Mass readings for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Wisdom 7.7-11 Psalm 90.12-17 Hebrews 4.12-13 Mark 10.17-30
I’ll avoid getting lost in the weeds of figuring out the origin of our Lord’s metaphor concerning camels and sewing needles – let’s just take the basic point that this is referring to things that are impossible; and that Jesus goes on to tell us, “…with God, all things are possible.”
So, let’s consider how impossible our salvation is, and how with God, we can nonetheless achieve it. This is our confession: God saves, Christ redeems, the Holy Spirit sustains us in this life unto the next. And it is because of this we are a community of thanksgiving; and we give thanks in the Eucharist, not just this Thanksgiving weekend, but every time we celebrate the mass, on a weekday, on a Sunday morning. After all, “Eucharist” itself means “Thanksgiving.”
Jesus identifies a big obstacle to our gaining the eternal kingdom – it’s wealth, its material success; and that might strike us as ironic, but it’s a truth with which we have long experience. We also know is no differentiation between those who’ve earned their wealth, and those who’ve inherited, those who’ve won it in a game of chance. We rightly congratulate those who’ve earned it over those who simply have it given to them; but the dangers are the same. I would not hesitate to further expand our Lord’s warning to encompass our affluent society with its middle class and well-paid blue-collar workers. Having wealth requires that big old camel to carry it. Now we know we can’t take any of it with us to heaven; and we’re supposed to be making our way to God’s kingdom right now and not putting off our passage til the hour of death. Figuratively speaking, we bring that camel along. Today it’s our basements, closets, storage containers, the shed at the cottage, that bear the burden of what we accumulate; and there are the bank accounts, deeds to property, stock portfolios, RRSPs and TFCs, that hold our virtual wealth, stored up digitally against our needs in retirement or emergency. This digitized wealth can pass through the needle’s eye via a fibre-optic filament; but spiritually our virtual and real property have the same spiritual bulk as any camel laden with treasure. We still can’t ride it through the eye of that needle.
Now, this could be seen as nonetheless, a happy problem: to have, and then need to think of how to dispose of what we have rather than be wondering how we get through next week because we have nothing. But rather perversely, the having of wealth makes many of us anxious to keep it, and too often, to keep it no matter what.
We live in a time when most of us have some modest assets: a home, some money in a savings account, RSPs or RRIFs, but this must be set against the more general debt of our society; and that is a debt that looms over everything. Both publicly held debt, that is what our governments owe, and private debt, what business, corporate or privately owned owe, and what households owe in the form of mortgages, credit card balances, etc. These are at all time highs with many economists concerned that all this debt has the potential to ruin us, and so, lead to even bigger social and political crises. Set that next to the international conflicts we see, and the prospect for any of them to spin out of control; and holding on to what we have becomes an even more urgent impulse even though it likely would be to no purpose in a true catastrophe. Remember Jesus told us there will be wars, and rumours of wars until he comes.
This is the problem of our attachment, it deludes us into rationalizing it as necessary; it takes us away from our proper vocation. We weren’t put here to be rich; Rather our prosperity is to be a by-product of our righteousness; the harvest we gather is supposed to be both material and spiritual. That we focus on the former and neglect the latter has long been the concern of Christ and his Church.
Now, this can be heard cynically: “Well, Father, are you so generously offering to take this burden from me? Lighten my wallet? Want me to cut a cheque for the parish for the sake of my soul?”
Well, yeah, I’m here to help. Indeed, that is part of the Church’s role; and one we should undertake together. As much as we are about worship, evangelization, catechesis, and service, we are also a reliable conduit through which people can contribute to all these things from their wealth, or from their poverty. And in many instances, the wealthy who contribute are doing so from a place of poverty of spirit; and hopefully they find in it a leavening of their souls. But the larger point that Christ is making is that we cannot put our faith in anything or anyone but God and his mercy. And by giving it all away and following Jesus, we can prove to ourselves the truth of this; but do we have enough faith to do so; to even go part way?
I must guard myself against making my principal concern as pastor, the money we need to operate this parish, pay the salaries, keep the heat and light on, fix the many things that need fixing, buy the study materials for the Sunday afternoon education series, the equipment for the Challenge and Conquest youth groups that meet later on Sunday, the things needed for RCIA – the program that prepares adults to enter the Church. All those things, and much more, arrive as bills on my desk; and then, there is our long-term debt that paid for the renovations done before I arrived. I have my own expenses too, and a retirement with my wife to plan for. So, I get how we can become preoccupied with such worries because they are common to us all, even me. These bring us to become very attached to money – the supposed solution to everything; and on a personal level, to the things we personally possess because they are some slight evidence of achievement; for all the stress and worry, we’ve wrung something out of those efforts and proved we’re not a total failure.
And I don’t think that ultimately our Lord begrudges us this, provided we regard it properly: as something passing, as simply the good we are blessed to enjoy in this life, but that all good things come from God; and so, we need to look upon our accomplishments, whatever we possess, be it great wealth, or public prestige, satisfying career, good health, with thanksgiving to God who has made all this possible.
I was visiting with the schools last week, and that came up: I asked what we should be thankful for and a few of the kids answered, we should be thankful that God made us in the first place; that we are alive and so, have the opportunity for family, friends, work and play, to feel the Sun on our faces. These things can’t be enjoyed if we aren’t here! These things all exist as a means for us to know the splendour, the glory, the love of God; and not for their own sake. So, they don’t last; they are passing, only God endures, and only in him lies the prospect of eternal life for us.
And so, we must surrender the things that are passing, and cling to what endures. St. Ignatius, for those who know his famous spiritual exercises, was a man who struggled and overcame his attachments, to wealth and prestige, to his own time’s culture of conspicuous consumption and the validation people sought through it.
At the heart of what Ignatius taught is the idea of detachment. To fulfil our vocation to righteousness and holiness we have to detach from worldly goods. A basic principle of this is “agere contra,” which is Latin for “to act against.” The idea is simple: if we are attached or dare we say, addicted to some worldly good, then the best thing is to act against it. If we’re not sure of the degree of an attachment, then we must test ourselves.
I had a university professor who smoked cigars that made for an unpleasant atmosphere in the office. He said he could give them up at any time. And so, a number of the teaching assistants asked him to prove it. And you know, he actually stopped for a whole semester; at least, he didn’t smoke around us that term. Can we do the same in terms of our own attachments, especially the ones we justify as matters of common-sense necessity – can we be generous beyond our margin of comfort? Can we make a real sacrifice? That is, the offering that hurts a little, not the largesse that we comfortably afford.
Thanksgiving, while a secular affair, is nonetheless an opportunity to do just that. Can our gratitude toward God extend to a real faith and trust in him that allows us to be generous in the same spirit as our Lord who has given us everything: life, the beauty of creation, the love of others, and the saving love we know in Christ.
Amen.