Homily: August 30, 2025, Saturday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time (Work Hard)

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 “Aspire to live a tranquil life, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your own hands, as we instructed you.” 

This is exactly what I desire for my own life, a tranquil, serene, peaceful life. And I believe many of us long for the same too. St. Paul repeatedly encourages the Christian community to live in peace, to engage in meaningful work, and to live in harmony with one another, respecting a healthy privacy and space for others.

One common misunderstanding among the early Christians was about the Second Coming of Christ. Many believed that Christ’s return was imminent, so close that it would happen within their lifetime. Because of this anticipation, some thought that working to upkeep livelihood or planning for their children’s future were pointless.

And in some sense, it is practical. If you knew that everything you are working for would soon be useless, that your life would be totally transformed and all your property would be valueless, would you still work? Work for the sake of meeting material need would seem logically unnecessary, wouldn’t it?

At that time, the theology about the end of time was still developing. No one truly understood what Jesus really meant and many people took His words literally and expected His return to be immediate.

More than two thousand years later, we read Scripture with a broader perspective, and Bible scholars have now put everything Jesus taught in totality. We therefore now know that the end of time will not happen, Jesus will not return yet, until the Gospel has been preached to all nations.

So, what do we do while waiting? Do we then go ahead to enjoy life’s pleasures since it might be a long time away before end time?

No. Paul’s advice is still largely relevant to us today: “Aspire to live a tranquil life, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your own hands.”

To live a life which is not disturbed by temptations to forget God, to work with our own hands and not expect others to work for our benefit, and work not for worldly gains, but to make effort at preaching the Gospel to where it has not been preached, so that we can participate in the mission of Christ, to speed up His coming again, and to all enter the Kingdom of God when the time is here.

Jesus said in John 9:4: “We have to do the works of the One who sent me while it is day. Night is coming when no one can work.”

We are given another day, another chance. Let us aspire a tranquil life, rooted in God’s peace, while working hard for His Kingdom.

Amen.


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“The kingdom of God will be taken away from you  and given to a people that will produce its fruit.” We are now in harvesting season. Many months before this, we were planting and pruning, now we see the results, the fruits, the produce. Our two readings today are also about producing and harvesting fruits. In the first reading the vineyard produced wild grapes instead of good grapes. What went wrong? If the vineyard owner had done everything right, and yet the vineyard brought forth wild grapes, then the problem must have been the soil? Yet it was a land set on the fertile hillside. There is nothing the vineyard owner could do than to let it waste and be cursed. In the Gospel, the story is not about the soil which could not produce, but the tenants who refused to give the produce back to the vineyard owner. What went wrong? The produce must have been good, and the tenants might have become greedy, and wanted to keep all the harvest to themselves and even planned to kill to take ov...
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