Homily for Tuesday, 21 August 2018– Memorial of St. Pius X

Tuesday of the 20th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Ezekiel 28:1-10; Responsorial Canticle: Deuteronomy 32:26-27ab, 27cd-28, 30, 35cd-36ab; Matthew 19:23-30

This homily was given at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada.

What does Jesus have against rich people, anyway? “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone to enter the kingdom of God,” Jesus says to his disciples in Matthew’s Gospel. In other words, if we are rich, we have no chance of being saved, right?

Well, yes and no. Without God, our salvation is impossible. “But for God, all things are possible,” Jesus says. So what does Jesus mean by these words?

Having grown up and now whenever I return to visit here at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, I get an impression that this parish; this community of Sherwood Park is fairly well-off, especially compared to some communities and parishes in which I have served in various places in the world. Of course, there are poor people among us here at OLPH and in Strathcona County, as there are in any parish, especially of this size. But even our country; our society is quite materially rich. Does this lessen our chance of salvation?

Let me suggest that this is not quite what Jesus is saying in our Gospel reading today. We get a clue, I think, toward the end of our Gospel reading today to the point Jesus is trying to communicate. Jesus gives his disciples two key images of what heaven will be: First, they will “sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” Second, Jesus says that everybody “who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for [his] name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold” in return what they have left to follow him, “and will receive eternal life.”

Here Jesus is speaking in what we call apocalyptic tradition, which dates the Old Testament. By apocalyptic, I do not mean the images of fiery end-of-the-world disasters brought to us by Hollywood. “Apocalypse” means “to make known”; “to reveal.” Old and New Testament writers, and Jesus in his own teaching and preaching, responded to crisis experiences in their own times (such as the Roman occupation of Israel in Jesus’ time) with language designed to give the people hope that God would resolve their crisis, and then some.

If we understand Jesus as preaching in this kind of apocalyptic language, revealing a message of hope, the rest of our Gospel reading today makes more sense. Material richness in itself will not result in our being denied heaven. Yet the onus is especially upon those of us who possess worldly riches; who have the gift of strong, united families; who do not have to struggle to get enough to eat, or for shelter, or against forms of mental, physical, or spiritual illness, to be mindful at least of people who do struggle and even suffer in these ways.

The onus is on us never to believe ourselves to be self-sufficient; to be our own gods. This is the same lesson Ezekiel speaks to the prince of Tyre and that Jesus speaks to his disciples: Only “for God all things are possible,” including our salvation. And our salvation depends on letting go of our worldly riches; putting them at the service of people who have less. Our salvation depends on letting go of the good but still finite gifts of this world for something eternal. Our salvation depends on how well we let go of our self-sufficiency to hope in God who alone saves us.