How To Become Truly Rich Young Men and Women, 28th Sunday (II), October 13, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
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 tonight’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• One of the characteristics of being young is that we can live to some degree “in” and “for” the future. We dream about what we’ll do when we’re older, where we’ll go to school, what profession we’ll choose, where we’ll live, whether and with whom we’ll marry, and lots of similar questions. As we mature, we begin to make our questions more precise, our dreams more concrete, and our values clearer. And we get to the point where we begin increasingly to have to choose a path, to say yes to one school and no to all of the others, to select one field of study and no to many other interests, to say yes to one person and no to all other suitors. At this stage, some get overwhelmed by the cancer of optionitis: they try to keep all of their options open as long as possible, avoiding definite commitments out of fear of missing out on something, only to discover later that they have missed out on many of the most important joys of human life, which come only through making tough choices and firm commitments. That mature, however, recognize that they cannot have everything, but have to prioritize what’s really important and then act according to those priorities. They know they have to choose, and sometimes those choices are tough.
• Today’s readings are about young people making choices and they contain a great deal of divine wisdom to help us examine what we value most. The questions they raise are valuable to people no matter what their age, but they are particularly relevant for young people to examine what they really aspire to in life and ultimately to which God they want are going to serve. Let’s together enter into the drama that concerns not just these Biblical figures but you and me and everyone who will ever live.
• In the first reading, we encounter the thoughts ascribed to the young King Solomon. When he was the age of a Columbia freshman, beginning his reign as king over the Lord’s people, he pleased God very much. One night God appeared to him and told him to ask anything of him and he would grant it (1 Kings 3:4-15). Solomon could have requested for anything whatsoever, but he did not appeal for power, money, health, a long life, or even a beautiful queen. He knew he was, he said, “a mere youth, not knowing at all how to act,” and so he asked for “an understanding heart to judge [God’s] people and to distinguish right from wrong.” He asked, in short, for wisdom. In tonight’s first reading, Solomon tells us, “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 personal and political decisions on earth in accordance with the way things really are, the way God made them. How much do we prioritize divine wisdom? Do we value it more than robust health and world-class athletic abilities? Would we sell it divine wisdom — and become a fool — in order to obtain Elon Musk’s fortune? Would we sacrifice divine wisdom if it proved an obstacle to getting a coveted job or entering into a desired relationship? Do we really seek and treasure the truth or, even at a university in which we are supposed to live by the motto to see all things in divine light (Ps 36:10), do we treat divine wisdom — and the God who gives it — only as instrumental goods?
• In today’s Psalm, we all echoed Solomon’s request. We begged God, “Teach us to number our days aright that we may gain wisdom of heart.” We asked him for the grace not to forget that we will die, that we do not have all the time in the world to get things right, and therefore to learn the wisdom of heart, the prudence of desires, to prioritize what’s most important. We then ask for a particular type of wisdom that is not of the world. “Make us glad,” we prayed, “for the days when you afflicted us, for the years when we saw evil.” We’re asking for the wisdom to see even our sufferings in the light of God. This type of wisdom would reach its culmination, St. Paul will tell us later, in “Christ Crucified,” who was 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 of heart, flowing from numbering our days on earth aright. 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.
• These thoughts about the importance of divine wisdom and our need to seek it, pray for it, and try to according to it, helps us to understand better the other great drama of a young man with God that the Church has us ponder tonight: Jesus’ encounter in the Gospel with the figure tradition has called the Rich Young Man. He was a virtuous youth. He had kept the commandments of the Lord from a young age. And when he was thinking, like young people do, about the future, he was considering in the deepest and most long-lasting way possible. He ran up to Jesus, knelt down before him in homage, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what good must I do to inherit eternal life?” He kneelings shows how much he really wanted to know the answer to that question. His calling Jesus, “Good Teacher,” showed as Jesus noted that he saw in Jesus something more than an ordinary rabbi, but a reflection of the divine, since God alone is ontologically and morally worthy of that adjective. Jesus first told him something that’s important for all of us to know. He told him to keep the commandments, especially those about love of neighbor, since we can never love our neighbor and the God who loves our neighbor if we’re dishonoring those through whom God gave us life, if we’re killing or hating others, if we’re lying to them, stealing from them, being unfaithful to our spouses or taking advantage of them sexually. The young man noted that he had kept all of these commandments from the time he first started making moral decisions, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t take him at his word. But he knew 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 was calling him to an upgrade in faith, a radical choice for, and total commitment to, God. He was summoning him to do more than not sin against others, but to love them to the point of using all his possessions to care for them and then to love God enough to dedicate his whole life to following him along the path of total-self-giving love.
