Choosing to Follow Jesus on the Road of Wisdom and Perfection, 28th Sunday (B), October 13, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
28th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B
October 13, 2024
Wis 7:7-11, Ps 90, Heb 4:12-13, Mk 10:17-30

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• As a young king of the Lord’s people, Solomon pleased the Lord very much. One night God appeared to him and told him to ask for whatever he wanted (1 Kings 3:45-15). Solomon could have requested, and likely received, anything he asked for. Solomon did not appeal for power, or money, or health, or a long life, or even a beautiful queen, but for a “an understanding heart to judge [God’s] people and to distinguish right from wrong.” He asked for wisdom. In today’s first reading, Solomon shows us that, to some degree, he was already wise in asking for what he did. “I preferred [wisdom] to scepters and thrones, and I accounted wealth as nothing in comparison with her. … I loved her more than health and beauty, and I chose to have her rather than light, because her radiance never ceases.” He valued wisdom more than political power, than all the money in the world, than physical vigor and looks, even than light. He wanted help from God to make right judgments, to choose well, to order his decisions on earth in accordance with the way things really are, the way God made them.
• This is the prayer we all asked for in the responsorial psalm today. We begged God, “Teach us to number our days aright that we may gain wisdom of heart.” We asked him for the grace to help us see how, even on our hardest days, God has been there, forming us, helping us, passing on to us a wisdom not of this world. “Make us glad,” we asked, “for the days when you afflicted us, for the years when we saw evil.” This type of wisdom would reach its culmination, St. Paul would tell us, in “Christ Crucified,” who is a “ stumbling block for Jews and foolishness for Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” Christ Crucified would become the wisdom of God and he would call us to follow him along that cruciform path of wisdom. He would beckon us, “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself, take up his Cross daily, and follow me” (Lk 9:23). Jesus wants us, like Solomon, to prefer this wisdom to scepters and thrones, to wealth and the things of the world, to health and beauty, even to light. God wants to give us this wisdom. But this wisdom doesn’t come on the cheap. We have to treat it like the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in a field, worth sacrificing all we have to get it — because this relationship with God and the way it changes us is worth far more than everything else in the world.
• This helps us to understand the great drama taking place in today’s Gospel in Jesus’ encounter with the Rich Young Man. He was a virtuous youth. He had kept the commandments of the Lord from a young age. He was concerned about the deepest and most important questions, like the one he asked Jesus, “What good must I do to inherit eternal life?” He already had some faith in Jesus, coming to him not just as a rabbi who knew a lot but as a “Good Teacher,” whose whole bearing intrigued him as someone who gave signs of the divine and inspired him to approach and ask about the way he should live in order to live for ever. The young man also recognized that, despite all his material wealth and moral uprightness, there was something missing in his life. His heart yearned for more and greater. He grasped that the life God intended for us had to consist in so much more than merely not breaking the second tablet of the Decalogue. And so he asked in St. Matthew’s account of the same scene, “What do I lack?” Jesus, St. Mark tells us, looked at him with love and gave him the challenging, brutally honest, direct answer to his question, “You lack one thing. Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me!” It was a highly paradoxical answer. Jesus was telling him that what he lacked was precisely that he had too much. He lacked total detachment from substitutes so that he could attach himself to the Absolute. He had previously lived a good life, but Jesus was now calling him to greatness. He already had some faith in Jesus as a “good Teacher” who was reflecting the goodness of God alone, but Jesus was now calling him to an upgrade in faith, a radical choice for, and total commitment to, God. He had previously kept the “second tablet” of the Ten Commandments, all about love of neighbor, but now Jesus was calling him to a much more radical following of both tablets: to love his neighbor to the point of using all his possessions to care for them and to loving God to the point of accounting him more valuable that all his possessions and following him on the path of total-self-giving love.
• Therese of Lisieux, the great doctor of the Church who never even attended high school — and therefore a tremendous example of one who was enriched with a wisdom from God that you can’t learn by devouring even all the titles in the New York Public Library — taught us that we grow in the spiritual life by subtraction, not by addition. Once when a novice said with exasperation in her presence, “When I think of everything I still have to acquire!,” the Little Flower replied, “You mean, to lose! Jesus takes it upon himself to fill your soul in the measure that you rid it of its imperfections. … You want to climb a great mountain and the good God is trying to make you descend it; he is waiting for you at the bottom in the fertile valley of humility.” The Rich Young Man needed to learn this lesson of addition by subtraction. He looked at the path of holiness, happiness and heaven as something he could add on to what he already had, whereas Jesus was indicating that the cure of his sense of emptiness would happen through self-emptying, precisely so that Christ could fill him. Unfortunately the Rich Young Man wasn’t ready yet for the challenge that spiritual perfection requires, because his many possessions owned him. The Lord is always asking us to let go even of many of his gifts in order to help us to recognize that the greatest gift of all, and the one to whom we should cling, is the Giver.
