27th Sunday 2025
Habakkuk 1:2-3, 2:2-4; 2 Timothy 1:6-8, 13-14; Luke 17:5-10
“We are useless servants: we have only done what was our duty.”
Three cheers for the new translation, which has corrected the carelessness of the Jerusalem Bible, which we formerly used. The JB often flowed more smoothly than the present translation, but it was sometimes slipshod.
This is a case in point. The Jerusalem Bible has “we are merely servants” which glosses over the actual text. The Greek word is achreioi meaning “useless”. In other words, not only are we “merely” servants: we are no good even as servants.
Thus, we are warned not to give ourselves airs but, perhaps more importantly, not to attribute any success to ourselves. On our own, we would achieve nothing: it is God who accomplishes the work, not us. All that we have is faith in God, and not reliance on our own efforts or our own virtue.
The prophet Habakkuk makes a similar point when he writes that the righteous shall live by their faith, something on which St. Paul insisted. When the latter speaks of “justification by faith”, he is not saying that we shouldn’t do good works: rather, he is making the point that these works come from God, so we shouldn’t claim the credit for them. Instead, we put our faith in God, who enables us to carry out the good works. Neither our own efforts, nor the keeping of the rules, can give life to ourselves or to others.
All of which leads me to a story which I have told more than once before, but for which I make no apology, as it deserves to be retold. It dates back to my first term in seminary, more than half a century ago.
When I entered the seminary in 1971, there was still a Junior Seminary on the same premises, and the priests on the staff of the latter would alternate with the Senior Seminary staff in presiding and preaching at Sunday Mass. Among the former was Fr. Tony Pearson, a priest of the Leeds Diocese who, in a Sunday homily, recalled the advice which he, as a young man about to enter the seminary, had been given by his parish priest.
It was only a few years ago that I discovered that the parish priest in question had been Fr. John O’Connor, who received GK Chesterton into the Church and on whose personality, though not his appearance, Chesterton based his priest-detective, Fr. Brown. No wonder he gave wise advice.
“Tony” he had said to the young Anthony Pearson. “When you go to Ushaw, there’ll be lots of things you’ve got to do, and lots of things you’ve not got to do, and if you do all the things you’ve got to do, and you don’t do all the things you’ve not got to do, then they’ll make you a bishop. And Tony, you’ll be no bloody good.”
It was long after Fr. Pearson’s time in Ushaw, and also after mine, that these words proved prophetic. There came a student who, apparently, kept every rule, not deviating by an iota from even the pettiest regulation. In vain, his fellow-students attempted to humanise him, even on one occasion sticking his head down the toilet and pulling the chain—not normal seminarian behaviour, I hasten to add, but a sign of desperation—but all to no avail. He remained an irredeemable model student, and in due course was made a bishop—not in this Diocese, I hasten to add.
Since then, he has fulfilled Fr. O’Connor’s prediction to the letter, being, as many believe, “no bloody good”. He has turned back the clock in his Diocese by several decades, unpicking the good work undertaken by his predecessor who, while always demonstrating deep pastoral concern, had also spent years working with priests and lay people to implement the vision of the Second Vatican Council.
I have not a shadow of doubt that this onetime model student is a very good and dedicated man, thoroughly devoted to the service of God, but he does appear to me to underline Jesus’ description of all of us as “useless” servants. If we rely on our own virtue, our own fulfilment, as we see it, of God’s will, we shall come unstuck, or perhaps we shall be too stuck for God to use us as He wishes. I am not implying that we should be anarchists, but that we must always be open to God’s leading us, because He alone knows what will bear fruit, whereas we are indeed “useless servants”.
