 |
| Allegory of the Vanity of Earthly Things by an UNKNOWN French Master, 1630 |
Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth,
vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!
Here is one who has labored with wisdom and knowledge and skill,
and yet to another who has not labored over it,
he must leave property.
This also is vanity and a great misfortune.
For what profit comes to man from all the toil and anxiety of
heart
with which he has labored under the sun?
All his days sorrow and grief are his occupation;
even at night his mind is not at rest.
This also is vanity.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Commentary on
Ecc 1:2;
2:21-23
Three hundred years before Christ walked the earth, the Hebrew
teacher Qoheleth reflects on the illusion of human wisdom and effort. Even one
who works and has earthly success must ultimately leave that result to a person
(heir) who did not toil. He develops the idea that God’s wisdom is hidden and
nothing mankind can do on this earth will reveal it in a meaningful way. “All is
vanity.” The word “vanity” (in
Hebrew “hebel”) is used 35 times in
this book and translated literally it means “breath” or “vapor.” It is used elsewhere (Psalm 39:6-7 and Psalm 94:11) and indicates
something transient, worthless, or empty.[4]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
R. (1) If today you hear his
voice, harden not your hearts.
You turn man back to dust,
saying, “Return, O children of men.”
For a thousand years in your sight
are as yesterday, now that it is past,
or as a watch of the night.
R. If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
You make an end of them in their sleep;
the next morning they are like the
changing grass,
Which at dawn springs up anew,
but by evening wilts and fades.
R. If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
Teach us to number our days aright,
that we may gain wisdom of heart.
Return, O Lord! How long?
Have pity on your servants!
R. If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
Fill us at daybreak with your kindness,
that we may shout for joy and gladness
all our days.
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!
R. If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Commentary on
Ps 90:3-4, 5-6,
12-13, 14, 17
This selection of Psalm 90 is very important to us in that it
provides an understanding of God’s time table for creation and man; “For a thousand years in your sight are as
yesterday…” The psalm laments the
mortality of the human life and prays for wisdom and asks for value given to
the work of human hands.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brothers and sisters:
If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above,
where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.
Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.
For you have died,
and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
When Christ your life appears,
then you too will appear with him in glory.
Put to death, then, the parts of you that are earthly:
immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire,
and the greed that is idolatry.
Stop lying to one another,
since you have taken off the old self with its practices
and have put on the new self,
which is being renewed, for knowledge,
in the image of its creator.
Here there is not Greek and Jew,
circumcision and uncircumcision,
barbarian, Scythian, slave, free;
but Christ is all and in all.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Commentary on
Col 3:1-5,
9-11
The theme of seeking the higher gifts continues in this section of
St. Paul
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Someone in the crowd said to Jesus,
“Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.”
He replied to him,
“Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?”
Then he said to the crowd,
“Take care to guard against all greed,
for though one may be rich,
one’s life does not consist of possessions.”
Then he told them a parable.
“There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest.
He asked himself, ‘What shall I do,
for I do not have space to store my harvest?’
And he said, ‘This is what I shall do:
I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones.
There I shall store all my grain and other goods
and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you,
you have so many good things stored up for many years,
rest, eat, drink, be merry!”’
But God said to him,
‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you;
and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’
Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves
but are not rich in what matters to God.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Commentary on
Lk 12:13-21
Jesus uses the parable of the Rich Landowner to emphasize the need
to focus on the spiritual gifts not just on material goods. He tells the one
who wishes to have Jesus arbitrate a dispute with that person’s brother to take
care against greed.
The passage begins with Jesus refusing to provide rabbinical
guidance to a person in the crowd. Such
guidance is provided in Numbers
27:1-11 and Deuteronomy
21:15ff but the Lord saw the greed at the root of the request. He uses the
parable (found only in Luke) of the Rich Fool to emphasize the need to focus on
the spiritual gifts that do not parish not just on material goods. He tells the
one who wishes to have him arbitrate a dispute with that person’s brother to
take care against greed.
The parable has elements of other stories used by Jesus in which
the unpredictability of the end of life is emphasized. Spoken to the crowd, the
Lord tells them to focus on those spiritual attributes without delay. St.