• There’s a key lesson here not just for spiritual growth but for all of human life. St. Therese of Lisieux, the great 19^th century, French, young adult doctor of the Church, who never attended university or even 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 sighed 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 only through self-emptying, precisely so that in that emptiness Christ could fill 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 God the Giver.
• The Rich Young Man got the answer to the question that was erupting from the depths of his being about what he needed to do not just to inherit eternal life but to have it all in life, but he didn’t like it. He wasn’t mature enough for the challenge that spiritual perfection requires. 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 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 taught emphatically 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). The Rich Young Man 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, of whatever age, 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 teaches elsewhere, 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), like we see in the sadness of the young man in today’s Gospel. 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,” we can begin to believe. We can start to place our security and our 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 earliest days, 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 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 not even all the money in the world can buy.
• So what are we to do? All of us, including those 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. Do any of us have a chance for eternal life, or for human perfection, or are we like camels before a microscopic hole? St. Mark tells us that Jesus’ disciples were “exceedingly astonished” at the severity of Christ’s statement and asked, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus says in the Gospel that God makes it possible for all of 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 faithful by trying to water-down the stark and challenging three-fold command of Jesus, as if Jesus didn’t mean what he said to the Rich Young Man. If Jesus didn’t mean what he said, however, it would have been cruel to allow him to depart so sad and just told him he was exaggerating. Jesus did indeed to challenge him in the way he did and we, too, need to confront the two-edged sword of Jesus’ word. If we see to be perfect, to be holy, to have it all, Jesus calls us to use our money — as well as our intelligence and all our gifts — in the service of God and others. It’s wrong to water down the radicality of the call. Other preachers, however, have perhaps done just as much harm to people, by interpreting what Jesus said in a univocal way, stating that what the Lord is asking of us, no matter our vocation and responsibilities, is to go down to the local pawn shop, hock 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, or the Missionaries of Charity. The proper interpretation of the passage 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 loving service 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 as many as possible can have work to support themselves and their loved ones, or when they pay not just a fair wage but a generous wage, so that their employees can make ends meet more easily. Catholics give it away when they give it to the Church Jesus founded in order to support the works of the faith, especially the spread of our faith through the Missions, the support of Catholic education, and the care for the needy. Customers give it away when they see that their overworked waitress is pregnant and give her an extremely generous tip. We all give it away, when we prioritizing seeking 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. But the summons that Jesus gives is not just to give “something” to others, but to make a commitment to use for others basically everything of which he has made us a steward. It’s a call to empty ourselves of all greed, to give 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 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.” We can only be filled with the Lord’s love when we have emptied ourselves of placing our faith, hope and love in mammon.
• Is what Jesus is asking of us hard to do? Yes, indeed. But with his help it’s certainly possible. We see that every time a young person responds to the vocation to enter seminary or the convent, placing God above a worldly career, above the goods of human marriage and family, above being in control of their own life. We see it in every FOCUS missionary, who have given up lots of other possibilities, and all the money they might earn, to dedicate themselves for two years or more to spreading faith on campus and raise their own sustenance. We see it in many converts to Christ and the Catholic faith, who sometimes are disowned by their family and, in some countries, even have to endure death threats. We see it in faithful Catholic employees who refuse to violate their conscience, even at the risk of losing their job. I saw it with two of the pilgrims with me this summer who walked with me across the country. One had asked her Catholic employer to give her two months off without pay so that she could