There is a wonderful correspondence in the themes of the Gospel and Epistle readings today. The Gospel, as we know, is all about obedience and faithfulness to the will of God. When the disciples in the Gospel reading decide to align themselves with the will of Jesus, suddenly the abundance of Heaven is poured out upon them by means of the miraculous catch of fish. Today's Epistle reading, on the other hand, gives us a lesson that is primarily about generosity and charity towards the poor. Paul exhorts his hearers, the Corinthian Church, to be generous, because with the generous God will be generous.
When giving charity to the poor, Paul exhorts them to sow their charity lavishly. Paul is borrowing the image of one who is sowing seed in a field. We know that in the first century sowing a field was done by broadcasting. You take a handful of seed and you just throw it without care concerning where it lands as long as it lands in the field. Paul is exhorting the Corinthians to be the same way in their charity towards the poor. Broadcast it. Just throw it. Don't be overly concerned about where it lands. The field that is heavily sowed will bear a lot of crop, but the field that is only lightly sowed will bear only a light crop.
This line of reasoning brings Paul to consider a particular verse from Psalm 112, as psalm that describes the activity and characteristics of the righteous or just man, the man that is pleasing to God, in other words. The verse Paul cites is, "Openhanded, he gives to the poor; his righteousness endures forever." The word that Paul uses is dikaiosyne, which can be translated from Greek into English as either justice or righteousness. Just as with all the other New Testament writers, when Paul quotes from the Psalms or other Old Testament texts, he quotes from the Greek translation known as the Septuagint, the version that was miraculously translated from Hebrew into Greek by seventy Jewish scholars in the fourth century B.C. The seventy scholars used the term dikaiosyne to translate the Hebrew term tzedakah. Tzedakah is indeed righteousness and justice according to God, but in Hebrew, it is also charity. To give tzedakah or to perform tzedakah means to give charity to the poor, while the noun tzaddik, which signifies the righteous man, automatically means one who cares for the poor.
It may be a surprise to us to see here that justice and charity are equated. After all, the concept of justice is normally defined as the virtue by which one renders to others what is their due, nor more and no less. Equating justice and charity is equivalent to saying that charity is due to the poor. All of this is highly reminiscent of Saint Ephrem the Syrian, who famously equates God's justice and mercy, arguing that in God these concepts are the same. We are simply not intelligent enough to understand how they are the same. In a similar way, we see that charity towards the poor is truly justice, not because the poor deserve our largess, but because God deserves it. In other words, what we do for others we do for God.
The Lord Jesus, in the Gospel According to Saint John, famously tells the Samaritan Woman, "God is Spirit, and those who would worship Him must worship in Spirit and in truth." God is Spirit is a way of expressing the idea that God does not have a body. God does not have hands and feet and ears and eyes. In the Incarnation, He took human nature, so that the human being is now His hands and feet and ears and eyes. Whatever we do, even what we do for others, we do only for God. This is a realization we have to grow into more and more over time.
One of the best things we can do to grow in this realization that is central to the Christian life is to prepare for each day carefully. If you are in the habit of preparing a to-do list at the beginning of each day, perhaps divide the list in half. List the things that must be done, and consider the fact that anything that you are doing, even those things that you are doing for others, you are doing for God. Offer your list as an act of love for God. Then, consider the virtues that you will need to perform the duties on your list well. Pray for those virtues and make resolutions to practice them, especially any that have been particularly challenging for you in the past.
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