Why Do We Keep Score? God Gives Us a Full Cup

Are you envious because I am generous?

My mother used to have problems with some of my homilies,
and she used to say so,
"You are a bit light on judgment
and a bit heavy on love."
I would say, "God has more love than judgment."
She would go, "Yeah."
Then she would always end the argument,
"Yeah, but that one who gets in at the end of time,
who kind of just shows up with a conversion at the last moment,
I think that is just a bit unfair!"

I would defend, of course, with this scripture passage.
I said, "God's mercy and love is overwhelming.
It is incredibly generous.
He does not really measure us our way.
As the prophet Isaiah says,
God's ways are not our ways."

But truth be told,
there is a bit of my mother in me too.
I look at it that way sometimes too.
She used to say, "It is not fair.
We live a life of temperance and discipline all our life."
Then the guy who lived a life of debauchery,
at the last moment, has a conversion
and says, "Oh Lord, forgive me."
And they get in as well.

I said, "But no, this is the joy of living the gospel.
It is wonderful to be so enlightened all your life
that you know all you have is given by God."
They never got to know that.

I suppose, truth be told,
we all, in a sense, keep ledgers.
We all do a little bit of accounting.
That is exactly what these vineyard workers do.
They had a ledger inside themselves, an accounting, saying,
"Gosh, we bore the heat of the day,
and they have not done anything,
and they get the same as us."
But you see, we are looking at it
from the point of view of worker,
not from the point of view of God's mercy.

God gives you a full cup.
It is full.
How much more do you want?
It is full.
I give each of you a full cup.
Then each has a full cup.
You cannot take any more than a full cup.
The cup is full.
So it is with God's mercy.
There is nothing more you can add.
You already have the fullness of God.

So the idea that we want to hold back someone
is like somehow we measure out those
who have not worked as hard as us,
volunteered as much as us,
who do not seem to be there as much as us.
We are the ones bearing the heat of the day.
We have to find a way inside ourselves
to surrender that ledger, to let it go,
because that is the joy of the gospel:
to surrender our all for the sake of God.

Now, the great St. John of the Cross,
whom we celebrate especially here
because he is buried in this very building,
put it this way and
I have mentioned this quote many times before.
In particular he says,
"In the evening of our life,
we will be judged on how well we love."
That word love includes mercy, God's mercy.
That is what this first reading from Isaiah
is talking about this week.
We cannot understand God's mercy.
God's love is overwhelmingly generous.

God showers his love upon all of us
and fills up all our cups.
There is no measurement.
There is no counting with that.
God does not use the ledger to weigh in,
and therefore we cannot understand God's ways.

John of the Cross had this different way
to really understand that,
which he called todo, which was everything.
He said, "You have to go by way
of the path of nada, which is nothing."
So he says, "If you want to receive todo, everything,
you must enter into the path of nada,
which means you have to let go of everything.
You have to surrender your will to God's will."

Now, in theory, that sounds great in church.
Well, how much is enough?
When is enough, enough?
I think we have to get that into ourselves.
We think we have to do enough to get in at the end.

What will it look like for us?
We have to find a way to put away the ledger,
the accounting of other people's sins
or the ways other people have done us wrong.
That is not our worry.
God's mercy is big enough to cover them.
Worry only about receiving
and surrendering ourselves to God.
When we do that,
we let go of the need for the ledger,
and we embrace the gospel,
to live it as best we can on our way to heaven.

So we celebrate the great gift of John of the Cross.
He knew what poverty was.
His father was disinherited
because he married a simple weaver.
When his father died,
the family was left with nothing.
So John, his brother and his mother were homeless.
It was in this very city
that he sat before a cross
and experienced that poverty once more,
that he knew what it meant to have nothing.
He realized, when you have nothing, nada
you have open hands to receive everything, todo.

Today we follow that way,
and we surrender ourselves to God
so that our hands are open
to receive everything from God.

Are you envious because I am generous?