October 11, 2015 –Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time – Lectionary: 143

 

Reading 1 – Wisdom 7:7-11

I prayed, and prudence was given me;
I pleaded, and the spirit of wisdom came to me.
I preferred her to scepter and throne,
and deemed riches nothing in comparison with her,
nor did I liken any priceless gem to her;
because all gold, in view of her, is a little sand,
and before her, silver is to be accounted mire.
Beyond health and comeliness I loved her,
and I chose to have her rather than the light,
because the splendor of her never yields to sleep.
Yet all good things together came to me in her company,
and countless riches at her hands.

 

Responsorial Psalm – Psalm 90:12-13, 14-15, 16-17

1. Fill us with your love, O Lord, and we will sing for joy!
   Teach us to number our days aright,
   that we may gain wisdom of heart.
   Return, O LORD! How long?
   Have pity on your servants!
2. Fill us with your love, O Lord, and we will sing for joy!
   Fill us at daybreak with your kindness,
   that we may shout for joy and gladness all our days.
   Make us glad, for the days when you afflicted us,
   for the years when we saw evil.
3. Fill us with your love, O Lord, and we will sing for joy!
   Let your work be seen by your servants
   and your glory by their children;
   and may the gracious care of the LORD our God be ours;
   prosper the work of our hands for us!
   Prosper the work of our hands!
4. Fill us with your love, O Lord, and we will sing for joy!

 

Reading 2 – Hebrews 4:12-13

Brothers and sisters:
Indeed the word of God is living and effective,
sharper than any two-edged sword,
penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow,
and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.
No creature is concealed from him,
but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him
to whom we must render an account.
Alleluia – Matthew 5:3

1. Alleluia, alleluia.
   Blessed are the poor in spirit,
   for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
   R. Alleluia, alleluia.

Gospel – Mark 10:17-30

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up,
knelt down before him, and asked him,
“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus answered him, “Why do you call me good?
No one is good but God alone.
You know the commandments: You shall not kill;
you shall not commit adultery;
you shall not steal;
you shall not bear false witness;
you shall not defraud;
honor your father and your mother.”
He replied and said to him,
“Teacher, all of these I have observed from my youth.”
Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him,
“You are lacking in one thing.
Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor
and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
At that statement his face fell,
and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

Jesus looked around and said to his disciples,
“How hard it is for those who have wealth
to enter the kingdom of God!”
The disciples were amazed at his words.
So Jesus again said to them in reply,
“Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle
than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
They were exceedingly astonished and said among themselves,
“Then who can be saved?”
Jesus looked at them and said,
“For human beings it is impossible, but not for God.
All things are possible for God.”
Peter began to say to him,
“We have given up everything and followed you.”
Jesus said, “Amen, I say to you,
there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters
or mother or father or children or lands
for my sake and for the sake of the gospel
who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age:
houses and brothers and sisters
and mothers and children and lands,
with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come.”

 

 

Listen to the Scriptures:  Click on the link below:

http://ccc.usccb.org/cccradio/NABPodcasts/15_10_11.mp3

28^th Sunday of the Year – B

 

 

Theme:  CHRISTIAN POVERTY.  The Christian message does not condemn the principal of ownership.  We may use the goods of the earth but not abuse them for they are not ours alone.  We need to recognize the social nature of ownership, the responsibility that comes with it.  Jesus lived as a poor man and he asks us to examine our life in the light of his own, to see what we can do personally to create a truly Christian society based on love and justice.

 

Jesus asks us to live in a spirit of inner freedom, of detachment; he invites us to examine our life style in the light of the Gospel.

 

Introduction:  In the past, Christians understood the demands of evangelical poverty in terms of giving alms to the poor.  In our own time, the earth has become a global village, a global economy, and we are aware of the needs of others on a much larger scale.  We know that whole nations live in substandard conditions; hundreds of thousands of people are ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-fed.  We know there is inequity in the distributions of the earth’s goods.  It is in the light of this knowledge that we should understand Jesus’ words.  He does not ask us to live without possessions which would be impossible, but he wants to teach us the proper way of handling the goods of the earth.

