Monday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
Saved By Grace
Liturgical Cycle: A | Lectionary Cycle: II
Introduction
Year II. Ephesians gives us the very fundamental message of our gratuitous salvation by the death and resurrection of Christ. Life, real life, comes through him. We have not done anything to deserve it and we can’t do anything to merit it. All we are, we are by the grace of God. It goes perhaps against the grain of our human thinking, but we are dependent beings, a gift from God living by the gifts of God. And yet, this should not be humiliating, for it is in accordance with our human nature. We are dependent, yes, but we are loved – and this is what changes everything.
Gospel. When Jesus speaks out against the rich, he does not intend to condemn them but to liberate them. What he denounces is not the fact that they have material goods, but their own attachment to them and the use they make of their riches: for hoarding, for selfish enjoyment, or – as some rich countries do – stockpiling wheat in silos or using oil for economic and political pressure. The value of possessions is relative to the goods of the kingdom, to justice and love. What counts is to be rich and wise before God.
Opening Prayer
Lord our God,
we are your work of art.
When we were vowed to death through sin,
you called us to life
through the death of your Son.
God, open us to your love and life
given for free as a gift
without charge or regret
and give us thankful hearts.
May we learn from you and your Son
to place ourselves in the service
of our brothers and sisters,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
First Reading
From Death to Life
You were dead because of your faults and sins.
Once, you lived according to this world and followed the ruler who reigns between heaven and earth, and who continues to work in the disobedient.
All of us once belonged to them, and we followed human greed; we obeyed our natural urges and consented to their desires. By ourselves, we headed straight for judgment like the rest of humankind.
But God, who is rich in mercy, showed his great love.
As we were dead in our sins, he made us alive with Christ. By grace, you have been saved!
And he raised us up with Christ, giving us a place with him in heaven.
In demonstrating such kindness in Christ Jesus, God intended to reveal and unfold in the coming ages the extraordinary riches of his grace.
By God’s grace, you are saved through faith. This is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift.
This was not the result of your efforts, so you should not feel proud.
Our identity is God’s work. He created us in Christ Jesus for the good works he prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
Responsorial Psalm
R. (3b) The Lord made us, we belong to him.
Sing joyfully to the LORD all you lands;
serve the LORD with gladness;
come before him with joyful song.
R. The Lord made us, we belong to him.
Know that the LORD is God;
he made us, his we are;
his people, the flock he tends.
R. The Lord made us, we belong to him.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
his courts with praise.
R. The Lord made us, we belong to him.
Give thanks to him; bless his name, for he is good:
the LORD, whose kindness endures forever,
and his faithfulness, to all generations.
R. The Lord made us, we belong to him.
Alleluia Verse
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Blessed are the poor in spirit;
for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Someone in the crowd spoke to Jesus:
“Master, tell my brother to share with me the family inheritance.”
He replied:
“My friend, who has appointed me as your judge or your attorney?”
Then Jesus said to the people:
“Be on your guard and avoid all kinds of greed, for even if you possess many things, they are not what give you life.”
And Jesus continued:
“There was a rich man, and his land produced a good harvest.
He thought, ‘What shall I do, for I am short of room to store my harvest?
Alright, I know what I shall do: I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones to store all this grain, which is my wealth.
Then I will say to myself: My friend, you have many good things stored up for many years. Rest, eat, drink, and enjoy yourself.’
But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night, your life will be taken from you. Tell me, who will get what you have prepared?’
This is the fate of the one who stores up riches for himself and is not rich in the eyes of God.
Prayers of the Faithful
– For grateful hearts, that we can thank God for changing us from strangers to him into his sons and daughters in Christ, we pray:
– For loving hearts, that God has brought us peace with himself, with one another, and even with ourselves, we pray:
– For wide-open hearts, with which we can love the many brothers and sisters God’s grace has given us in the Church, we pray:
Prayer over the Gifts
Lord our God,
you let us use these offerings
as gifts from your hands
to eat and drink the life of your Son.
Confirm us in your grace
without any claim to our own merits
and let the Spirit of Jesus help us
to live the good life of your Son
which you had meant us to live
from the beginning and for ever.
Prayer after Communion
Lord our God,
what else can we do
than give you thanks and praise
for speaking to us through Jesus
and strengthening us
with his bread of life?
May what we say and do
and all of our lives
be a gift to those around
and an act of gratitude to you,
our God for ever and ever.
Blessing
All is grace, all is a gift freely given. Even the use of our talents and our work is God’s gift. Let us also give freely to our neighbor, like our love to the people close to us, but also our help to people who suffer, even if far away from us. And may almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
REFLECTIONS
Saved By Grace
Luke 12:13–21
Someone in the crowd asks Jesus to intervene in a family estate, which was an ordinary request to make of a respected teacher, since inheritance law was religious law and rabbis were regularly asked to divide property between brothers. Jesus declines the role and tells a story instead.
The parable assumes the world of a landowner whose fields have produced beyond capacity, a genuine problem in a region of uncertain rainfall where a bumper harvest arrived unpredictably and grain had to be stored in dry pits or barns to survive the year. Nothing the man does is illegal or even unusual; he builds bigger storage and calculates that his future is secure.
What the first hearers would notice is the conversation. He speaks only with himself, using the language of self-address that Wisdom writers put in the mouth of the fool, and there is no mention of labourers, neighbours, or the poor who gleaned at harvest. The word that undoes him is spoken by God, and the sentence the notes to Luke's Gospel render as being rich in what matters to God stands in deliberate contrast with the pile in the new barns. The same notes describe this whole section of Luke as a contrast between lives anchored in possessions and lives that know their dependence on God.
Pope Francis noted that Jesus refuses to arbitrate the inheritance and turns instead to the greed that exhausts a life, since a full harvest can create a false sense of security (see Angelus, 4 August 2019).