18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

There is a story told of a wandering hermit who having walked all day in a forest came to a small village on the outskirts of the forest. Just as the sun was setting, a man from the village appeared and said that he had been told by an angel to go and see hermit who would be on the outskirts of the village and would give him a great treasure. The hermit said “Ah the angel must have been talking about this rock that I found yesterday in the forest” and the hermit proceeded to take out of his knapsack the biggest diamond the man had ever seen. He handed it over to the man and told him he could keep it, as he had no use for it. The man went home with great joy, and put the diamond away in a safe place in his home. But that whole night he could not sleep a wink, and he kept getting up at night to change the hiding place of the diamond, scared that someone might come and steal it from him. Having not slept at all that night, in the early hours of the morning, just as dawn broke, he rushed back to the edge of the forest afraid that the hermit might have already gone. But he found the hermit at prayer. He said to the hermit, I realize now that last night you gave me one treasure, but it was not the treasure that the angel was referring to. You have a much greater treasure to give me. Tell me how to acquire the freedom you have that enabled you to give this diamond to me.

True wealth is actually the freedom to be able to detach ourselves from material possessions, and to simply use them in the measure that they bring us closer to God and help us to glorify our Creator. In the measure that they separate us from God and from others, we need to be free to let go of our material wealth. Jesus knows how quickly we can lose our inner freedom when it comes to riches, and so when someone from the crowd tells Jesus to intervene in a dispute he has with his brother over the inheritance, he asks him “who appointed me to be your judge and arbiter.” Jesus is telling this man that he is not going to find the happiness and fulfilment that he is seeking through winning an inheritance fight with his brother. When we see the way that inheritance fights tear families apart, we would do well to heed Jesus’ warnings against greed. When people let inheritance battles poison their family relationships, they are being incredibly foolish, because they are swapping true wealth for false wealth. Jesus came to teach us that our true wealth is our relationships. They are the only things that we take with us when we die. What we have managed to give away to others is all that we truly get to keep. For our deeds of generosity translate into riches before God. When we allow our family relationships to degenerate into bitterness, feuding or cold wars over material wealth, we have swapped real gold for fool’s gold.

Today’s gospel follows immediately on the heels of Jesus’ warnings to his disciples not to be like the Pharisees, who are all about an outward show of their holiness. He calls his disciples to pay attention to their inner lives and not to outward appearances. All too often, our wealth is all about putting on a show for others. If we live by the tyranny of creating an image of success, we will never be truly free. Success will become our god and we will always be struggling to keep up. We can never reach the top of the tower, because there is always more to be had. Success is a tryrannical god, because it never lets us rest. Notice how the rich fool projects his happiness into the future. Once he has built his bigger barns he thinks he will be able to “enjoy life, eat and be merry.” He thinks that once he has built his bigger barns, his soul will be content and he can relax. The truth is that wealth is an unforgiving god, because you can never have enough. You might think that you can easily exit the rat race, but it is not a race that can be easily exited. I once saw a t-shirt emblazoned with the message “The one who dies with the most toys wins.” This message encapsulates the futility of the race – a message that is starkly conveyed by our first reading today “vanity of vanities, and all is vanity.”

The compelling addictiveness of the race for ostentatious wealth is often seen in the lives of the super rich. It suffices to take one anecdote from the life of Jeff Bezos, who decided to commission the building of the largest sailing yacht in the world with a price tag of an eye watering $500 million dollars. He commissioned it to be built in Rotterdam. When it was almost complete, the ship’s engineers discovered that it was going to be too big to fit to be able to get out of the port of Rotterdam. It would not fit under the historic Koningshaven bridge that lay at the exit of the port. So Jeff Bezos arranged with the city council of Rotterdam to have the bridge torn down and rebuilt at his expense. But when the residents of Rotterdam heard about this plan to tear down their historic bridge, there was such an outcry that the plan had to be abandoned and Jeff Bezos was still left with his problem of how to get his super yacht out of Rotterdam harbour. In many ways, instead of solving our problems, wealth simply creates more problems for us. Whenever we find ourselves making our happiness depend on some future event, we must be wary and question whether we have not let something other than God become the centre of our attention.

This is why, in the passage that immediately follows our gospel today, Jesus urges the disciples to live in the present moment and not to worry about what they are to eat or wear. Instead of worrying about the future, we should be content to trust in the Providence of our heavenly Father who provides for the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. Unlike the rich fool who projected his happiness into the future, we should able to realize that the present moment is the only place that we will find happiness, contentment and peace. We do this by storing up treasure for ourselves in heaven. We do this in two ways, firstly through the relationships that we nourish with others, and secondly through the relationship that we nourish with God through prayer. This is why our second reading today emphasizes that we “our life is hidden with Christ in God.” It is only through prayer that we can come into contact with this “hidden life” that we have with God. It is only through prayer that we come to realize that our lives are really secure in God. The old Collins missal (the old English translation of the missal) has a far better translation of Lk 12:15: “for it is not by amassing many things that we secure our lives.” The newer translation that we now use in our liturgy reads “for life does not consist in amassing many possessions.” The old version cuts to the heart of the matter by revealing that it is ultimately a sense of security that we are looking for when we amass wealth. But this sense of security can only really come from a deep relationship with God. For it is only a relationship with God that will ultimately secure us against all the continencies of life. Anything less than God will simply be vanity, doomed to fade away like everything else.

Questions for reflection

1. What are my strategies for securing my life against the contingencies that threaten it?
2. Where do I need to grow in freedom with regard to material possessions and wealth of any kind?