 

Point 1: It is necessary that each person have possessions.  We all need food, shelter, clothes, and means of transportation.  We must not think that ownership is an evil or that it is perfection to reduce our needs to a strict minimum.  The world would be a dreary, sorry place if everything in it was merely functional.  It is self-evident that we cannot go and sell all our possessions, for we would then become totally dependent on others and would forfeit our responsibilities as Christians and as citizens.

 

Point 2: Love, caring for the good of others, is the supreme law of Christ.  The head of a family cannot take the invitation of Christ literally; could he sell his house and leave his wife and children without a roof over their heads, without shelter?  Could he give his salary to the poor and deprive his own family of good?  The needs of one’s own family come first for the head of a household; the good of others should always serve as a guiding rule.  But we should carefully examine the true nature of these needs and determine their limits.  Extravagant living is not compatible with the message of Christ.

 

Point 3: Men can be possessed by their possessions.  Often in an affluent society, homes and personal lives are cluttered with possessions.  We are hardly satisfied with a simple life-style.  We want more and more goods; we discard furniture, gadgets, and cars for newer models.  We equate our personal worth with the size of our bank account or with what we possess.  Keeping up with others is a disease to which we are all exposed.  So and so has something new and wonderful, so we must have it too.  There is a great danger of corruption in letting our appetites go wild.  We then lose sight of the communal character of our faith, we tend to ignore the needs of our brothers and sisters and we show contempt for those who are poor and unemployed.

 

Conclusion:  Christ’s message does not contain a specific blue-print; he does not tell us what to do, how much to spend, how much to give away.  It is for each one of us to examine our way of life to see in what manner we answer the call of Christian poverty.  What Christ asks of everyone, of poor and rich alike, is a spiritual transformation, a striving to attain inner freedom.  But this should not be understood in vague and abstract terms.  The message of Christ directly affects the concrete realities of our daily life.  We must educate ourselves and our people to recognize true Christian values, to be aware of the needs of others, to work in our community, our nation, for the establishment of a truly Christian society where the requirements of love and justice are fully met.

 

 

QUESTIONS THAT MAY LEAD TO OTHER THOUGHTS / DISCUSSION / REFLECTION / WRITTEN

 

1. Do I teach through my own example the correct usage of money and worldly possessions?

 

2. Does my thirst for luxury or things obscure the message of Christ?

 

3. Am I ready to sacrifice some pleasure, to forego some personal need, in order to provide for the poor?

 

4. Am I truly detached from my possessions (many or few) or do I waste my energy and thought in the pursuit (desire) of more and more worldly goods, possessions?

 

 

The Peril of Riches or Material Possessions.

 

The ruler who had refused the challenge of Jesus had walked sorrowfully away, and, no doubt the eyes of Jesus and the company of the apostles followed him until his figure receded into the distance.  Then Jesus turned and looked round his own men.  “How very difficult it is,” he said, “for a man who has money to enter into the Kingdom of God.”  The word used for money is chremata, which is defined by Aristotle as, “All those things of which the value is measured by coinage.”

 

We may perhaps wonder why this saying so astonished the disciples. Twice their amazement is stressed.  The reason for their amazement was that Jesus was turning accepted Jewish standards completely upside down. Popular Jewish morality was simple.  It believed that prosperity was the sign of a good man.  If a man was rich, God must have honoured and blessed him.  Wealth was proof of excellence of character and of favour with God. The Psalmist sums it up, “I have been young and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging bread.”  (Ps.37:25.)

 

No wonder the disciples were surprised!  They would have argued that the more prosperous a man was, the more certain he was of entry into the Kingdom.  So Jesus repeated his saying in a slightly different way to make clearer what he meant.  “How difficult it is,” he said, “for those who have put their trust in riches to enter the Kingdom.”

 

No one ever saw the dangers of prosperity and of material things more clearly than Jesus did.  What are these dangers?

 

1. Material possessions tend to fix a man’s heart to this world. He has so large a stake in it, he has so great an interest in it, that it is difficult for him to think beyond it, and it is especially difficult for him to contemplate leaving it. The danger of possessions is that they fix a man’s thoughts and interests to this world.

 

2. If a man’s main interest is in material possessions it tends to make him think of everything in terms of price. A hill shepherd’s wife wrote a most interesting letter to a newspaper.  Her children had been brought up in the loneliness of the hills. They were simple and unsophisticated.  Then her husband got a position in a town and the children were introduced to the town, to the city.  They changed very considerably–and they changed for the worse.  The last paragraph of her letter read–“Which is preferable for a child’s upbringing–a lack of worldliness, but with better manners and sincere and simple thoughts, or worldliness and its present-day habit of knowing the price of everything and the true value of nothing?”

