A homily for the Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time, November 5, 2023
Mal 1:14b-2:2b, 8-10, 1 Thes 2:7b-9, 13, Mt 23:1-12
The DoorDash food-delivery service made somewhat unwanted headlines recently when its app started nudging customers to leave its drivers a tip with the extortion-like suggestion that, if the customer didn’t pay a gratuity, their food might arrive late and cold.
Frankly, I think the suggestion was cold.
Begging — or demanding — that a tip is necessary as part of the service merely reveals that the DoorDash drivers are not being paid a fair wage for the work they’re doing.
In fact, as the father of two former restaurant servers who relied on tips to help pay their North Jersey rents, I agree with the many social justice warriors who would abolish the whole procedure in favor of better steady pay.
As it is in Europe and at enlightened upscale restaurants in New York City.
And right now I’m not going to lay out the whole history of tipping, or its current — annoying — omnipresence, because that would turn into a long, flaming rant. (I will take a moment to point out that the notion of “TIPS” as an acronym for “to insure prompt service” is an urban legend. A tip as a bonus preceded what we know as restaurants by centuries.)
Nonetheless, please tip generously when the service genuinely warrants.
It’s been said, if you want to know someone’s character, watch how they treat servers and hosts and bussers when you dine out. To take that one step further, observe how people engage with grocery and retail cashiers, bus or taxi drivers, public works employees, disabled or developmentally challenged workers, and other laborers, especially construction workers and landscapers. And so, so many others toiling and sweating for their daily bread.
All of them are children of God. All of them were created in God’s image and likeness.
All of them deserve human dignity.
All of them are proof there’s dignity in work. Any sort of work.
That’s a key takeaway from today’s Gospel. As we all were cattle-prodded into realizing during COVID, the humble folks among us are among the most essential. The people all too many of us look down on are the bedrock of our society.
They don’t need parades and 7 o’clock blaring of trumpets and banging of pots — and maybe they never did — but they still need our appreciation, always. And they need fair compensation and a safety net.
We all know what that means. Ideally, we all know what to do. Today’s Gospel is clear.
Our companion passage from Malachi, though, takes a little more pondering.
According to Malachi, God is a major crankypants in demanding homage or else. In this passage, God reminds all of the Chosen People to have no gods before him, and in particular, God is thoroughly miffed at the priests of the people for setting themselves up as high holy potentates.
In other words — and to quote a Franciscan sister’s favorite line from my grammar school days — God is going to knock them down a peg or two if they don’t act more humbly and obediently.
God’s message in Malachi is the same as the point of Matthew, just delivered according to the spiritual maturity level of the different audiences.
The Israelites, with their contractual vision of God’s role in their lives, needed a carrot-and-stick relationship to understand what God demanded — and still demands. Usually, it was less carrot and more stick, often a lot more stick. Just ask Noah or Job or Lot.
A whole lot (no pun intended) of “Or Else.”
The followers of Jesus the Christ, conversely, are offered a vision of how things are and how things can be. As chronicled by Matthew, those in the first century and we in the 21st learn about the consequences of arrogance and the glories of humility, and they/we are invited to do the right thing.
We can serve those who serve us, honor who they are and what they do, advocate for their just treatment at all times, and embrace them in any and all appropriate ways as fellow pilgrims and children of God.
We thereby can choose to do what’s right, and set the world aright.
