10 Nov 2015
Memorial of St Pope Leo the Great
Every now and then I’ll hear somebody suggest that because I’m
a priest, it’s like I have a sure ticket to heaven—because I give my life to
God. Or maybe at a funeral, I’ll hear a
eulogy that highlights all the things the deceased has done for God. And, of course, we spend a lot of time
praying to God, asking his help and guidance—if we just pray the right way or
with the right words, he just has to
respond to us.
Well, Jesus puts these words in our hearts today in response:
“We are unprofitable servants.” That
doesn’t mean what we do in our life of faith isn’t worth anything. Instead, it means that we do what we do as
Catholic Christians simply out of
love for God and others . . . we don’t expect anything in return.
And, you know, there really is a joy that comes from serving and loving and caring . . . without having that expectation of
profiting from it. We do what do for the good of others. We pray to God and thank him out of simple gratitude. We go through life expecting nothing. And, in return—without us even looking for it—God
repays us with his blessings; we don’t have to worry about that.
We are unprofitable servants . . . sometimes. Other times, as we know, we can
unintentionally expect God to pay us
back for the good that we do. Sometimes
we can think that God owes us. Sometimes we can think that friends owe us, or family. And so, it’s good to
let Jesus put these words in our heart from time to time: “We are unprofitable
servants.” We are unprofitable servants. We serve and love purely to serve and to love.
And that’s an ideal, for sure. But that’s what we aim for: Love without
strings attached. Love that doesn’t seek
to paid back. Love that is pure and
simple.
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