Tuesday of Week 20 in Ordinary Time (Year II)
Ezekiel 28:1-10 | Deuteronomy 32:26-28,30,35-36 | Matthew 19:23-30
Yes, I tell you again, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 19:24)
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with money all my life.
Mostly, I’ve loved the things that money can buy, especially all those weird gadgets of the last decade or so. It was nice to have the capital to just upgrade my hardware when my needs outgrew them, instead of spending time to figure out how to do more with what I already had.
From this perspective, I can see how Jesus is warning us about our preoccupation with mundane riches, that clouds our vision of the heavenly home that should be our final destination, and especially of our heavenly Father, whom we’ve been called to love with all our heart, soul and strength. In extreme cases, with servants and underlings to do our every bidding, it’s easy to succumb to the point-of-view that today’s reading warns us about:
Being swollen with pride,
you have said: I am a god
[…] Though you are a man and not a god,
you consider yourself the equal of God. (Ezekiel 28:2)
I’ve also hated the (blessedly few) times when I had to put in long hours just to have my daily meals and a roof over my head. I’ve never know grinding poverty, but I have known the pangs of involuntary hunger, quite unlike the fasting we do every Good Friday. That memory will likely stay with me till my final day on this earth.
From this angle, it’s easy to envision the urge to claw our way back up to sufficiency, and from there to surfeit, so as to never experience poverty again. This climb might begin with the purest of motives, taking care not to cross any moral lines, but as we march towards excess, it gets progressively easier to compromise on our call to love one another as Christ loved us, as the spectre of office politics and other forms of fiscal and moral fraud beckon with their siren song.
So if riches and/or the pursuit thereof changes us in ways that make it impossible for us to enter the kingdom of God, what are we to do? I wrote about cultivating a healthy relationship with money yesterday; in short, we should use our excess resources and some of our precious time to help the less fortunate. In this way, we may hope that God will look kindly upon us, and be more predisposed to reuniting us with Him at the end of days.
Lord, nothing is impossible for You. We implore you to melt our gilded hearts with Your love, and to let our excess flow to those in need, so that all may know that You are the God of love. Amen.