God's Economy

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Sts. Timothy and Titus,

from today’s Gospel:

The measure with which you measure will be measured out to you, and still more will be given to you. (Matthew 4:24)

God is greater than any idea we can have of him, and so when we speak of the qualities of God we must realize that our words and our notions are woefully inadequate and can only faintly point to a reality which is greater than any reality and far beyond even the notion of reality.

Nonetheless, being people who think with words and ideas, that is all we have to use when we want to reflect on God. (It is far better to just sit in silence and awe and behold the incomprehensible, but many people are unable to do this in their own journey of spiritual development.)

Why do I write in such a way today? Because I am going to make a statement about God and I must do it with humility, knowing that God far surpasses anything that I might try to say. And with all that being said, this is my statement: Our God is a God of superabundance. God’s storehouse of goodness, and riches, and blessings, and grace far surpasses anything we can imagine or conceive of. And today, in this one sentence from the Holy Gospel, Jesus makes a statement which tries to translate for us the sense of abundance and superabundance that He experiences since He is God. And this one sentence is His translation: The measure with which you measure will be measure out to you, and still more will be given to you.

That, my friends, is God’s economy and it blows our own notions of economy right out of the water. I don’t know about you, but I do know that when I think of economy in a purely human sense, I think about scarcity, about greed and about injustice. God’s economy has nothing at all to do with that. One thing about the statement that Jesus makes is that it is meant to challenge us to participate in God’s economy.

If you give, you will receive far more than you give.

When you forgive, you will be forgiven far more than you forgave.

When you are compassionate, God’s compassion towards you will overflow upon you.

When you are self-sacrificing, well, God has already shown us the fullest meaning of self-sacrifice, and it was done for us.

When you give your life in service of God, you come to know God’s service of you in an unending wealth of experiences, insights, blessings, graces and satisfaction.

And what about the statement that follows the sentence I have quoted? from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.

This statement can sound unjust to us, and I know I have struggled with it for many years. But I have come to see it this way:

When you act out of scarcity, when you are stingy or miserly, when you do not practice compassion, when you are severe in your judgments and condemnations, when you live for yourself alone, well then, you cut yourself off from God’s economy and cannot receive due to your own fault.

I don’t know if this satisfies you, but it is the only understanding the Holy Spirit has allowed me to reach at this time in my own journey. If it makes sense to you, then take care what you hear. (this is the beginning of Mark 4:24).

God bless you abundantly!