed and we purposely don’t share and we don’t help even if we have the means to do so. – Marino J. Dasmarinas     

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