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Wicked Servants

We are all familiar with the saying that “when the cat's away, the mice come out to play.”  A commercial that has been running on TV recently illustrates the same point. It shows a grandmother saying “Good-bye” to her adult children as they go out the door.  Then she peeks through the window to make sure they're gone, calls up her friends, and the next thing you know all the grannies are there having a great time playing poker. But unfortunately the son and daughter-in-law come home a little prematurely and catch the ladies in the poker game. The commercial reflects the same idea as the saying in the reverse way - it's the parents misbehaving and the children reprimanding. But the idea is the same - when those who are in authority are distant and remote, then it's human nature to feel free to indulge in what we would not be willing to do in the presence of authority figures.

We can find a similar example, my brothers & sisters in Christ, in our gospel today. Our gospel portrays a householder planting a vineyard and then traveling to a far country. What happens?  Then those who are the tenants of the master's land begin to feel free - they begin to feel that they are in charge – so that they can do things to their own advantage without regard for the master's will or wishes. This points out what begins to take place in us when we feel that God is remote or distant. When we sense that God is actively present among us, there is no question that that has a powerful impact on our thinking and our behavior. If, however, we begin to indulge the notion that God is far distant from us, than that also has a major impact on our thinking and behavior.

How can we consider – even for a moment - that God is remote or distant from us?  One reason that allows to indulge this notion is the fact that God's existence is not immediately apparent to our senses. We don't see God with our physical eyes; we can't reach out and touch Him.  Because He's not physically apparent to us, it may seem for a moment that He is distant. But of course, even though He is not physically apparent, He is ever present to our spirit. He is never distant from our spirit. So there is a certain basic sense where God may appear to be distant from us - but He is not. He is present to us.

To really create some distance from God, to really exile God somewhere up there in heaven, we have to do some travelling. Because He is ever present to our spirit, the only way to get Him out of the way for us is to actively avoid Him.  How is it done?

There are some basic ways.  We leave off regular prayer. We leave off the reading of the Scriptures and the lives of the Saints. We become irregular and then infrequent in our attendance of Church and in reception of the sacraments. The result is that as time goes on, as we live without God, as we fail to open our hearts to His life and His presence, God seems indeed to be remote.  He recedes into the background. And this enables a person to enter into a state of spiritual denial.

I trust we are all familiar with what denial is.  When we say that someone is "in denial," what are we saying?
We are saying that a person refuses to accept what he knows is true. It is a paradoxical frame of mind. How can one refuse to accept what he knows is true? It’s hard to understand; all one can say is that it must take some work to get around the obvious in order to be able to claim it’s not there. But that's how denial works.

Spiritual denial is that very thing with regard to God. We willingly pretend He’s not around.  So He becomes remote; He becomes distant. Even though deep inside we know that His existence, life and gospel are true, we push
them far from us - we refuse to accept what we in fact know. We do it because that's where we want God to be; we want Him away from us, out of our hair, so to speak. We may in fact believe that God exists somewhere out there, but we think and we act as if He didn't. We have successfully exiled God to a far country. What's the advantage of
this?

The mice can come out to play. We can make our own rules. We can set our own standards. We can act to our own advantage. With God out of the picture, we have no other standards to guide us than our own. Our own thoughts, our own opinions, our own desires, become the rules that we live by. This is what modern atheism and humanism and secularism do.  They put God out of the picture and say that we human beings are basically it. We're here, we set our own standards, we can make up our own rules. What is moral one moment can be immoral the next and vice versa. The advantage is, we are not responsible to anyone but ourselves. We create our own (a)theology. That's why Plato's dictum "atheism is a disease of the soul before it is an error of the mind" is so to the point. Atheism really the desire to exile and to reject God. It’s a matter of the will, not primarily an intellectual option.

But what is the message of our gospel, my brothers and sisters in Christ? If we would exile God, if we will send Him to a remote and distant place, what is God's response? He sends us reminders, unpleasant though it may be. To the Jews who would have rejected their God and run after every false idol, what did God do? He sent prophet after prophet. And when they continued in their disobedience to Him, what did He do? He said, “I will send them my Son, they will respect my Son, they will hear Him.” What did they do? They crucified Him.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, when we wish to wander far away from God, God may use unpleasant means to call us back to Him, to remind us of His love, to remind us of His care, to remind us of His law.  Why might the message seem unpleasant? Because it tells us the party's over. The mice have to stop dancing around the room and recognize the presence of the big bad cat. I am not making the point that God is a spoiler who wants to ruin everyone's fun.  Rather, the point is that we cannot continue to live blindly by our own expectations, by our own understanding, by our own wisdom, to our own advantage, by our own rules, when we are confronted with God’s power, presence, love, compassion, and salvation. His presence confronts us with the necessity of making a choice. There are only two possible responses.

If we have wandered from God, and He comes to us with a blunt and unmistakable reminder of His presence, what can we do? On one hand, we can seek all the more to run and hide. We can more fervent in our mental exercise of denial. On the other, we can simply humble ourselves, and in repentance receive with humility the gracious love and salvation that He offers us. We can accept the invitation into His presence, into His house, where indeed there is repentance, and yes, indeed there are tears, but also rejoicing and blessedness and joy endlessly multiplied.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, it is possible for us to successfully exile God into a far away place. It is not hard to do. All we need to do is lay aside our prayer, lay aside good works, lay aside our pursuit of the word of God, and God will indeed seem distant and remote. But rather than exiling Him, let us open our hearts to Him again and again, and receive Him anew and afresh - the one whom God the Father sends into the world to call us back to Him - His beloved Son. Let us receive Him, hear Him, accept Him, believe Him, and live in Him - for he is the Savior of our souls.

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