Like St. John Paul II, Becoming Rich in What Matters, October 22, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. John Paul II, 40th Anniversary of His Inauguration Mass
October 22, 2018
Eph 2:1-10, Ps 100, Lk 12:13-21

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today as the Church celebrates the Feast of St. John Paul II on the 40th anniversary of the inauguration of his papal ministry, we have a great commentary in the readings today about the type of life he lived and the type of life he for God encouraged us to live. Let’s jump into the readings to see why.
• In the Gospel, there is a huge contrast between two types of riches, two types of inheritance, two types of legacy, one very often sought by those who are spiritually worldly, the other counseled by Jesus; one ultimately a patrimony of monopoly money, the second an endowment of God. This scene which is as relevant today as it was what someone in the crowd shouted the question to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” Jesus’ response to the man’s request for Jesus to command his brother to give him his share of the inheritance is, “Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?” Jesus didn’t come from heaven to earth to settle inheritance disputes but to make us aware of a totally different type of inheritance. He was the one who told the Parable of the Prodigal Son, of course, which begins with a hunger for an inheritance that leads one to treat his father as if he were already dead. All sin can be summarized in a sense by a desire to place possessions, or money, or the things of this world, and ultimately oneself over other people, including one’s family members. St. Paul would say that “love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim 6:10). Jesus gave an important antidote as medicine against this spirit of acquisitiveness that leads to all types of sins:  “Take care to guard against all greed,” Jesus says, “for … one’s life does not consist of possessions.” He then tells a parable about the rich fool who was blessed with a bountiful harvest who instead of sharing any of his good fortune with those who were hungry after the harvest of grain had filled up the barns he already had, decided to tear down his barns and build bigger ones in an unbelievable building project of selfishness. The man egocentrically said to himself, “As for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years.” He didn’t care that many others didn’t have the bare necessities. And that led to other excesses as he convinced himself to “rest, eat, drink and be merry!” Charity wasn’t even in the picture. And he had a rude awakening coming. That night he would die. “You, fool, this night your life will be demanded of you,” Jesus puts into the mouth of his Father. “And the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” Jesus drew the moral of the story: “Thus it will be for the one who stores up treasure for himself, but is not rich in what matters to God.”
• St. John Paul II wrote about this passage in a 2001 letter to young people in preparation for World Youth Day, saying, “Jesus does not ask us to give up living, but to accept a newness and a fullness of life that only He can give. The human being has a deep-rooted tendency to ‘think only of self,’ to regard one’s own person as the center of interest and to see oneself as the standard against which to gauge everything. … [But] whoever depends solely on worldly goods will end up by losing, even though there might seem to be an appearance of success. Death will find that person with an abundance of possessions but having lived a wasted life (cf.Lk 12:13-21). Therefore, the choice is between being and having, between a full life and an empty existence, between truth and falsehood.” This choice is ever relevant. We’re living in a culture of the grain bin. We obsess about storing treasures or even junk for ourselves, constantly building new storage facilities to house the stuff that can no longer fit in our homes, rather than giving the stuff we don’t need away. Perhaps the most ubiquitous grain bin of all are financial portfolios, where so many obsess about seeing them grow, while often few think nearly as much if at all about how to share those blessings with others, especially those in desperate need. To all of us in this culture, Jesus calls us to become rich in what matters to God.
• But that just begs the question: How do we become rich what matters to God? St. Paul tells us in today’s first reading, taken from his Letter to the Ephesians: It’s by becoming rich in his mercy. St. Paul highlights the richness of God’s mercy by contrasting it first to our initial condition. We “were dead in [our] transgressions and sins in which [we] once lived following the age of this world, … in the desires of our flesh, following the wishes of the flesh and the impulses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest.” Our transgressions and sins had separated us from the life of God because we were seeking other things than God, we were following the desires of the flesh instead of the spirit, we were vulnerable to the “ruler of the power of the world and the spirit at work in the disobedient,” namely the devil, and we were children living in anger like everyone else, rather than living with God’s mercy. But God acted. St. Paul describes it: “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ …  and seated us with him in the heavens in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.” God has showed us with the abundance of his mercy, raised us from the death to which sin leads, brought us already in embryo to eternal life, and wants us to manifest the immeasurable riches of his mercy to the world. This constitutes the “good works that God has prepared in advance” for us, this is the reason why we are his “handiwork” and God wants us to “live in them.” St. John Paul II’s second encyclical, Dives in Misericordia, takes it name from this passage and focuses on how God who is rich in mercy seeks to make us rich with that divine gift. “It is ‘God, who is rich in mercy,’ John Paul II writes at the beginning of that encyclical, whom Jesus Christ has revealed to us as Father.” In Jesus, he said, God the Father’s “invisible nature becomes in a special way visible … in Christ and through Christ, through His actions and His words, and finally through His death on the cross and resurrection. … He Himself makes it incarnate and personifies it. He Himself, in a certain sense, is mercy. To the person who sees it in Him – and finds it in Him – God becomes ‘visible’ in a particular way as the Father who is rich in mercy.” John Paul II sought to help everyone contemplate the face of Christ in which the riches of the Father’s mercy could be seen adored and gratefully received, so that we having been blessed with 10,000 talents of God’s mercy might lavishly pay it forward. This is what the Church does. In a 2003 commentary on Psalm 100, which responds to St. Paul’s words to the Ephesians today, John Paul II said we find in this prayer the joy at the covenant of total belonging that exists between God and Israel and the “richness of the relationship of love, his ‘mercy’ and ‘fidelity,’ joined with his ‘goodness.’ It is a “kind of profession of faith: the Lord is good and his fidelity never abandons us because He is always ready to sustain us with his merciful love.” This is the mercy John Paul II never ceased to encourage us to receive. When 40 years ago today he told us, “Brothers and sisters, do not be afraid to welcome Christ and accept his power,” he was describing Christ as Mercy Incarnate and that power as the strength of his merciful love. He encourages us still today to receive that gift.
• St. John Paul II drew his strength from the Eucharist. He never lost the “eucharistic amazement” he encouraged us all to have in his exhortation Mane nobiscum Domine. In his encyclical Ecclesia de Eucaristia, he described celebrating Mass in basilicas, Churches, in mountain chapels, on lakeshore and seacoasts, in stadiums and city squares. “This varied scenario of celebrations of the Eucharist,” he wrote, “has given me a powerful experience of its universal and, so to speak, cosmic character. Yes, cosmic! Because even when it is celebrated on the humble altar of a country church, the Eucharist is always in some way celebrated on the altar of the world. It unites heaven and earth. It embraces and permeates all creation.” Today we turn to God and ask him, “Tell my brother, Karol Wojtyla, to share the inheritance with me,” the inheritance of mercy he received, shared and proclaimed, that we can’t store in grain bins, one that will lead us to where we hope we will be able to share St. John Paul II’s eternal friendship where we will be enriched by the One who is rich in mercy with the greatest wealth of all. That is the fulfillment of the Covenant to which Psalm 100 leads, where we hope to come before the Lord with joyful song and enter his courts with eternal praise!

The readings for today’s Mass were: