Now, I'm going to let our beloved Abbot Gueranger explain it. He does a far better job at than I do. He's commenting on the readings from St. Paul to the Romans, which we have been hearing the last few weeks:
'...man, unaided by grace, is incapable of producing perfect justice and absolute good. Experience has proved it, the fathers will, later on, unanimously assert it, and the Church, in her Councils, will define it. True, by the mere powers of his fallen nature, man may come to the knowledge of some truths, and to the practice of some virtues; but, without grace, he can never know, and still less observe, the precepts of even the natural law, if they are taken as a whole.
From Jesus and Jesus alone, comes all justice. Not only is supernatural grace in the sinner's soul, wholly from Him; but even that natural justice, of which men are so proud, and which they say is quite enough without anything else, soon leaves one who does not cling to Christ by Faith and love. Our modern world has a pompous phrase about 'the independence of the human mind'; let those who pretend to acknowledge no other but that, go one with their boasting of being moral and honest men; but, as to us Christians, we believe what our mother the Church teaches us; and, agreeably to such teaching, we believe that 'a moral and honest man'; that is to say, a man who lives up to all the duties which nature puts upon him, can only be such here below by a special aid of our Redeemer and Saviour Christ Jesus. With St. Paul, therefore, let us be proud of the Gospel; for, as he calls it, it is the power of God, not only to justify the ungodly, but also to enrich souls, that thirst after what is right, with an active and perfect justice. 'The just man liveth by faith' says St. Paul; and according to the growth of his faith, so is his growth in justice. Without faith if Christ, the pretension to reach perfection in good, by one's own power and works, produces nothing but the stagnation of pride and the wrath of God.'
GOSPEL (Luke XVI. 1-9.) At that time, Jesus spoke to his disciples this parable: There was a certain rich man who had a steward: and the same was accused unto him that he had wasted his goods. And he called him, and said to him: How is it that I hear this of thee? give an account of thy stewardship; for now thou canst be steward no longer. And the steward said within himself: What shall I do, because my lord taketh away from me my stewardship? To dig, I am not able: to beg I am ashamed. I know what I will do, that when I shall be removed from the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses. Therefore calling together every one of his lord's debtors, he said to the first: How much dost thou owe my lord? But he said: A hundred barrels of oil. And he said to him: Take thy bill, and sit down quickly, and write fifty, Then he said to another: And how much dost thou owe? Who said: A hundred quarters of wheat. He said to him: Take thy bill, and write eighty. And the Lord commended the unjust steward, for as much as he had done wisely: for the children of this world are wiser in their generations than the children of light. And I say to you: Make unto you friends of the mammon of iniquity, that when you shall fail, they may receive you into everlasting dwellings.
God is represented by the rich man; the steward is man, to whom God has confided the various goods of soul and body, of grace and nature: faith, intellect, memory , free will; and five senses, health, strength of body, beauty, skill and power over others, time and opportunity for good, temporal riches, and other gifts. These various goods of soul and body God gives us not as our own, but on loan to us to be used for His honor and the salvation of man. He will therefore demand the strictest account of us if we use them for sin, luxury, seduction, or oppression of others.
More Gueranger:
'For the fool, as well as for the wise man, the day will come when his soul will be required of him; and when the rich man, as well as the poor, will be brought before his Maker, exactly as he was on the day of his first entrance into the world, and it will be said to him: "Give an account of thy stewardship!" At that dread hour, the rule observed for the judgment will be that which our Lord revealed to us during His mortal life; "Unto whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required; and to whom they have committed much, of him they will demand the more." Woe to the steward who, disregarding the trust assigned to him, has done just what his own whim suggested with the goods of which he was only the dispenser! When the light of eternity shall be upon him, he will understand the error of his foolish pride. He will see the shameful injustice of a life which the world perhaps thought a very decent one, but which was spent without the slightest regard to God's intentions in giving him the riches of which he boasted. He will then be entirely deprived of them all; neither will it be then in his power to make a better use of them for the future---that is, a use more in accordance with the designs of God. It he might, at least, make some restitution for the goods he has abused! if he might sue for aid from those with whom he lived upon earth! But, NO! when time is over, labor is over too. He has nothing to show for all his riches; he is powerless; and when he goes before that dread tribunal, where every man is afraid that he cannot put his own accounts right, whom can he get to help him?'
We should remember these words spoken by our Lord: "Come to me, all ye who labor, and I will give you rest."
'Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service, you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already.'
- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
'Not only are we incapable, of ourselves, of doing any good work, but, without the help of grace, we cannot even have a thought of supernatural good. Now, the surest means for obtaining the help that is so needed by us to acknowledge humbly before God that we depend entirely upon Him; it is what the Church does in the Collect for this Sunday:
Grant us, O Lord, we beseech Thee, the spirit of always thinking what is right; and grant us mercifully the spirit of doing it: that we, who cannot subsist without Thee, may live according to Thee.
Strengthen me, O Lord, that I may not live according to the desires of the, flesh; but resist them firmly by the power of Thy Spirit, that I may not die the eternal death.
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