travel with the Eucharistic Jesus, but the employer denied the request. It was a tough choice, but she sensed that Jesus was drawing her onto this journey and so she, trusting in him, said yes and came. Another pilgrim was a 2024 Columbia Law School grad and recent convert whose family and friends urged her to spend the summer like all her colleagues studying for the bar exam at the end of July. She had spent five years of her life preparing to be a lawyer and certainly part of her thought it wise to spend May through July preparing to pass the bar, but the other part felt Jesus calling her to come follow him from New Haven to Indianapolis. She chose to go with Jesus and to trust in his help to pass the bar. Toward the end of our pilgrimage, at a night for young adults in rural Indiana, she gave a witness that I can’t forget. She said that when she was young girl she had heard the story of the Rich Young Man and was saddened by his choice and hoping that if she were ever confronted by a similar dilemma, she would choose Jesus. She said she would hope to choose Jesus as the pearl of great price in her life, as the one for whom it would be fitting, like Mary of Bethany, to crack open an alabaster jar and anoint his feet with a year’s salary’s worth of precious aromatic nard. And by this choice to go on the Eucharistic pilgrimage, she said she was doing so, and that it had filled her with enormous joy. She urged her fellow young adults to make a similar choice for Jesus. She would, I’m sure, urge all of her fellow Columbians here to make the same.
• I’d like to bring up one last inspiring example. Yesterday the Church celebrated the liturgical memorial of Blessed, soon to be Saint, Carlo Acutis, who died 18 years ago yesterday in 2006 at the age of 15. He was a indeed a Rich Young Man, from a wealthy Milanese family, but he got right what the youth in today’s Gospel got wrong. Blessed Carlo is most famous for the ardor of his Eucharistic love, dubbing the Eucharist “My highway to heaven,” living a truly Eucharistic life, and trying to bring his friends, classmates, neighbors and even the whole world to appreciate the wondrous gift of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. But he recognized that a truly Eucharistic life is not just one that prioritizes daily Mass and Eucharistic adoration. It also features intense Eucharistic charity. Carlo sought to pattern his life on the Lord’s love in the Eucharist, giving his body, blood and his possessions away to others. “Life is a gift,” the young Carlo said, “because as long as we are on this planet, we can increase our charity.” When he was very young, he brought his whole piggy bank to school to give to students who needed it more. He would turn down the offer for new clothes or sneakers and ask that the money instead go to the poor. To the homeless, he would spend his allowance buying them sleeping bags, blankets and thermoses so that he could fill them with warm drinks and bring them to them. He used every opportunity to use what God, his parents and others had given him to love those around him. “Money is nothing more than shredded paper,” he said. “What counts in life is the nobility of the soul, that is, the way we love God and neighbor.” He’s praying for us to adopt with him this Eucharistic form of Christian life. If he were still alive, he would be only 33 years old. I’m personally convinced because of his Eucharistic love, that he would be a brother priest. And if he were here, preaching, I believe he’d tell all of us that we should not be striving to be a rich young man according to worldly standards, but according to divine. To be truly rich, he would say, we have to be holy, to be rich in what matters, to be rich in the way we love God and neighbor. To be rich means to be Christ-like.
• The best place for us to become rich in this way is here at Mass. Here we receive the greatest wisdom of all, the wisdom that comes not just from the Word of God but from Christ crucified himself, 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). In every Mass, the Lord gives us 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, between leaving here sad or full of joy. He places before us the call to be perfect, to be holy, to be like him. As St. Paul told us, “Though he was rich, [he] became poor for [our] sake so that by his poverty [we] may become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). He wants us to be rich in what really matters. As we see in the second part of today’s Gospel, the apostles trusted in what Jesus said and left everything to follow him, putting their whole lives at his service. When St. Peter asked out of shock and self-interest what awaited those who had left everything for him, Jesus gave them the greatest promise of all time: “one hundred times more now in this present age … and eternal life in the age to come.” That’s what Jesus in fact bestows when he gives himself to us in Holy Communion, which is far more valuable than 100 times what we would ever give up, and is the foremost foretaste of the eternal life. What Jesus gives us here is something far greater than what Solomon even dared to dream. This is the down payment of what awaits us if we structure our life on his wisdom and value it more than power, money, physical strength, looks, and even light. This is what we will receive if we make our own Jesus’ cruciform, loving, self-emptying way of life. This is what will be ours forever if we maturely decide, tonight, to heed Jesus’ words to go, to make our life a radical gift to God and others, and then, freely, to follow him all the way along this path of love, of holiness, of true and lasting riches, and of eternal life.

The readings for tonight’s Mass were: 

Reading I

Alleluia

Gospel

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