October 10, 2024
About this time of year, each year, Forbes Magazine publishes a list of the richest people in the world. You have to be a billionaire to make the list, and even so, only the richest 400 billionaires are listed. In today’s Gospel, Jesus said: “How hard it is for the rich to get into heaven.” So, as Christians we must say: Be careful, you billionaires!
Why does being rich make it hard to get into the kingdom of God? The answer: because money might control you. And, when money controls, greed follows close behind. Greed delights in owning what money can buy. Until that deadly sin of greed makes us so preoccupied with money there is no room for God. Remember Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens? As the play opens, Bob Cratchit asks his boss Scrooge to be off on Christmas day. Scrooge says, Christmas bah-humbug. They’d be no Christmas party, no Christmas bonus for his employees. With Christmas day off, Scrooge tells Bob Cratchit to be all that much earlier the following day. Scrooge counts every penny, pinches every penny. In winter, to save on heating costs, all workers had to wear heavy coats. Scrooge would have a hard time getting into the kingdom of God, because his idol, his god was money. How can anyone think about God while so preoccupied with getting rich? Get preoccupied with money and we forget about God and our neighbor.
Money itself is not the problem. Abraham was a wealthy man, and we remember Abraham as the father of our faith. Likewise, David was king with all the wealth and trappings of royalty, yet we remember King David as the psalmist who sang praises to God.
The real question is: “Do we have burdens that weigh us down? Does something about our lives contradict talk about Christ?” It might be money, but other things also can block out Christ. Possessions and addictions and bitterness are heavy loads. Burdens which block out God. There is no time for God when we are caught up with these heavy loads. A Christian casts off the heavy load. As followers of Christ, we make a deliberate decision to de-accumulate, to simplify how we live. To divest and disperse our material wealth, to give up bad habits, so as to be more wholly dedicated to God. The goal is to get rid of burdens which tie us down. We can shed these heavy loads by a deliberate decision.
Jesus tells the young man: “sell everything ... give the money to the poor ... then come follow me.” Christ, the good physician, looked with love into the man’s heart and saw his riches blocked out God. The question for us is: What in our lives keeps us from God? What do we own, or do, or like so much we forget about God? If something blocks out God, Christ says: “Get rid of it. Then, come, follow me.”
With love,
Deacon Ron