Gratuitous Love (4th Sunday Lent B)

Gratuity is an uncommon word as the concept itself is quite strange in this profit-oriented society.  In this era when economic gain seems to be the be-all-and-end-all of life, we easily acquiesce to the principle that nothing comes for free.  There’s no such thing as a free lunch, we say.  Everything has a price.  Everything has to be paid.  Even in the theological exposition of the “economy of salvation,” the expiation framework easily makes sense to most of us:  The cross of Christ is some kind of a payment for our sins. To be saved from sin, someone has to pay the price. This logic we understand quite readily.

The readings today, fortunately, offer us another way of understanding the mystery of our salvation.  The readings invite us to see our relationship with God from the point of view of God’s gratuitous love.  For this we need to let go first of our fixation to concepts like profit, interest, price, payment.  We need to accept the principle of gratuity:  The best things in life are for free.  The nearest common concept to gratuity, I think, is gift-giving.  But again, even this concept has been tainted with self-interest as in the case of our exchange-gift-Christmas-party favourite.  We give and expect to receive.  All too often, we are robbed of the joy of pure giving when we fail to receive what we have expected to.

Something is gratuitous when it is offered unwarranted, undeserved, unmerited.  It is pure gift. Not demanded nor bought.  God’s love to us is gratuitous. This is illustrated in our first reading (2 Chr 36: 14-16, 19-23), when God inspired Cyrus, the King of Persia, to free the Israelites from Babylonian captivity.  This loving act of deliverance was unmerited by an unfaithful people.  Despite their sins, the people of Israel were restored to their own land.  St. Paul expresses this in the second reading (Eph 2:4-10) with more clarity of insight into God’s undeserved love and mercy: Brothers and sisters, God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ... For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast (vv. 4-9). 

Clear as daylight. We did not deserve to be cared for.  We were sinful, unfaithful, hard-headed, proud, and selfish. Despite these, we were saved from the very sins that had brought death upon us.  Such is the greatness of God’s love. Gratuitous indeed!

Moreover, today’s gospel (Jn 3: 14-21) highlights God’s love as his own initiative of giving up his only Son that we may have eternal life: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. The Son of God is lifted up on the cross as God’s ultimate act of sacrificial love.  Through this sacrificial love, our enslavement to sin has been broken.  Selfishness has been overcome by total self-giving.  And by Christ’s resurrection, death is vanquished; eternal life dawns for all of us who believe.  And all of these come to us for free.  It’s pure gift.  If there’s one thing we can be sure of about what God is not, God is every inch not a businessman!

In this season of Lent, we may do well to heed these following invitations:

Conviction.  Are we convinced of the gratuity of God’s love for us? Isn’t it the case that often we are practically incredulous of God’s capacity to love us despite our unworthiness? In our relationship with God, we allow our sense of unworthiness to get in the way.  We still think that we can only come to God when we are worthy; so, when we are not (which is often the case), we keep God at bay.  Lent is an opportunity to strengthen our conviction about God’s gratuitous love for us.  It is God’s grace which makes us worthy of him. We need to surrender to this truth and there can be no stronger proof of his unconditional love than the fact that, by God’s initiative, his beloved Son was lifted up on the cross... that we may have life.

Celebration.  A true disciple of Christ has all the reasons to be joyful. This season invites us to celebrate the joy of being loved gratuitously.  This is an invitation to a joyful spirituality, living each day with the delight that the new life in Christ brings, living in a loving relationship with God with utmost confidence in God’s unfailing fidelity, if not in our own capacity to be faithful.  May this season help us to truly relish with joy our freedom from sin and death won for us by Christ through his cross and resurrection. 

Commitment.   We have been loved unconditionally.  God loves us not because we are good.  God loves us despite ourselves. He loves us warts and all. His love is not because of our merit.  His love is pure gift.  Every day we receive his grace and we experience his mercy as gift. This experience of gratuity invites us to a commitment to self-giving, to be a man-and-woman-for-others, to serve without asking for reward, to give to those who cannot give back. 

May the Lenten discipline transform us into the effective signs of the presence of God’s gratuitous love amid this society which puts a tag price to just everything.

