Mindless Christianity

The parable that our Lord tells in today’s Gospel seems a strange one. It almost sounds as if our Lord is saying that fraud and embezzlement are good things!

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The key verse is this:

For the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.

There are two aspects of this that are especially important:

First, our Lord is counseling us to be prudent and active. Too many of us practice mindless Christianity: we simply drift along through our lives without taking the initiative or taking the time and effort to think long and hard about how we can best be serving God and our sisters and brothers.

Our faith and our spirituality are too often purely habitual (for good or ill). We need to take the initiative, we need to seek God’s grace, we need to take the time to discern what can we be doing better in the service of our Lord.

Second, in this passage, our Lord is reminding us that we are not of this world, although we are in this world for a time. We are not like everybody else, nor should we be thinking and wanting to be like everybody else. We are children of the light. We are having eternal dwellings prepared for us. We serve God for God’s sake, not money for money’s sake or for our own comfort.

Don’t be mindless. Don’t be like everybody else.

Be proactive about the higher things.