How can anyone dare to preach on today’s gospel, ending as it does: “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions”?
How can we? What do we think of: car, computer, credit card, home aids, books, musical instruments, CD players… The list goes on.
Are we really meant to embrace voluntarily the utter poverty being experienced today by millions in Pakistan? Can we be too fundamentalist in weighing up what is really meant?
And so we gladly turn back to the first reading from the Book of Wisdom, read for us today? “Who can know the intentions of God? Who can divine the will of the Lord?”
Just a minute, you might say, we do know the intentions of God. They have been made abundantly clear to us in the teachings and practice of Jesus. Love is to be our yardstick, so love is our arbiter.
What about the car? Is it just for my/our own personal convenience? Obviously not. Somehow, it is to be at the service of the kingdom of God, as are all our possessions. There is something to be said for the phrase “for the use of” that we were trained to say. But even that does not go far enough. We might not say it, but all these worldly things are “for the use of the kingdom of God”.
What about the TV? What about books, music, artworks? No real difficulty there. Our spirits need constant uplift, to be found in these things, reflecting the beauty of God, though there is no place for the decadent or wasting of time in any guise.
The credit card? Ah, there’s the rub! No matter how generous we are on occasions, we can never sit back with satisfaction and think, “I have done well. I have given enough.”
So, let us pray to be granted that Wisdom from above, so that we may know, not just the intentions of God, but how to fit in with them. A closer scrutiny of our use of earthly things may not be comfortable, but the daily carrying of the cross is not comfortable.
The psalm prays :
May we know the shortness of our life
that we may gain wisdom of heart
with the reassuring antiphon:
In every age, O Lord, you have been our refuge.
Helen Ryan OP
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