Athanasius used these words: “A person who lives as if he were to die every
day- given that our life is uncertain by definition- will not sin, for good
fear extinguishes most of the disorder of our appetites; whereas he who thinks
he has a long life ahead of him will easily let himself be dominated by
pleasures (Adversus Antigonum).”[5]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Homily:
There
was once a very good and very wealthy man who died and went to heaven. When he
arrived at the pearly gates, St. Peter looked in his book and saw all the good
things the man had done and invited him in. As the man walked by, St. Peter
noticed a look of great sorrow on his face. He said to the man “Mr. Jones, I
don’t understand your depression. You had a wonderful life on earth, filled
with good deeds and great wealth and today you are ushered into heaven. Why are
you sad?”
The
man said in reply “St. Peter, I know I should be happy and I always knew I
could not take my wealth with me but I fear I will miss it. I wish I could have
brought up just one souvenir of my earthly success.”
St.
Peter again consulted his book and thought for a moment. He turned to the man
and said “You know, I think you can be allowed to go back and bring just a
small memento of your earthly life, nothing big like a yacht, but just a
reminder.”
Poof!
The man disappeared and poof he was back. He was holding a small shoe box that
was clearly quite heavy. St. Peter could not resist and asked the man what he
had chosen to bring back. With his face reddening somewhat the man opened the
box lid to show St. Peter four bars of gold bullion. Whereupon St. Peter looked
up in surprise and exclaimed “You brought pavement?”
The
story, of course has a moral and that moral is tied directly to the Gospel from
St. Luke. The Lord is, at this point in
his ministry, a person of renown. He is
respected and looked upon as a person of some authority. He is approached by one of the crowd he is
addressing and asked to take on the role of a Rabbi – to settle a dispute about
Mosaic Law in a family dealing with how an estate should be settled. Jesus does not choose to deal directly with
the issue, but rather sees the motive of the one who asked the question. That motive is greed.
Greed,
defined as “excessive desire, as for wealth or power” is a symptom of perverted
values and Jesus chooses to address the entire crowd with a story to illustrate
the foolishness of the motives the questioner expressed. The story of the wealthy fool is instructive
in a few different ways. It tells us,
first of all, the same sentiment expressed by the ancient author of
Ecclesiastes said in the first reading today – even a person who is successful
in his labors on earth may not take those treasures to heaven.
Without
going into details there is another humorous story about the man who gave his
lawyer a large sum of cash to put into his casket when he was buried. After the funeral he was asked if he did and
he replied “Yes, I left him a check for the total amount.” What is important in our lives is not how
much we can accumulate, not even how much we leave to our heirs. But the point the Lord was making in his
Gospel story is the treasure we need to accumulate is spiritual, not material.
One
may think at this point that gathering spiritual treasure is all fine and good
but it does not pay the mortgage nor put food on the table. That is of course correct. We must all work to provide for ourselves and
for those who depend upon us. Working in
such a way is neither vanity as Qoheleth said nor is
it greed. What Jesus refers to is our
passion – what are we passionate about?
Where our passions lie – we will spend our time, our energy, and our
thoughts. Taken to an extreme, our
passions become obsessions and obsessions may turn even the best intention into
an unwholesome pursuit.
The Gospel begs us to ask ourselves a question today. Where do we spend our time? What are our passions? If we are passionate about our work, have we
neglected more important elements of our lives?
If we are passionate about a hobby or sport, have we neglected some
other aspect of our lives – has work, or friends, or family suffered as a
result? Are we passionate about the
Lord? Ah, there is the question.
One might argue that, just like other healthy passions, passion
for the Lord can be overdone. I submit
that it probably could be, but like eating healthy or getting proper exercise,
you would have to go along way before passion for Jesus would cause a
problem. I seriously doubt that one who
truly followed the Lord, no matter how obsessively, if they did so for the
right reasons, for God’s greater glory, they could not over do it.
Our concern today is not that our congregation will become
obsessive / compulsive about the Lord. But
rather do we give Jesus enough of our time, our passion, our thought so that
our lives will be transformed? That is
the message contained in scripture today – do we spend our time on gifts that
we will always have, or do we go after pavement.
Pax
In
other years: August
4, Memorial of Saint John Mary Vianney, Priest
[2]
The picture today is Allegory of the Vanity of Earthly Things by an UNKNOWN
French Master, 1630
[3]
The readings are taken from the New American Bible with the exception of the
Psalm and its response which were developed by the International Committee for
English in Liturgy (ICEL). This
re-publication is not authorized by USCCB and is for private use only.
[4]
Jerome Biblical Commentary, Prentice Hall, Inc., © 1968, 32:8, pp 535.
[5]
The Navarre Bible, Gospels and Acts, Scepter Publishers, Princeton , NJ
No comments:
Post a Comment