The Great Trades

Tuesday of the Eighth Week in Course 2025

The wisdom book we have in Greek called Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus (since the early churches used it so often) reads like the book of Proverbs. Today’s proverbs regard offerings to God. Our sacrifices to God, in the spirit of the second-Temple Jews, should go along with our abstention from wickedness, and be given with a smile. Consider this advice: “Give to the Most High as he has given, and as generously as your hand has found”. God, the Most High, has given us everything we own, so generosity in His service is only just. We are also counseled never to sacrifice as if we were offering God a bribe. God doesn’t need anything. He wants our love and obedience, not because we are making up something He is lacking. He wants our love and willful service because doing so is very good for us.

Psalm 50, sung frequently in the Temple during the life of Jesus and even later, is a kind of dramatic poem. In it, we hear God calling His people to judgement, much as Jesus will do to all of us on the last day. God reminds His people of the covenant made with them at Sinai, with the offering of blood from the animals of their desert herds. The psalm reminds the people that the Almighty needs nothing, and indeed that He already owns all the beasts of the forest and cattle on the hills. For God the sacrifice of thanksgiving is enough. That’s a sacrifice of bread and win offered in the Temple by a person who has been rescued from a terrible fate.

In the last part of this psalm, God says to the wicked who bring sacrifices, “what right have you to recite my commandments or take my covenant drink on your lips? You hate discipline and run around with thieves. You lie with your tongue and slander your brother. And you keep doing it because I was silent. But now I lay my indictment before you.” Good is good and evil is evil. We must, especially as we go into Lent tomorrow, repent of our sins of injustice, either to God or to other humans.

Today’s Gospel pericope is a logical follow-up on yesterday’s story of the man invited by Jesus to leave everything and follow him. Peter must think he’s reminding his Master that he and the other apostles have themselves left everything to follow Him. The Greek reads he “began to say” what they have abandoned for Jesus. But Jesus picks up on Peter’s cue and lists the people and things left behind: oikia, adelphos, adelphoi: house, brothers, sisters; metera, patera, tekna, agros: mother, father, children, lands. And then He reminds them of the goal, the end for which they are doing all that: “for my sake and the Gospel.” Finally, He tells them the exchange in this life, a hundredfold of everything listed before, except fathers. They have only one Father. The substitute is “persecutions,” diogmon. Then, the best part, aionion zoen, eternal life, which we know is union with the Trinity, up close and personal.

It looks for all human purposes like a trade down, does it not? But the big “trade down” was made by the Son of God, who emptied Himself of His deserved power and glory when He took up human nature, the humanity we all share. His first crib was a feed-box, because He came offering His flesh and blood as our food and drink. He associated with the lowliest of His society, loose women and tax-collectors. In the end, He went willingly to His death, and in the struggle on the cross and in the nether world He defeated sin and death and rose from the dead and ascended to the right hand of His Father, having earned His title as Lord, God and Savior, so that all humanity could rise with Him to eternal life. He traded down so that we could engage in the most remarkable, divine trade-up. All we need to do is believe in Him, trust Him, and sacramentally unite with Him. Take the trade!