Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke 12, 13-21
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 the one who stores up treasure for himself
but is not rich in what matters to God.”
One’s life does not consist of possessions
1. Share. Sometimes we find it difficult to share because we are self-centred or closed-minded. As a friend of mine would say, “a person isn’t poor because he has nothing, a person is poor when he doesn’t know how to share”. Remember that there are people who aren’t even capable of sharing information because they consider that the more they know about a situation or person, the more powerful they are. Not sharing is linked to selfishness and that leads you to focus on the life of others, so if someone has more wealth than you, either as a person or materially speaking, you end up considering him a threat.
2. Greed. There’s a very slight difference between greed and covetousness. Avarice or greed means too much desire for wealth, the desire to gather and to hold on to wealth by any means available. Covetousness refers to the desire of someone else’s wealth. On the one hand, avaricious or greedy people seek to accumulate riches and therefore they aren’t able to share, and possibly they aren’t able to enjoy what they have. As St. Francis of Assisi would say “the more you have, the more enslaved you are to it.” On the other hand, covetous people strongly envy what other people have and they don’t enjoy life either. They’re even capable of leading a fictitious life, not knowing how to manage because they forget to see their life as wealth. They end up measuring people by what they have and are only able to relate to others considering their bank account.
3. Foolishness. When your life revolves around having money and possessions and pretending, you end up living life without a clear direction. I’ve met people who live off appearances and even behave with a feeling of superiority towards others. When you start to look at your bank account more than into the eyes of your children, when you look at the vehicles you have more than at your wife’s or husband’s smile and when you spend your life talking about what you desire and you have more than what you can ever enjoy, then your life is foolishness. Up in the mountains I’ve learned that there are many rich poor people and many poor rich people, because I can assure you that I’ve seen people enjoy life much more than others who have palaces to live in. The key to happiness is not what you have but how you live.
Never forget that something good is on the way! God bless you and be with you in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
