From financial wolves to accumulators and rich in grace: “Poverty is lacking many things, all avarice
Homiletics of the Fathers of The Island of Patmos
FROM FINANCIAL WOLVES TO ACCUMULATORS AND RICH IN GRACE: «POVERTY IS LACKING MANY THINGS, TO THE GREED EVERYONE»
“But God said to the rich farmer: "Fool, this very night your life will be demanded of you. And what you have prepared, whose it will be?”. So it is with those who accumulate treasures for themselves and are not enriched with God".
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Author:
Gabriele Giordano M. Scardocci, o.p.
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Dear readers of The island of Patmos,
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In Gospel of this XVIII Sunday Ordinary Time, Jesus condemns greed or avarice, hence the immoderate accumulation of goods. A theme that may seem far from us small and medium-sized workers. Accumulation is not just about goods and treasures related to money or property. This was Jordan Belfort's experience, broker and financial entrepreneur, whose story was also told in the film 2013, The Wolf of Wall Street. At the beginning of his career he began with fraudulent investments and earnings, with an increasingly messy and flawed attachment to money. This will lead him to completely destroy his life by reducing him to drug addiction and the destruction of his friends and loved ones, up to prison.
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Today Jesus wants to offer us this teaching, he clearly says it in this pericope:
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“Be careful and keep away from all covetousness because, even if one is in abundance, his life does not depend on what he possesses".
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The life of each of us does not depend on good money. But it depends on the primary and essential good which is God. It is He who, if we trust, he gives us all the other goods and the means to reach the ultimate goal: Holiness and the eternal encounter with Him in Paradise. To clarify this, the Lord tells the parable of the rich man and his countryside. Here it calls again to the real dependence we have on God, that decides our life and our death. But even more: in this parable Jesus says a much stronger phrase, taking up the ending of his narration:
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“But God said to the rich farmer: "Fool, this very night your life will be demanded of you. And what you have prepared, whose it will be?”. So it is with those who accumulate treasures for themselves and are not enriched with God".
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True wealth to which we are all called is then the wealth in God. A wealth that does not accumulate by shopping on Amazon, playing on the stock market, or buying real estate. It is the wealth of those who truly have and are filled with the presence and grace of God.
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Jesus does not ask us to live as miserable, like poor people looking for a pauperistic form in which misery is our aim. He asks us to relocate all goods to obtain the richness of the Presence of God, which today you can get as a free gift, especially in the Sacraments and the Eucharist. A spiritual wealth that is obtained by free gift, when we grow in prayer and meditation: this is the treasure of the doctrine taught by Jesus which leads our every life. Got all this then, the Lord will not let us lack other material goods as well.
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The Roman author Pubblio Sirio wrote, in its Judgments: “Poverty is lacking many things, to avarice all".
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We ask the Lord to heal from the morbid attachment to all material and ephemeral realities, to learn to draw from the Trinitarian treasures of eternal life.
Amen.
Rome, 31 July 2022
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