28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Wis 7:7-11
Second Reading: Heb 4:12-13
Gospel Reading: Mk 10:17-30
“How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” Jesus says in this Sunday’s Gospel Reading.
Good, we think. I don’t have great wealth. He’s not talking to me. I can relax.
However, let us think again.
In his book Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI says that when the Babylonians conquered Judea (586 BC), 90 per cent of Judeans were poor, and Persian tax policy kept them poor after their return from exile. Consequently, he says, they could not maintain the old idea that poverty is a consequence of a bad life: that the righteous prosper in this world.
Israel began to realize that its poverty was precisely what brought it close to God; that the poor, in their humility, were closest to God’s heart, while the rich, in their arrogant pride, were farthest away.
Now Jesus’ disciples, who actually heard him, were poor; by our standards, very poor. Nevertheless, they were “astounded” and asked, “Then who can be saved?”
Clearly, they took Jesus’ words to apply to everyone. As Jesus said on another occasion, “None of you can be my disciple if he does not renounce all his possessions.”
As Pope Benedict points out, Jesus said, “Blest are the poor in spirit.” Material poverty does not of itself bring salvation, he said; even those who have nothing may be greedy for material things, forgetful of God, and covetous of others’ possessions. St. John Henry Newman noted that even the poor and those who do not “seek to be wealthy” nevertheless “bow down before wealth.”
“Wealth is that to which the multitude of men pay an instinctive homage,” he said. They measure “happiness” and “respectability” by wealth. They “never dream that they shall ever be rich themselves,” but at the sight of wealth they “feel an involuntary reverence and awe, just as if a rich man must be a good man.” They like to know a rich man by sight, to be noticed by him, to have spoken with him, to have entered his house, to know those who know him.
However, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Jesus proclaims that true happiness is found not in riches, “but in God alone, the source of every good and of all love.” “God alone satisfies” us.
The poverty Jesus calls a blessing is never purely material, Pope Benedict points out; it always has an interior dimension. On the other hand, it is not purely spiritual, either.
Not everyone is called to the radical poverty of St. Anthony of Egypt or St. Francis of Assisi, he notes, but the Church needs communities that live in material poverty and simplicity – like the Poor Clares in Mission – to demonstrate that possession is all about service, to contrast the culture of affluence with the culture of inner freedom, and to create the conditions for social justice.
To see the difference between “poor” and “poor in spirit,” consider the von Trapp family. When Hitler invaded Austria in 1938 and they lost all their money, Maria hugged her husband so he could hardly breathe. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “You act as if you had made a million dollars!”
“Oh, much more!” she answered. “I have just found out that we were not really rich; we just happened to have a lot of money. That’s why we can never be poor. I am so happy to know that we don’t belong to those for whom it is so hard to enter the kingdom of God.”
God’s word “is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart,” says the Second Reading. If we are to enter God’s kingdom, we must be poor in spirit, not just poor. Let us ask God, therefore, for the wisdom to prefer him to everything else, for, as the First Reading says, wealth is “nothing in comparison with her.”
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English in both written and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 4, available on YouTube starting Oct. 10, is “The History of Our Salvation.”