Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Brendan

In 1707 the English satirical poet Alexander Pope wrote a long poem in heroic couplets called “Essay on Criticism” which attempted to define the rules governing poetry. The poem is almost as long as one of the Harry Potter books though only marginally less interesting. If J.K. Rowling had written her novels in heroic couplets a la Pope we’d probably all find ourselves rooting for Lord Voledmort.

I would go so far as to say that the poem is eminently forgettable were it not for the fact that in it Pope coined a phrase that would go on to become a Johnny Mercer song and a big hit for Frank Sinatra who sang it with exquisite poignancy on an album called Nice and Easy recorded in 1960: “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”.

In the popular imagination this saying cautions against involvement in questionable situations or becoming entangled in someone else’s unsolvable problems. And it comes to mind in this portion of Luke’s Gospel. But it will take me a minute to explain why.

A man comes to Jesus and says: “Teacher tell my brother to give me my share of the inheritance.” There are two odd things about this request. First, he calls Jesus teacher. Usually in the gospels whenever someone addresses Jesus as “teacher” it is an indication that this person does not have a clue about the true identity of Jesus Christ.

The second thing is the way the request is phrased, or more to the point, the way it is not phrased: He does not say “Rabbi, my brother and I are quarreling over our inheritance, will you help us arbitrate this dispute?” Instead, he tries to pressure the Lord Jesus to carry out his own desires by telling him to command his brother to give him his rights.

Maybe this is why Jesus, who is usually more than willing to help others in their need, refuses to get involved in a dispute and so, pointedly—and uncharacteristically-- ignores the man’s request. Instead, he tells a parable about a rich fool and his bigger grain barns.
The parable never looses its impact because rich fools go on forever. They are fools, not because they are rich, but because they are greedy. That is why, beneath this parable, lurks a verse from Psalm 48: In his riches man lacks wisdom, he is like the beasts that are destroyed.

How does it happen that we lack wisdom in our riches? My grandmother once made a wry comment about a neighbor whose death had provoked a family quarrel over who was getting what. She said: “people would fight over a pair of dirty socks.” She could not have known how prophetic she was. When she died in 1983 she left behind the only two things of any value that she really had, a lazy boy recliner rocker and a Christmas club account at a local bank in the amount of $96.00.

A cousin dropped by to claim the lazy boy within a few hours of her death. One of my brothers and an aunt fought over the money. Accusations were made and harsh words were spoken. In the end they didn’t speak to each other for eight years. The price of their mutual silence comes out to about $12.00 per year. But can you really put a price on family loyalty? Obviously two people in my family did.

Homilies that address the question of money and wealth usually provoke restlessness on the part of the listeners. People fume that the clergy are always talking about money because, like politicians perpetually campaigning for office, they have a vested interest in the generosity of others. But I am not running for office nor am I interested in persuading you to higher levels of personal stewardship. The gospel is addressing attitudes that lie behind wealth and money: because although someone may be rich, their life does not consist in what they possess.
At the same time we cannot use the Gospel to portray the Lord Jesus as 1st century paleo-Marxist rabble-rouser issuing condemnations of the bourgeois capitalist elite on behalf of the downtrodden proletariat.

Christ is not for the poor and against the rich: neither does he condemn possessions and riches. In the end he is saying something far more subtle, and for that reason, far more disturbing to the ears of those living in a consumerist culture glutted with luxuries: a greater abundance of goods, or a higher level of consumption, does not mean a greater abundance in the quality of life.

The real problem is not our net worth. The problem comes in trying to answer the only question that really matters in assessing the quality of any human life: who or what am I living for? I suspect that even Paris Hilton knows the answer to that question.

Rich fools build barns to store their grain, rich families build huge mansions to house their shrinking families. Their children, who have everything they want, complain that life is boring so they smoke dope, medicate themselves with mood enhancers or drink themselves senseless (not necessarily in that order) in order to escape from the burdens of their meaningless existence.

In the meantime, we are bombarded by the media and their marketing strategists with the deceptive message that this life is all there is or at least the only one worth living for; that peace, joy and happiness are achieved by the avoidance of pain and suffering and the fulfillment of our desires for wealth, fame, and pleasure and that self-sacrifice, suffering and death are the ultimate evils to be avoided at any cost.

And if this were not enough to shake our Christian faith, there are preachers who do not hesitate to present these same secular distortions in the guise of Christian principles based on the Bible. Who turn the Gospel into a cargo cult by teaching that if there is anything God hates it is suffering and that he’ll take it all away if we just pray hard enough: that the reward of faith is prosperity and riches.

In one of his other, less famous poems, Alexander Pope made a wry comment that would probably have had Christ nodding his head in approval:

Satan now is wiser than of yore,
and tempts by making rich, not making poor.