Love at the Eleventh Hour (25th Sunday Ordinary A)

Nothing is too late for this loving God.  His love and his grace are freely given to those who seek him even at the eleventh hour.  He is ready to offer his love just anytime.  To those who come at the last hour, he showers his underserved love just the same.

This loving God turns our world upside down.  We order our values and priorities this way; He shows us what is essential to life quite another way--oftentimes, the exact reversal of our human reckoning.  We establish consistent and obliging norms for our individual and communal acts; He intervenes in our lives beyond these norms we set.  In humility, then, we ought to listen to this God through his Prophet Isaiah:  “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways... As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts” (Is 55: 8-9). God’s ways are simply beyond us.

These words of the prophet in the first reading prepare us for the unpredictable God of the gospel today.  He is the landowner in the parable who hired labourers in his vineyard at five different intervals and paid all of them equally with the customary day’s wage.  In other words, those who came in early to work and those who came in at the last hour of the day received the same amount from him as their wage. 

Isn’t it unfair?  Our impeccable human sense of equity is tempted to say, “Yes, unfair! It is a complete disregard of commutative justice.” But we hesitate.  The parable invites us to ponder more deeply and come to a deeper insight into the free and loving acts of God.  Allow me to offer two points for our reflection:

First, God’s moment is not governed by chronos but is manifested in kairos.  Chronos and kairos are two helpful Greek concepts of time. Chronos is clock time. Calendar time.  Sequential time.  This helps us organize our lives well.  With a Rolex watch on our wrist, we can be precise with our time management... or so the advertisement goes.  We can quantify time and execute our plans by the hour from day one to the day we die.  With chronos, we have an accurate sense of who came early and who got in real late.  We even invented the Bundy clock to monitor and quantify work time.   Since we benefit so much from this time category we also take it for granted that God works within the same paradigm forgetting that He is eternal... timeless... hence beyond chronos. 

God’s actions in history are manifested in kairos which is use in the New Testament to mean “the appointed time in the purpose of God.”  It is any moment when God acts.  Freely.  Lovingly.  Not imprisoned by the rigidity of our time inventions.  If we come to think of it, the precision of Rolex time doesn’t matter much to the eternal God.  God’s only time is the one and lasting moment of the now.  The time that matters to him is every moment that his lost son or daughter finally comes home to accept his mercy and love.  It even doesn’t matter to him who came in early or late, who served him the longest or shortest.  He does not use the Bundy clock. All, including him who comes at the eleventh hour, receive the same grace He intends for his people. 

We have developed acute sense of chronos.  We have become time conscious in its chronological sense for our human purposes.  We even blow our tops when time is not observed as planned. But are we time conscious in the sense of kairos?  Can we go past the familiar tic-tac of the clock and recognize instead the glorious moments when God acts in our lives to accomplish his purpose?  Have we celebrated these precious moments in life when God bathed us with his grace?    

Second, God deals with us not with strict justice but with love.  If God were to use our human standard of justice in dealing with us sinners, who would survive?  Yet we expect God to be just.  While listening to the parable, what makes our eyebrows meet with disbelief is the part when the landowner gives the same wage for everyone.  We feel there’s lack of equity. Others have worked longer. How come those who worked for the last hour receive the same amount as those who worked the whole day? This smacks of injustice, so we think.  Again, we are invited to think deeper.  Justice is rendering whatever is due by right. Those who worked the whole day actually received what is due as agreed upon beforehand.  So, there isn’t a real justice problem here. The issue at hand is actually this: that those who worked in fewer hours received more than what they deserved.  The issue here is not of justice but of our sense of envy in the face of God’s generosity to those whom we believe are undeserving.  God’s action is beyond justice. God deals with us with love. And God’s love is gratuitous. God renders not just what is due by right but grants even what is undeserved!

The landowner in the parable asks, “Are you envious because I’m generous?”  Oftentimes we cannot believe that God still acts lovingly to those who do not deserve his love.  All too often we wish that God be the strict God of justice.   We want him to be like us—calculating and exacting.  But sorry, or shall I say, thank God, God’s ways are not our ways.

Again, I would like to say what I have said: Nothing is too late for this loving God.  His gratuitous love shines even more at the eleventh hour.  He is ready to offer his love just anytime.  To those who come at the last hour, he showers his underserved love just the same.