 

If a man’s main interest is in material things, he will think in terms, of price and not in terms of value.  He will think in terms of what money can get.  And he may well forget that there are values in this world far beyond money, that there are things which have no price, and that there are precious things that money cannot buy.  It is fatal when a man begins to think that everything worth having has a money price.

 

3. Jesus would have said that the possession of material things is two things.

 

1. It is an acid test of a man. For a hundred men who can stand adversity only one can stand prosperity.  Prosperity can so very easily make a man arrogant, proud, self-satisfied and worldly.  It takes a really big and good man to bear it worthily.

 

1. It is a responsibility. A man will always be judged by two standards–how he got his possessions and how he uses them.  The more he has, the greater the responsibility that rests upon him.  Will he use what he has selfishly or generously?  Will he use it as if he had undisputed possession of it, or remembering that he holds it in stewardship from God?

 

The reaction of the disciples was that, if what Jesus was saying was true, to be saved at all was well nigh impossible. Then Jesus stated the whole doctrine of salvation in a nutshell.  “If,” he said, “salvation depended on a man’s own efforts it would be impossible for anyone.  But salvation is the gift of God, and all things are possible to him.”  The man who trusts in himself and in his possessions can never be saved.  The man who trusts in the saving power and the redeeming love of God can enter freely into salvation.  This is the thought that Jesus stated.  This is the thought that Paul wrote in letter after letter.  And this is the thought which is still for us the very foundation of our Christian faith.

 

For the Church: that we may experience God looking upon us with love and respond to what God asks of us today, let us pray to the Lord.

For the freedom to trust: that we be freed from fear and insecurity and live in the awareness that with God, all things are possible, let us pray to the Lord.

For the Synod of Bishops: that the Spirit will guide their work and inspire them to new ways of supporting and encouraging family life, let us pray to the Lord.

For the grace of listening: that the Word of God may enter the deepest part of our being and reveal to us the One who calls us to life and brings us to wholeness, let us pray to the Lord.

For a deepening of Wisdom: that we may yearn for and seek after the Wisdom that surpasses all other gifts and brings us to fullness of life, let us pray to the Lord.

For fortitude: that God will give us strength and courage to grow spiritually and personally through the new challenges that await us in each phase of life, let us pray to the Lord.

For the gift of insight: that we recognize the limits of power, beauty, fame, and wealth, and learn to trust God who alone fulfills all our needs and wants, let us pray to the Lord.

For a greater reverence and appreciation of human life: that we may recognize God’s gift of life in each person, particularly in the very young and the elderly who cannot speak for themselves, let us pray to the Lord.

For all who are making vocational or life direction decisions: that God will inspire them with deep insights into their gifts and help them to hear the divine invitation deep in their hearts, let us pray to the Lord.

For teachers, preachers and spiritual directors: that God will plant the divine Word deep within them and inspire them to share it in dynamic and life-giving ways, let us pray to the Lord.

For all who are overwhelmed, confused, or misdirected in life: that Christ may enlighten a path towards wholeness for them and that they may find support and encouragement in the Christian community, let us pray to the Lord.

For wisdom in our eating habits: that we may each recognize and balance the foods we eat so that it may sustain our health and energy, let us pray to the Lord.

For children who have suffered abuse or who have witnessed abuse: that God will provide them with good counseling, a safe and loving environment, and healing for their wounds of body, mind, and spirit, let us pray to the Lord.

For all in public office: that God will inspire them to understand the common good and design ways to promote it, let us pray to the Lord.

For all who are grieving, particularly those who have experienced violence: that God will comfort them, heal their pain and give them hope, let us pray to the Lord.

For all who have endured storms and floods: that God will sustain them, speed the assistance they need, and reunite families that are separated, let us pray to the Lord.

For refugees: that God will open new pathways for them to find homes and become integrated into new communities, let us pray to the Lord.

For Peace: that God will guide the leaders of nations as they strive to contain nuclear weapons and guide them in finding new paths of dialogue to resolve disputes, let us pray to the Lord.