We Have Received Everything

Simone Riva - The conclusion of this Sunday’s Gospel raises a profound question about what has been given and entrusted to us.

“To everyone who has been given much, much will be asked; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be required.” (Lk 12:48)

This is how the passage ends—prompting us to ask what, exactly, has been given and entrusted to us.

Jesus says it plainly: “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Lk 12:32). From the beginning, the Church understood that “Kingdom of God” identifies the very person of the Son—the Christ—as Pope Francis emphasizes:

“The central theme of Jesus’ Gospel is the Kingdom of God.
Jesus is the Kingdom of God in person; he is Emmanuel—God-with-us. And it is in the heart of man that the Kingdom, the lordship of God, is established and grows. The Kingdom is, at the same time, a gift and a promise. It has already been given to us in Jesus, but it has yet to be fulfilled in its fullness. Therefore, every day we pray to the Father: ‘Thy Kingdom come.’”
—Pope Francis, Message for the 29th World Youth Day

God’s gift is his Son, so that we can understand “much” as everything: we have been given everything. Yet how often do we actually live from the awareness that we have received everything? And how often, instead, do we fixate on the consequences—on “much will be asked” and “much more will be required”—which distract us from amazement at what we have been given and fill us with anxiety about what we can repay?

What comes first is the gift itself; it is the reason we are told, “Do not be afraid.” We need not fear, even knowing we are a “small flock.”

Certainty does not arise from what we can preserve, repay, or achieve—nor from the number of those who join the flock—but from the unwavering preference of the One who gave himself completely, an act that precedes every other initiative. Every action, every response, every stirring of the heart must reckon with that before of the gift.

For many, summer is a chance to look at reality anew, leaving room for wonder at what is not our doing—what comes before all our works. Often the sky becomes our first and greatest ally in this, as on the feast of St. Lawrence, so vividly evoked by Giovanni Pascoli in X Agosto:

“And you, Heaven, from the heights of the worlds,
serene, infinite, immortal,
oh! flood this opaque atom of Evil
with a shower of stars!”

From the start, God’s method has been a flood of graces and gifts—offered with such discretion that they can be ignored, yet endowed with a magnetism singularly fitted to the human heart. The true “opacity of Evil,” then, is this: to have received everything—to be flooded with a “shower of stars,” to know we exist and can address Heaven as a friend—and still to flee into the arms of what we call the “concrete” without being moved to the depths.

This is why the sky exists with its stars that will shine and fall tonight. This is why the sun will rise tomorrow, why the air will stir with its caresses, and why the sea will heave in its waves. For one reason alone: so that a person may rise with the expectation of that burst of life born of the correspondence between the heart and all that has been received as a gift. And that comes first.