Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, October 9, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil
October 9, 2021

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, as we eavesdrop on his famous dialogue with the young adult Christian tradition has dubbed the Rich Young Man.
• The Rich Young Man was a good man. 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 to approach and ask about the way he should live in order to live for ever. He also recognized that, despite all his material wealth, despite even his moral goodness, there was something missing in his life. His heart yearned for more. He knew he was called to something greater. The life God intends for us consists, he realized, in so much more than merely not breaking the Decalogue. And so he asked in St. Matthew’s account of the same scene, “What do I lack?” Jesus 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. What he lacked was precisely thathe 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 total commitment. 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 of Decalogue: 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 stuff and following him on the path of total-self-giving love.
• St. Therese of Lisieux taught that we grow in the spiritual life by subtraction, not by addition. Once a novice sighed in her presence, “When I think of everything I still have to acquire!” The Little Flower replied, “You mean, tolose! … You are wanting 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. Unfortunately he wasn’t ready for the challenge that spiritual perfection requires because he had so many possessions that owned him. He looked at the path of holiness as something he could add on to what he already had, whereas it was an emptying precisely so that Christ could fill him. The Lord is always asking us to let go of many of his gifts in order to help us to recognize that the greatest gift of all is the Giver.
• The Rich Young Man got the answer to the question that was erupting from the depths of his being, buthe didn’t like it. In fact, St. Mark tells us, “He was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.” When given a choice between Jesus and his money, the young man chose the money, and went away sad, because he was still lacking something, that, with all his wealth, left him consciously imperfect and incomplete. This young man couldn’t give up the wealth to follow the Creator of every earthly treasure. Without a doubt, he was thinking he could both have his money and have 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).
• We can similarly be trapped by our own hanging on to our money. 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 grasping onto the fruit of our labor. 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 toown us rather than our stewarding them as gifts of God. The person who puts his treasure in earthly mammon isn’t necessarily one we’d define as evil. He may even keep the ten commandments like the Rich Young Man said he did from his youth. The lover of wealth in this world might even consider God really important, but for him, God is not God. God is not the most important thing 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. 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 and woman — and almost all of us are rich in relation to the vast majority of people in the world — to do?, 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 imperative 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, or the Food Pantry, or the Salvation Army. It all comes down to what the Lord means by “selling what you have.” What he’s getting at is spending our money, putting our resources at the service of love of others. There are many ways to give this money away. We give it away when we use it to support — not spoil — the members of our family. We give it away, when, if we’re, for example, a business owner, we use our capital to create jobs so that people can have work and support themselves and their loved ones. Such people also give away 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. We give it away when we give it to the Church Christ founded to support the apostolic works of God. And we give it away when we put it into the hands of Christ in the disguise of the poor and needy around us and around the world. 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. In order for the material wealth we have not to become curses bringing us down, but rather blessings bringing us an eternal treasure, we have to transfer the funds, not to a Swiss bank account, not to the Cayman Islands, butto heaven, by putting these blessings, directly or indirectly, into the hands of Christ disguised in others. There are so many opportunities for us to transfer those funds. But we have to ask God intelligently in prayer, “How, Lord, should I best give away the material blessings you have given me?”
• At Mass this Sunday, the Lord will give us a choice, a choice between his wisdom and worldly wisdom, between an earthly treasure and an eternal treasure, which moths can’t destroy, rust corrode, or IRS agents take away. The apostles left everything to follow the Lord, putting their whole lives at God’s service. The saints have followed suit. The hard working people who sacrificed so much to build most of our parishes have been all in. What’s our response going to be?

The reading on which today’s homily was based was: 

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