• The Rich Young Man got the answer to the question that was erupting from the depths of his being, but he didn’t like it. In fact, St. Mark tells us, “His face fell and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.” In the second reading, the Letter to the Hebrews says that the “word of God is … sharper than a two-edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.” The word of God pierced right into the young man’s heart and exposed what, in the ultimate analysis, was its treasure. And unfortunately it wasn’t yet God. When given a choice, like the rich young Solomon, between Wisdom Incarnate and his money, the young man in the Gospel chose the money, and went away sad, because he was still lacking something, something that, despite his wealth, left him consciously imperfect and incomplete. He couldn’t give up his wealth to follow the Creator of every earthly treasure. He thought he could both have his money and acquire what he was lacking. But Jesus said very clearly at another time, “You cannot serve two masters. You will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money” (Mt 6:24). He wanted to know the path to eternal life. He wanted to have it all. He came to Jesus and asked. Jesus with love answered his question exactly. But he didn’t have the trust, he didn’t have the courage, he didn’t have the detachment to do what Jesus indicated. He went away crestfallen. And how can we not share that sadness at his failure to seize the incredible invitation Jesus was giving him? How can we not share the sadness whenever anyone makes a similar choice?
• To do what Jesus indicates in the Gospel today, to make the choice that the Rich Young Man somehow thought he couldn’t, is challenging. Jesus uses the image of a needle and says that we’ll never be able to pass through the eye of the needle into the kingdom of heaven as long as we’re still clutching onto the things of this world. It’s not that material wealth or possessions are bad in themselves; in fact they’re blessings. The harm comes when we start to become attached to them, when they begin to own us rather than our stewarding them as gifts of God. St. Paul says, not that money is the root of all evil, but “the love of money is the root of all evil and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains” (1 Tim 6:10). He calls greed “idolatry” (Col 3;5).  Money, in other words, can easily become our anti-god, which we can begin to worship. Our faith, hope and love — which should always be directed to God — can be transferred to money. “Everything is possible for the one with money,” one can begin to believe. One can start to place his security and his heart in earthly mammon. Such a person who puts his treasure in possessions, like the Rich Young Man, isn’t necessarily evil. He can be good, he can keep the ten commandments from his youth, he might even consider God really important, but for him, God is not yet God. God is not yet the most important reality in his life. Like with the Rich Young Man, when it comes to the time when he has to make a choice, to part with his money or to serve Christ, he chooses his money. He chooses to sell off Christ and give his time, his talents and his energies to storing up for himself an earthly treasure. And, like the Rich Young Man, he will remain sad, because happiness is something that even all the money in the world cannot buy.
• So what is a rich man to do? And frankly, so many of those even on welfare in the United States are rich in relation to the vast majority of people in the world not to mention in human history, so what Jesus says in today’s Gospel applies to so many people we know. Jesus’ disciples were “exceeding astonished” at the severity of Christ’s statement and asked, “Then who can be saved?” We ourselves can ask, “Do any of us have a chance, or are we like camels before a microscopic hole?” Jesus says in the Gospel that God makes it possible for us to be saved. Jesus shows us the way, but those looking for an easy way are going to be disappointed: “Go, sell what you have, give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
