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Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
One of the great playwrights of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was the Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen was a highly influential figure in the development of modern drama, and he was also something of an iconoclast when it came to exposing Victorian values for their sham and shallowness. His plays often deal with themes of poverty, financial strife, and the moral conflicts that can arise from them. No doubt, that’s because when he was a young boy, the fortunes of his comfortably well-fixed family took a dive and they lost everything. Not surprisingly, Ibsen began to look at wealth with a jaundiced eye. “Money,” he once wrote, “may be the husk of many things but it’s not the kernel. Money brings you food but not appetite; medicine but not health; acquaintances but not friends; servants but not faithfulness; enjoyable days but not peace or happiness.” Ibsen’s words might well serve as a commentary on the words of the ancient philosopher, Qoheleth, in today’s first reading from Ecclesiastes. Qoheleth had come to a point in his life where a certain cynicism had begun to set in. He was weary of things: convinced of the futility of a life devoted to accumulating more and more things. ‘What does it all amount to?’ he found himself asking, and the answer he came up with was ‘nothing.’ It amounts to nothing. In the end, earthly goods are as permanent as a passing breath of air. “Vanity of vanities, he exclaimed, “all is vanity! To drive home his point, Qoheleth pointed to people who work all their lives to carve out a place for themselves in this world. No matter how hard they work, in the end, someone else will live in their homes, eat the fruit of their fields, and enjoy the shade of the trees they planted. “Vanity of vanities,” indeed. “All is vanity!” Sobering words for a summer day. Sobering words for any day! And don’t they fly in the face of values we Americans hold dear: values like hard work, responsibility, personal initiative, individual achievement? It might seem so, but I don’t think Qoheleth meant to disparage hard work or to dismiss human effort or ambition. What he did intend was to weigh in against the tendency to judge a person’s worth or dignity on the basis of what that person possesses or produces instead of who that person is. What a person owns or produces has passing importance but one thing is absolutely certain: it won’t accompany that person across the threshold of death. Qoheleth was the poet and the prophet of “You can’t take it with you.” I think he would have liked that breezy bumper sticker you may have seen: “You never see a U-Haul truck behind a hearse!” Jesus takes up this theme in today’s gospel. Someone asks him to arbitrate in a family dispute over an inheritance, and Jesus refuses because he sees that the dispute is not about justice but about greed. So he uses the moment to encourage his listeners to develop a right attitude toward things. “Avoid greed in all its forms,” he says. “A man may be wealthy but his possessions do not guarantee him life.” In other words, ‘if you want to become rich, become rich in what really matters. To illustrate his point he tells the little parable about the rich man who had it made: he had everything in life -- more than everything. But was it enough? Of course not. All he could think about was getting more! Jesus had harsh words for him. Very harsh. He called him a fool – the name in the Jewish scriptures reserved for a person who denies God or who puts things before God. My friends, we are hearing these readings at a time when many people, including some of you, are dealing with serious financial concerns and setbacks. If you are in that number, the readings may seem out of touch, even irrelevant. People struggling to get by are probably not in much danger of getting hooked on things, although it’s possible. But even so, there is a message here for both ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’ and there is encouragement, too, and perspective: a way of looking at what is really important in life, and what is not. Following Jesus doesn’t mean that we will never know need or hunger or hard times. In fact, following him may mean those very things. Jesus is, after all, the one who was born poor and who lived poor and who had nowhere to rest his head. It is he that we are invited to learn from and to lean on, and not on any things we may have or wish we had. For the truth is that for anyone who makes the choice to follow Jesus, life is not about possessions – unless, of course, that possession is Jesus himself! Father Michael G. Ryan |
