Overview:
Monday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time
A Reflection for Monday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time
“When you hold a banquet,
invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind;
blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you.”
Find today’s readings here.
If we spent our lives waiting around and hoping to be repaid, we would always be resentful and disappointed.
Repayment is a theme in the readings for today, referenced explicitly in the first reading and in the Gospel from Luke. In the first reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans, he writes of God’s mercy, and how that mercy is difficult for us to understand or map onto our ways of operating:
For who has known the mind of the Lord
or who has been his counselor?
Or who has given him anything
that he may be repaid?
A power dynamic with God where we act as giver or counselor or even as true knower is impossible. When it comes to divine power, we don’t stand a chance.
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus encourages his listeners to host a meal—but not to invite their friends. It’s puzzling, but he explains his reason: If you invite a friend or a relative over, they might invite you over in return. The horror!
It’s not another social obligation that Jesus is warning us about; it’s an ongoing cycle of debt and repayment. If you invite them, and then they invite you, well, then you owe them another dinner. When does it end?!
Instead, he says, the guests around your table ought to be those who could never repay you, who wouldn’t be able to invite you over: “the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind.” In this instance, all you can do is give. The cycle of gift and receipt and repayment and cost-counting is (joyfully) irrelevant.
Who matters to God, and why do they matter? The reason is not that they can repay God for what he has given to them or done for them. That’s because God’s greatness is impossible to repay or “get even” with, but it’s also because those God loves in a special way are usually those who have the least to give—at least in the world’s eyes.
God’s joy lies in the fact that we can’t repay him; God pours out love and delights in its expansiveness, its unmatchable grandeur. He doesn’t sit around counting our debts, letting resentment build and hoping to get what he’s owed.
If we crave joy, we should inch ever closer toward being like God. We can build up habits of enjoying the gift and making irrelevant the receipt.
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