Fr. Mike's Gospel Reflection for - Sunday, November 16, 2025

Don’t you hate it when people cheat and succeed? Or when a team wins because a referee makes a bad call? Or when a bully takes advantage of another person or of a situation? When these things happen, we are likely to call out, “That’s not fair!” Human beings love a fair process and despise cheaters. Fairness helps us to cooperate with one another. Without cooperation, we would fail. So, when children whine, “That’s not fair,” it’s because our brains are wired to find fairness uplifting and to find self-serving behavior unpleasant.

That’s why many of you will cheer when you hear these words in the First Reading, “The day is coming…when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble” and were even happier to hear that “The Lord comes to rule the earth with justice.” Paul reminds us and the Thessalonians that, in a fair process, people who do the same work should get the same reward. He tells the Church that “if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should he eat.” No one likes free loaders. It’s not fair if some people work hard while others don’t do anything.

I’m sure that the Jews who heard Jesus predict the destruction of the Temple thought that life wasn’t fair. They were already under the control of the Romans, now they hear that their Temple will be destroyed. Yet, Jesus wasn’t trying to upset them as much as to encourage them to look beyond the stones of the structure to what really matters. Instead of focusing all of their attention on the temple, they needed to keep things in perspective and to realize that their relationship with him and God the Father was far more important than a building.

Buildings will come and go, our lives here on earth will be a mix of fairness and unfairness, of joy and tragedy. For the most part, we can’t control that and we certainly can’t change the past. But we can control our eternal future by focusing on eternal life with God. We need to focus NOW. It will do us no good to cry, “That’s not fair!” when we are turned away from heaven at the end of our lives. Let’s pray for the grace to move forward together toward an eternity that will be perfectly loving, perfect peaceful, and perfectly fair.

Fr. Mike