18th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
First Reading: Eccl 1:2, 2:21–23
Second Reading: Col 3:1–5, 9–11
 Gospel Reading: Lk 12:13–21

In his book Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI quoted the atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who said that we do not want the kingdom of heaven: “we’ve become grown men, and so we want the kingdom of earth.”

According to the Vatican’s 2003 document Jesus Christ: The Bearer of the Water of Life, Nietzsche taught that Catholicism has prevented humanity’s full flowering. Emancipated from Catholicism, he said, we can achieve perfection: self-fulfillment according to values that we ourselves create and achieve by our own strength.

This Sunday’s first reading contradicts that view, from personal experience. What do we get from all our toil and strain? Our days are full of pain, and our work is vexatious; even at night our minds are full of anxiety.

“Which of you by worrying can add a single moment to his lifespan?” Jesus asked. This very night, he says in the Gospel reading, our life may be demanded of us, and we will have to leave all the earthly things we have acquired. There is no U-Haul behind the hearse!

Accordingly, St. Paul tells us to set our minds “on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.”

Nevertheless, if God is good and cares for everything—as we believe—should we not experience happiness here in this world?

We do, but we also experience sadness, illness, pain, infirmity, misunderstanding, conflict, violence, rejection, and loneliness. Even at our happiest, there is “an emptiness in our souls that we cannot fill, try as we may,” said the late Archbishop Adam Exner, OMI, of Vancouver. There is something we are always looking, watching, listening for, said C.S. Lewis.

For example, in one of Agatha Christie’s books, Roddy was engaged to Elinor—“altogether the most charming of companions”—and he would shortly inherit a large estate.

“Life stretched ahead of him pleasantly enough,” and he had “nothing to worry about.”

However, “just for a moment an odd restlessness came to him—a rippling of his previous placidity. He felt there’s something—something I haven’t got—something I want—I want—I want….”

“We must think of love as suffering,” said the Pope. We must have the “sense,” Jesus said on the road to Emmaus, to realize that, like the Messiah, we “have to undergo all this so as to enter” into the “glory” of the Trinity.

In our fallen world, we are like children who cannot see the giver because we are distracted by his gifts—who cannot even see the gifts because we are distracted by their wrapping. “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink, sex, and ambition when infinite joy is offered us,” Lewis said, “like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”

Like children, then, God disciplines us. We submit to our parents’ discipline; how much more should we submit to God’s! Our parents disciplined us “to prepare us for the short span of mortal life,” says the Letter to the Hebrews, “but God does so for our true profit, that we may share his holiness” and therefore his happiness.

We should enjoy God’s gifts and thank him for them. But God knows that his gifts will not satisfy us, and that if we do not learn to prefer him to his gifts we will be wretched. Accordingly, he withdraws them, warning us of an insufficiency that one day we will have to discover.

“For your faithful, Lord, life is changed, not ended,” the Church prays at a funeral. “When this earthly dwelling turns to dust,” after only about one hundred years, “an eternal dwelling is made ready for them in heaven.” It is only prudent, then, to meditate on “the four last things to be ever remembered: death, judgement, hell, and heaven.”

Father Hawkswell has now finished teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English for the summer. The whole course will remain available in written form and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course until it starts again, with new insights, on Sept. 7. The course is completely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary. The first session will be an introduction.

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