25th Sunday 2025
Amos 8:4-7; 1Tim 2:1-8; Luke 16:10-13
Beware easy targets: take special care in front of open goals. Programmes of sporting bloopers are full of people shooting wide of empty nets, dropping undroppable catches, failing to score unmissable tries. I recall a Scottish striker rushing to tap the ball into the net, and somehow clearing it off the line; Shane Warne being regaled with chants of “What’s it like to drop the Ashes” after spilling a dolly of a catch in the crucial final Test of 2005; Don Fox missing the simplest of conversions in front of the posts, and thus handing the Rugby League Cup to the opposing team.
All of this occurs to me as I ponder today’s Readings. Surely, they are a gift to the preacher? All you have to do is to condemn the big bankers and the city slickers, the monopoly capitalists and the politicians who support them, the other politicians who fiddle their expenses, and the millionaires who, to the applause of sections of the press, use legal but immoral means to avoid paying their share of taxes; and you can sit down again, basking in a sense of virtue?
No, you can’t. You never can. The scriptures never make things that easy, because they demand self-examination; and the parable of the man who sees the speck in his brother’s eye whilst ignoring the log in his own always looms large.
What then is the log which obscures our vision here? the stumble which will keep the unguarded net intact? Is it not that same lack of self-awareness which so often blinds us to our own faults? How many of us who decry the greed of others nonetheless do business, for the sake of cheapness, with a company which is notorious for not paying its share of taxes and for treating its workers badly? How many of us vote for a party because it promises “wealth creation”—surely a euphemism for greed? Why does a majority of the population allegedly support the slashing of overseas aid on the grounds that we should “look after our own” while at the same time denouncing those who are dependent on benefits as scroungers, regardless of the battle for survival which so many endure?
It is fascinating that the main political parties are terrified of offending pensioners—and I speak as a pensioner myself who am extremely grateful for my pension, but who cannot see any justification for the triple lock, at a time when swathes of the younger generation struggle to make ends meet. It simply adds to the conviction that we baby boomers are selfish.
I wonder how many of the people who bemoan the decline of town centres—and is there anyone among us who hasn’t done that?—have contributed to that decline by our own shopping habits, first abandoning the high street in favour of cheaper out-of-town supermarkets, and then shifting again to shopping on line. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in changing our shopping habits, but we cannot then moan because town centre shops are closing—and do we ever pause to consider those who lose their livelihoods, whether shop workers, bank employees, or whoever, as a result of our actions?
Before the 1997 General Election, the Bishops of England and Wales produced an excellent document entitled “The Common Good”, not telling people how to vote, but pointing to the moral factors which voters should consider. It was immediately denounced by the then editor of the Times, himself a Catholic, as being “economically illiterate”. What have we come to when Catholics place economics above moral justice? What price the Gospel if even we begin to think in those terms. DO WE?
Incidentally, a couple of days ago, I came across a couple of snippets from the forthcoming biography of the Pope, based on interviews with him. In them, Leo expresses regret that some Catholics place economic considerations above the demands of justice—so at least I got that part right.
