Scripture Reflection, Sunday, September 23: Love Is Ingenious

Scripture Readings:
Amos 8: 4-7
Psalm 113
I Timothy 2:1-8
Luke 16: 1-13

Some years ago, I officiated at the wedding of the daughter of some friends of mine. Their oldest daughter was married just out of college. She became an intensive care nurse and she married a young man who worked for an electrical company. They were both quite young when they got married, and I wondered how things would work out. This couple had two children fairly quickly, a beautiful little girl and a little boy who was born with spina bifida. Now they have four children. Through the years I have come to have tremendous admiration for this young couple. They have inspired me as I have watched them mature into a committed married couple and truly dedicated parents who have persevered through thick and thin.

Their son who was born with spina bifida had a very difficult start to his life. He is a handsome little boy with a big, bright smile. Before his first birthday, he had already undergone ten surgeries. A couple of those surgeries were emergency operations that were performed because his mother recognized there was something wrong and rushed him to the hospital. She saved his life more than once. A couple of years ago, I traveled back to officiate at another family wedding. There was this smiling little boy, stealing the show, with a small beginner’s wheelchair. Short of a miracle, he will never walk. But today he is a happy, well-adjusted first grader who obviously knows that he is deeply loved. This young couple’s ingenuity has brought him this far in life and he seems to be thriving.

Love is ingenious. Each of us has probably experienced that in our personal and family lives. We may have had parents whose hard work, imagination and on-the-spot creativity kept the family together at very difficult moments. The challenging of building a strong and loving family requires a great deal of ingenuity these days.

It seems to me that the Scripture readings for this Sunday illumine the powers of human ingenuity. But in so doing they challenge us to think very seriously about what it is we love. They invite us to reflect upon what it is that compels our attention and energies. The prophet Amos is well known for his fearless preaching about justice. Amos was not very concerned with cushioning his message; he hits us right between the eyes with his prophetic word. In this reading he confronts those whose governing desire is their own self-interest, people who are determined to enrich themselves even if it means exploiting the poor in the process. He depicts such people as driven individuals. They cannot wait until the Sabbath and the lunar days of rest are over so that they can get back to business. And they are smart, even ingenious: they know just how to rig the scales for cheating in order to increase their profit margin. In the process, they leave the poor strewn about the path they have just traversed.

Jesus’ story about the wily, crafty steward may seem to us like a strange and uninviting parable. It is a notoriously difficult story to interpret, even for professional Scripture scholars. Why would Jesus ever hold up this man as an example for his disciples? After all, this steward seems to be concerned about only one thing: his own self-protection. His voodoo economics and backroom “cooking of the books” would make him a well-qualified participant in a big city political machine. Listening to this story, you can almost smell the cigar smoke wafting out of the room where he secretly meets with his master’s debtors to decrease their debts. But one thing is certain: this steward is enterprising, he is very ingenious. He knows how to seize the initiative; he takes resolute action in a crisis. Jesus expresses his own wish that his disciples would only exhibit the same kind of initiative and resolve in living the gospel.

Love is indeed ingenious. When we are passionate about something we usually find a way of getting it done. But that which we love, what we allow to drive us and consume our attention, determines the kind of person we become. If we allow greed or ambition to be the governing force in our lives, we will gradually lose the ability to recognize what is truly good and worthwhile. We may even lose the ability to see the people whom we have stepped on in the pursuit of our aims. We will become a being who is less than human. This greed has many faces. It may involve the unbridled desire to accumulate a bigger bank account and acquire ever greater financial security. It may entail the passion to advance our careers, whatever those careers may be. Or it may mean the search for more prestige and recognition among friends or within the community. When these desires control any of us, we forfeit the dignity given to us as God’s sons and daughters.

We come to the Eucharist faithfully in order to allow the Lord to train, to shape, our affections. Each of us needs to be schooled in what it is that we should love. We need to be shown, over and over, what is of truly lasting value. The Gospel tells us that our affections are well-trained when we passionately love God and care for our neighbor as we care for ourselves. As Christians we are called to promote the ingenuity that comes from that kind of love. The human family is capable of producing ever more sophisticated weapons of mass destruction. We can design and build computers that are unimaginably fast. But we seem to have a difficult time mustering up the ingenuity to address the scourge of hunger in our world and even in our own cities. We seem to find it much more of a challenge to provide affordable housing for the poor or health insurance for the almost 50 million U.S. Americans who are uninsured. Love is indeed ingenious. But the Lord Jesus summons us to allow his grace to transform our affections into an ever deepening love of him and into active care for those around us. That training of our affections is a life-long process.

Each one of us is painfully aware of how often we fall short in this challenge of loving God with our whole hearts and caring generously for our neighbor. Still, Christ invites us to turn to him with confidence because he has revealed to us that God’s love, too, is ingenious. The love of God is astoundingly ingenious. The ingenuity of God’s saving love was manifested in Christ’s death and resurrection, which we remember and celebrate at the Eucharist. This ingenious love of God continues to work in our lives, showing us what is of lasting value, what is worthy of our attention, our energy, our passion.

Robin Ryan, CP