25 October 2025 – Saturday of the 29th week (odd years)
Homily
Nowadays, there are so many accidents and disasters like those mentioned in the first part of this Gospel that I don't think anyone is inclined to think that the victims of these events are sinners whom God wanted to punish. We are perhaps more inclined to say, when something painful or serious happens to us: ‘What have I done to God for this to happen to me?’ This is obviously a mistaken way of imagining God, for whom evil is not something to be explained, but to be eliminated. Thus, when a man born blind was brought to Him and He was asked whether this man was born blind because of his own sins or those of his parents, Jesus refused to answer the question and simply healed the blind man.
The second part of the Gospel text we have just read shows us another aspect of God's attitude towards evil, or at least the absence of good. God is patient – much more so than we are. In our efforts to acquire a particular virtue that we lack – patience, for example – we easily conclude after a few failures that we will not succeed and we give up. Obviously, the same is true with regard to others. After seeing them display a particular aspect of their character for some time, we can no longer conceive of them any other way, and we fail to see the perhaps barely perceptible but real progress they are making.
This is all the more serious because God wanted our own growth to depend to a large extent not only on the trust He has in us and the trust we have in ourselves, but also on the trust others have in us. He has given us all the power to bind and loose. When we say of a person, ‘he or she are like this and will never change,’ we bind them, we freeze them in the present moment and forbid them to grow. When, despite negative appearances, we believe that each person is different and fundamentally better than all their actions, we loose them and allow them to grow, not only in our own eyes, but in their own eyes and in God's eyes.
When we become discouraged about our ability to improve in a particular area, or about the inability of our brothers and sisters to do so, let us give ourselves – and them – another year, like the vineyard owner in our Gospel!
Armand VEILLEUX