The Gift of Himself

Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

I remember hearing on the radio, early one morning many years ago, a brother Jesuit provide a commentary on this Sunday’s Gospel reading which is all about how those labourers hired at the last hour get paid the same amount as those hired at the first hour. Those who had worked longest grumbled at the fact that they got the same amount as those who had worked for the shortest period of time. “And who can blame them?”, we might say!  

What I heard on the radio that morning long ago was so memorable it has stayed with me ever since. As I recall, our commentator said simply this: they get paid the same because Jesus is conveying the point that God has only one reward to give and that is the gift of himself. He can’t give more or less of himself; he can only give himself.  

The fact that he gives us himself is not easy to get our heads around. It means that by his gift, by his grace, he is so close to us, very present to us: he is with us and we are with him. Elsewhere in the Gospels, especially in John’s Gospel, Jesus conveys the intimacy of this relationship using a number of images. That of the vine and the branches in chapter 15 is one. We are united with him in the way the vine is one with the branches: “I am the vine; you are the branches”. The bread of life in chapter 6 is another image. “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him”, he says. Or there’s that scene in chapter 20 after the resurrection when Jesus appears to the disciples who are locked away in the upper room and he breathes on them, saying “Receive the Holy Spirit”. It’s as though his disciples breathe with his breath. As St Augustine wrote, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves.  

That he should be so close, so present is almost too wonderful to conceive. And perhaps that’s it. We try most of the time to grasp the meaning of our faith with our heads and that is important. But sometimes we need to use a different faculty to grasp in a different kind of way who he is for us and we are for him and to let ourselves be struck with wonder rather in the way that we look at a picture in an art gallery and are bowled over by its beauty or listen to a piece of music and recognise a truth that can’t easily be put into words. And if we use words, then we may need to use poetry to convey what we want to say about this presence as RS Thomas, the Welsh Anglican priest, did in this poem: 

But the silence in the mind 
is when we live best, within 
listening distance of the silence 
we call God. This is the deep 
calling to deep of the psalm- 
writer, the bottomless ocean 
we launch the armada of 
our thoughts on, never arriving. 

It is a presence, then, 
whose margins are our margins; 
that calls us out over our 
own fathoms. What to do 
but draw a little nearer to 
such ubiquity by remaining still? 

 There’s no room here for grumbling; only deep gratitude! 

Fr Michael Holman SJ