Unnecessaried

A Homily for the 24th Sunday of Ordinary Time 2026

My life is meaningful, but it’s not necessary.

Your life is meaningful, but it’s not necessary.

And that, believe it or not, is the Good News this 24th Sunday of Ordinary Time!

As one theologian reminds us: God’s creative act is always meaningful, but never necessary. So, as God’s creatures our very existence is imbued with meaning, but we are not necessary. Reflect on that a bit. God did not have to create you. God did not have to create the universe. God chose in freedom to create so all creation bears a depth of ever-burgeoning meaning. And it’s this meaning we were created to live into and out of, not necessity.

The theologian, Walter Kasper, once envisioned our faith lives as a movement out of a Logic of Exchange (a merely transactional/necessity driven existence) toward the Economy of Gift (a life lived boldly out of the deep meaning with which we are each freely imbued). And the engine that drives that movement is Mercy.

So, to allow ourselves to be moved from a life burdened by necessity to a life liberated by wild, unexpected meaning we need to practice mercy as the mode by which we are moved. And this is what it means to be Unnecessaried.

You see, a merely transactional/necessity driven life always does one thing and the same: It reduces reality to utility. It reduces our neighbors to utility. It reduces all creation to utility. Where everything and everyone is measured by their usefulness. To me that is the fundamental sin of humankind. We will always reduce ourselves to something less than what we are in God’s eyes, even if that means bloating ourselves into something more in human eyes. A life structured by necessity will always need to define, categorize, measure, limit, judge, and eventually, dismiss reality, the reality of the self, the other, creation, and even the Reality of God.

Sirach warns us today about the human drive to “hug tight” anger and wrath; to “nourish” it, and “cherish” it. Notice Sirach’s choice of words: hug, nourish, cherish. They all are words that usually point to human flourishing, yet we can tend to warp them to our own wrongly directed ends if we live a life under necessity.

A simple definition of necessity is: The state of being required, essential or completely unavoidable. It conjures up words like pressure, compulsion, coercion, impossibility and imposition. To live from that “state of being” makes us into people who find a strangely sick satisfaction in hugging wrath, nourishing vengeance, and cherishing hate. Living under the have to of necessity will always lead to dehumanizing ourselves and our brothers and sisters, and to the depletion of creation’s fundamental meaning.

Peter, in our gospel today, manifests this in what may appear a more innocuous form: “How many times must I forgive? Seven times?” That questions is founded on, and flounders by necessity, and the reduction of human relationship to being merely transactional. And Jesus wants to desperately unnecessary Peter with his response: “I say to you seventy-seven times,” representing the kind of infinity broken open by Mercy, the kind of infinity that Mercy can awaken in our own souls imbued with eternal meaning.

But, like Peter, will we allow ourselves to be Unnecessaried by God? And that means we have to reacquaint ourselves with an old friend I know I’ve preached about before: Splagchnizomai, to be gut-wrenched by the movement of Mercy in us, the revelation of compassion at the heart of the meaning that holds us.

Notice, in the gospel parable today, how the King relents in his transactional demand on the servant to pay up, when the servant pleads for mercy. The King freely chooses to flee from a frame created by the logic of exchange and hurls himself headlong into the economy of gift. But also note how the act of mercy won’t force transformation on the other. The servant remains unmoved by the mercy shown him, he is too protected by the lie of necessity, so he cannot show mercy to his fellow human being. We too remain free to choose.

To be Unnecessaried by God is to undergo the gut-wrench of compassion and let it change you. But just as God’s creative act is always free, we are always free to choose whether or not we’ll let mercy move us into a new mode of being in this world.

God’s creative act is always meaningful, but not necessary. You and I are meaningful, but not necessary. So, let’s allow mercy to move us out of necessity into the meaning that sets us, and others, free.