Overcoming the Near Impossible Difficulty to Enter the Kingdom of God, 8th Monday (I), March 4, 2019

• We are two days from the beginning of Lent and today’s readings help us to get ready. In the first reading, Sirach continues to train us in the font of divine wisdom and stresses for us the wisdom of recognizing how much we need God’s mercy, how much we need to acknowledge our sins, turn away from them and begin to turn with God in our mind, heart, soul and strength. He reminds us the theme of the conversion God is asking of us, to turn away from everything that leads us from God and turn toward and with Him in his merciful love. He affirms:
  • God provides a way back for the penitent. All of salvation history provides this path.
  • God has chosen us for the “lot of truth,” not for living a lie.
  • God wants to help us to turn “away from your sin” and “to the Most High.”
  • He wants to help us “hate intensely what [God] loathes” and love intensely what God loaves.
  • He wants to help us “stand firm” in the way set before us, which is a way of prayer and praise for the most high, praise of his mercy, praise of the wondrous things he does us. “You who are alive and well shall praise and glorify God in his mercies,” he says. “How great the mercy of the Lord, his forgiveness for those who return to him,” he exclaims. One of the reasons why we’re alive, he says, is because the dead in their sins can’t praise God for his mercy. God wants to help us remain alive so that, as the Psalms say, we can sing of his mercy forever. As we prepare to be reminded on Wednesday with ashes that we are dust and unto dust we shall return, we can remember what the “breath of life” breathed into us is for: to help us sing of God’s mercy.
• That wisdom is a key prism to understanding the scene of Jesus’ interaction with the young man in the Gospel. The man was seeking heaven, what he needed to do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus told him to keep the commandments, which help us to learn how to love God and love others. And the young man replied that he had kept them all from his youth. He was at least externally keeping the commandments. He seemed not to be committing any serious sins. But Jesus, looking at him with merciful love on the inside, said that he was lacking one thing — sin is a privation of good! — and told him “Go, sell what you have and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” What he lacked was poverty of spirit. What he “lacked” was that he had too much stuff and it had enslaved him. And because of that slavery he was not using all that God had given him for others — hence Jesus’ query to him about the “second tablet” of the Decalogue, that which concerns love of neighbor. He may not have been stealing, but was he truly generous?
• Jesus reminded us elsewhere in the Gospel that we cannot serve two Masters, God and mammon. We need to choose. And when the rich young man was given a choice between Jesus and his material goods, he chose the latter and “went away sad, because he had many possessions.” Mammon and “amen” come from the same semitic word root. Amen means to uphold, to build upon. At first mammon was like collateral given in exchange for a loan, but over time it developed into a “trust,” and people began to place their faith, hope, love and security in such a trust rather than in God, his Word, his providence, etc. This young man’s essential sin was his love of, his hyper-dependence on, money —what St. Paul calls “the root of all evil” — to the exclusion of God where God needed to be. That’s why he went away sad. That’s why it’s hard for those who are rich to enter God’s kingdom, because the more stuff we have, the more we can place our security in it, the less we can recognize that we lack the type of spiritual poverty necessary to open ourselves up to God. To fit through the eye of the needle, we need to do the humanly impossible, which is to trust in God to the extent that we can do what Jesus asked the rich young man, to entrust ourselves to the God who cares for the lilies and the sparrows, who knows what we need, and who will always provide. We likewise need to be willing to use all that God has given us — not just our money, but our time and personal gifts — for others if we’re really going to be able to follow Christ fully and freely.
• Today the Church ponders the example of someone who got right what the Rich Young Man didn’t. St. Casimir was a rich young man. He was the son of King Casimir IV and was raised in relative luxury, but he was focused fundamentally on living in God’s kingdom rather than building his own. He became known in his lifetime for his piety, devotion and generous toward the sick and the poor. He died at the age of 25, having sought to love intensely as the Lord had loved him.
• Today Jesus looks on us with love and gives us his word and himself. He became poor, as our Alleluia verse reminds us, so that by his poverty we might become rich. And he shows us what those real riches are: himself and the charity that he inspires and makes possible. He wants us, like Sirach encouraged, to recognize our lack of spiritual poverty, or chastity, or obedience, and learn that true wealth, love and freedom comes from God and is meant to be used for God and in God for others. He encourages us to come to meet him and not leave sad, but joyful, because from the inside he seeks to help us enter into him, pass through the needle’s eye and inherit eternal life where we hope with the angels and saints to sing forever of God’s merciful love.

Reading 1 SIR 17:20-24

Responsorial Psalm PS 32:1-2, 5, 6, 7

Alleluia 2 COR 8:9

Gospel MK 10:17-27