OMELIE / Omelie EN

21 set 2025

21/09/2025 - 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

21/09/2025 - 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

First Reading Am 8:4-7 from Psalm 112 Second Reading 1 Tim 2:1-8 Gospel Lk 16:1-13

St Paul insists to his faithful disciple Timothy that it is necessary for Christians to pray. He strongly urges him to exhort them to pray “wherever they are” with “all kinds of prayers, supplications and thanksgiving”. They must pray for everyone, and especially ‘for kings and all those in authority,’ because peace and serenity among peoples depend on them, as does the possibility for believers to lead a peaceful life while continuing their service of proclaiming the Gospel to the world.

This is precisely what the world needs, because when the Gospel arrives, people can begin a journey of true peace, solidarity, communion, attention to one another, and therefore also dignified progress for all. Prayer is the basis of every beneficial action and must precede every other intervention: it is from the Lord, in fact, that we can receive the humble, meek and wise Spirit who makes our presence and our activity fruitful.

The object of our prayer is God's desire for us. By praying, we attune ourselves to him, to his plans, to his love for all men: for he ‘wants all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth’. Jesus is the author of the salvation desired by God: he is ‘the mediator between God and humankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all.’ By praying, we attune ourselves to him.

It is from the Spirit of the Lord that we receive the light and wisdom to be detached from earthly things, indeed, to use them in view of the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus alludes to this in his parable. He has already spoken several times with his disciples and with the crowds about the danger of riches, which can become a temptation and an obstacle to faith, and therefore to the seriousness of life and the joy of man.

This is a difficult subject to understand, especially for a mentality that considers those who manage to accumulate wealth to be particularly blessed by God. The Jewish mentality of that time was no different from the one that continues to win the hearts of all men today, including ours. Jesus knows this, and that is why he insists on addressing this subject in many ways.

To some, it may seem that by telling the parable of the dishonest steward, Jesus wants to praise cunning and dishonesty. If we pay attention to the conclusion he draws, we understand instead that Jesus wants his disciples to use the riches of this world with spiritual cunning. And the cunning that is needed is to seek not to accumulate riches for a well-being that will end, but to think about securing a holy future after death.

As long as we think of using riches for our material well-being, these riches are dishonest with us; they deceive us, because they will not come with us beyond the boundary of life: then they will leave us alone and empty. They also deceive us because, instead of giving us joy, they bring us only a little pleasure accompanied by many worries, and they empty our hearts and ruin our relationships with both family and friends.

We must use our riches now so that they will be useful to us later. If we use them to benefit the poor, we will have joy, but then these very poor people, when they arrive in the kingdom of heaven, will testify in our favour before God and recommend us to him. The poor who benefit from us are the true riches that will accompany us into eternal dwellings.

Furthermore, if we are faithful to God in the use of earthly goods—and we are faithful to him if we do not make them an idol, but a sign of his love for the weakest—then he will trust us with important services in his Kingdom. In fact, in the Church we appreciate people who have chosen poverty: we willingly listen to them and pay attention to them. The sensitivity of the prophet Amos is just like ours.

When we think of the saints, the first ones that come to mind are those who gave everything to the poor and became poor themselves, or rather, abandoned themselves to the providence of the Father. In this way, they were witnesses to his fatherhood, to the beauty and security of Jesus, to the depth of the Holy Spirit. And their prayer cannot fail to be pleasing to the Father: he willingly answers it.