• Some preachers have done harm to people by trying to water-down the stark and challenging three-fold command of Jesus. But other preachers have perhaps done more harm, because they have interpreted what Jesus said in a univocal way, saying that what the Lord is asking of us, with all our responsibilities, is to go down to the local pawn shop, get rid of all our stuff, and then go give it in lump sums to individual poor people, or the St. Vincent de Paul Society, the parish Food Pantry, the Salvation Army or the Missionaries of Charity. It all comes down to what the Lord means by “selling what you have.” The universal application he’s getting at is placing our money and resources at the service of love of others. There are many ways to give this money away. Parents give it away when they use it to support — not spoil — the members of their family. Business owners give it away when they use their capital to create jobs so that people can have work and support themselves and their loved ones, or when they pay not just a fair wage but a generous wage to their loyal employees, so that they can make ends meet more easily. Catholics give it away when they give it to the Church Christ founded to support the apostolic works of God, especially like the spread of our faith through the Missions or through the support of Catholic education. Customers give it away when they see that their overworked waitress is pregnant and give her an extremely generous tip. And all of us give it away, when we make it a priority in life to seek out Christ in the disguise of the poor and needy around us, those in the streets, those families struggling financially to survive, those worthy causes that every month wonder how they’re going to pay their bills. It is by emptying ourselves of all greed, of giving ourselves and what God has given us out of love to others, that we become capable of receiving what the Lord wants to give us. It is only then, when we’re no longer attached to any earthly idols that we can sing in truth what we chanted in today’s Responsorial Psalm, “Fill us with your love, O Lord, and we will sing with joy.”
• But it’s important to stress the decision of those who like you, Sisters, live a radical poverty. St. John Paul II stressed in Vita Consecrata, his exhortation on the consecrated life, that the virtue and vow of “poverty proclaims that God is man’s only real treasure. When poverty is lived according to the example of Christ who, ‘though he was rich … became poor’ (2 Cor 8:9), it becomes an expression of that total gift of self which the three Divine Persons make to one another.” In response to the materialism of the age that craves possessions and makes the heart indifferent to the needs and sufferings of the weakness, he says, “The replyof the consecrated life is found in the profession of evangelical poverty. … Even before being a service on behalf of the poor, evangelical poverty is a value in itself, since it recalls the first of the Beatitudes in the imitation of the poor Christ. Its primary meaning, in fact, is to attest that God is the true wealth of the human heart. Precisely for this reason evangelical poverty forcefully challenges the idolatry of money, making a prophetic appeal as it were to society, which in so many parts of the developed world risks losing the sense of proportion and the very meaning of things.”Saint Teresa of Calcutta said that poverty was one of the Church’s greatest gifts to the Missionaries of Charity, a help to overcome the temptations to which the Rich Young Man succumbed. Poverty, she said, is a free choice that allow us better to serve the poor Christ and his impoverished people. It is what enables us to instantiate what we sang in today’s Alleluia acclamation:  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” The poor in spirit are those who put their treasure in God, place their hearts at the service of God’s kingdom.
• The best place for us to begin to become poorer in spirit, to treasure ever more effectively God’s kingdom, is here at Mass. In the Mass, we see behold, participate in, and receive the greatest wisdom of all, the wisdom that comes from Christ crucified who calls us to follow him along the path that leads here to this altar and from the altar to giving our body and blood, and our time, talents, and treasure out of love for others (1 Cor 1:22-24). At this Mass, as in every Mass, the Lord gives us a choice, a choice between his wisdom and worldly wisdom, between an earthly treasure and an eternal treasure that moths can’t destroy, rust corrode, or the IRS can’t tax or take. He places before us the call to be perfect. The apostles trusted in what Jesus said and left everything to follow the Lord, putting their whole lives at God’s service. Saint Teresa of Calcutta and so many saints have followed suit. At the heart of the Christian vocation is Christ’s summons to live spiritual poverty in a radical way united to his, to go, place all that God has given us at the service of others and to come follow him who, “though he was rich, became poor for [our] sake so that by his poverty [we] may become rich” (2 Cor 8:9).
• Today as we prepare to receive him, we recommit ourselves to our vow of poverty, to our promise of simplicity of life, or to the Christian summons to be poor in spirit because our treasure is the kingdom of God (Mt 5:3). With loving trust, total surrender and cheerfulness, we rededicate ourselves wholeheartedly and freely to the service of others, especially those in most need. And we seek to learn from what the Rich Young Man got wrong, and the apostles got right, and make the wisest choice of all: to give ourselves to God, as we beg him to give us in return not just a wise and understanding heart, which is itself worth far more than power, money, health, beauty, and light, but to give us what he promised in the Gospel, 100-fold in this life and eternal life in the age to come. That’s what he in fact bestows when he, Wisdom incarnate, gives himself to us in Holy Communion, which is far more valuable than 100 times what we’ve given away and is the foremost foretaste of the eternal life that awaits all those who not only ask what we must do to inherit eternal life but follow what Jesus says.

The readings for Today’s Mass were: 

Reading I

Alleluia

Gospel

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