7th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Imagine that you have just won the lottery – a cool R100 000. The next day, you are driving to the store, and when you get to the parking lot, it is choca-block, nowhere to park. You roam all over the parking lot until finally a space opens up – now you like reverse parking because it’s easier to get out. But as you are lining up into the space, a car darts in and gets there before you. It is an old battered Nissan sunny, and as the woman gets out, you see that she is unapologetic, perhaps you even discern a sly smile on her face at having beaten you to the parking space. Later in the store, as you queue up by the checkout, as luck would have it, you find yourself right behind the same person who stole your parking, who is studiously avoiding eye contact with you. As you study this woman more closely, you can see that her clothes are rather worn, and her handbag looks really shabby. Her trolley is full of the bare essentials, no luxuries like icecream or biscuits. As the cashier rings up her total, she inserts her bank card to pay, but it is declined. She asks the cashier if she can try the card again and again it is rejected. By this time, the woman is clearly very embarrassed, perhaps even a bit desperate. She tells the cashier to try and charge half the money on her card, and she will pay the rest in cash. The cashier does this and the payment for half the amount owed goes through. By this time people behind you in the queue are becoming agitated with this woman who is holding up everything. Now the woman is furiously rummaging through her old worn leather handbag, looking for enough loose change to pay the remaining R1 200 of what she owes. The woman pulls out two dirty R20 notes and hands it over to the cashier, and goes back to rummaging in her handbag, more to save face than with any real hope of finding any other money in there. But instead of feeling a sense of schadenfreude, you feel sorry for this woman and feeling flush from your recent windfall, you offer to cover the shortfall of R1 160. The woman is torn between her pride and her desperation, but finally the desperation wins out and she accepts your generous offer.

I think this story illustrates what our gospel is all about today. This story is not only a story about loving your enemies and doing good to those who hurt you. It also illustrates where the motivation to do so comes from. The reason you felt that you could offer to pay for this woman’s groceries who had stolen your parking was because you felt flush with money. Your lottery winnings injected some liquidity into your life that made you feel that instead of life owing you something, you actually owed life something. I want to liken the lottery money to God’s love, the gratuity of God’s love. When Jesus talks about a God who is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked, Jesus is referring to this gratuity of God’s love, that God sets no limits on God’s love, does not decide who is worthy of God’s love and who is not. As the beloved children of God who have experienced this bountiful love, we are asked to go into the world and inject the world with a shot of this totally unmerited love. Now if we only love those who love us, Jesus says, what good is that? It is no good, because loving those who love you doesn’t witness to the gratuity of God’s love. It does not get us out of the transactional way of being in relationship. The only thing that witnesses to God’s gratuitous love is when you love those who “don’t deserve it,” your enemies, those who have hurt and snubbed you, or who at the very least have done nothing to you to warrant a good turn from you. Instead of paying back love, we are called to “Pay it Forward.” This is so important, because our world is so starved of love, so based on a transactional way of approaching relationship that the system has seized up, there is so little social capital that we are constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, there is so little trust. There are too many people walking around thinking that they are owed something by life. They live by the dictum that there is no such thing as a free lunch. There is actually, and it’s called God’s love.

I think that a good metaphor for what Jesus is trying to get us to do here can be drawn from the financial crash of 2008. Now if I have understood it correctly, the global financial system needs liquidity in order for it to function – liquidity is literally the liquid cash that oils the machinery of the global financial system and ensures that it runs smoothly. What happened in the global financial crash of 2008 was that the liquidity dried up. Not only were banks less liquid because they had all this bad debt on their hands from the sub-prime mortgage crisis, they were also much less willing to lend out the little liquidity they had because there was no longer any confidence in the system. If you lent out money, you were not sure of getting it back. So what did the central banks do in response? They stepped in with a huge bail-out, a huge injection of liquidity into the system, to get the wheels and cogs of the system oiled again. Now suddenly, the banks could start lending to each other again, and once more there could be trust in the system, money could begin to flow because in a way, the central bank had underwritten all that bad debt with this bailout. This I think is what Jesus is trying to get us to do. He is telling us that the bailout has already been given – God has underwritten all the bad debts owed to us, so we need to stop walking around as if others, life, the universe owe us something. We need to start acting like people who realize that we owe life something, we owe God something, and what we owe God is to pay it forward, to witness to this same gratuitous love that we have received from God. If we are able to do this we will, by our acts of love, inject liquidity into the system and hope oil the wheels and the cogs of the world so that it can become a more trusting place.

This love is necessary, not only to convert the hardened hearts of people who are downright mean, but it is also necessary to heal broken relationships that are broken because each person thinks that they are owed something by the other. In a typical marriage relationship, each spouse thinks that they have to do their fair share, 50%, in order to keep the marriage working well. However, we often over-estimate our own contribution to a relationship and so while we may think that we are contributing 50%, maybe we are only actually doing 40%. If our partner has also overestimated their own contribution and is also only giving 40%, the relationship as a whole is 20% short. Both spouses know that the relationship is coming up short because it simply isn’t working, but both spouses assume that it is the other person’s fault and therefore live with constant resentment towards their partner. One of the ways to solve this problem is for each partner to do just a bit more than what they think is actually their fair share. If each spouse gives 60%, then there is a surplus to cover shortcomings when one or both spouses overestimate their contribution. If each actually does give 60%, then there is a surplus to be paid forward, to give to other people who have decided that the world is an unforgiving, dog-eat-dog world.

This same logic applies not only to marriage relationships, but to all our relationships. To go back to the story that I began with, what if this woman really and honestly didn’t realize that she was stealing your parking and that mischievous smile on her face that you thought you saw afterwards was just in your imagination? What if she was just so wrapped up in her worries about how she would make ends meet and feed her family that week that she just didn’t see you lining up to take the parking. She was not really your enemy then, you just perceived her like that. Your winning the lottery gave you that extra liquidity of love necessary to move beyond that perceived or actual slight and do what God was calling you to do that day.

Now when we decide to pay it forward, we don’t know how that gesture will be received, if it will be thrown back in our face, if the people we pay it forward to will pay it forward in their turn, or simply take it as their due. As a result of your generosity in the store, maybe that woman will go back and be a better mother to her children, be a kinder colleague at work, or maybe not. All we can do is to take the risk, by reaching out, perhaps to a colleague at work who has always had it in for us, and surprise them with a good turn. How they respond to our generosity is out of our hands. Just as it was out of the hands of Jesus and God how people would respond to his immense love that culminated in the cross. Coming to mass and spending time in prayer are the equivalent of winning the lottery, because our hearts are filled with this immense love of Jesus that we should then allow to overflow out of our hearts to others.

Questions for reflection

1. Are my friendships/relationships with family members/work colleagues transactional or gratuitous?
2. Are there any network of relationships in my life where the cogs have “seized up” and need an injection of liquidity?
3. What unexpected act of love can I do this week? What little bit extra can I do to go from 50% to giving 60%?