27 August 2026 - Thursday of the 21st even-numbered week
Homily
As the first reading of Mass, we begin today with Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, which will accompany us for several weeks. This letter tells us a great deal about the inculturation of the Gospel in the pagan world during the first generation of the Church. Corinth was an important seaport, a large cosmopolitan city with a Greek language and culture, where the most diverse currents of thought and religion clashed, sometimes with rather loose morals. For the first Christians of Corinth, who belonged to the lower classes of the population, living the Gospel in this context led them to encounter difficult situations and to face many questions. Paul set out to resolve these situations in the various Letters he wrote to the Corinthians, two of which have survived. (He had written at least one other before these two.) The few lines in today's text are simply a greeting, of the kind with which Paul usually begins these Letters: He gives thanks to God for their faith and perseverance.
As for today's Gospel, taken from one of the last chapters of Matthew's Gospel, it highlights one of the major challenges of the Christian life: that of remaining vigilant, persevering and faithful to the end. The house that God has entrusted to us and which we must not allow to be invaded by the evil spirit is certainly the Church and our community; but it is above all our own spirit, our own person, which we must watch over so that the enemy has no access to it. We are servants of the one who made himself the servant of all; and the Master expects to find us, at any moment, not only in our service clothes, but in the act of serving.
At this level, it would be wrong to try and find an opposition between action and contemplation, the active life and the contemplative life. Just as Jesus once said, ‘My Father is always at work and so am I’, here he is saying: ‘Blessed is the servant whom the master returns to find working’. We are not contemplative when we are not working, and certainly not simply because we are not working. We are contemplative when we are united to God in a profound relationship of love, which is best realised when we serve our sisters or brothers.
In the same way, being ‘vigilant’ does not mean being immobile and inactive, waiting for what may happen; it means being awake and active, totally given to the task that has been entrusted to us.
- Today, we celebrate the liturgical memory of Saint Monica, mother of Saint Augustine.