Twenty-sixth Sunday in
Ordinary Time
There was a wise old Jewish
rabbi who one day asked his students a very interesting question. He said to them, “How do you know when
nighttime has ended and morning has arrived?”
The students thought about it for a while and one of them said, “Well is
it when you can look off into the distance and you are able to distinguish
which tree is an oak and which is an elm?”
The rabbi said, “No, that’s not correct.” Another student said, “Well, it’s the moment
when you are able to tell between two animals which is the dog and which is the
sheep.” The rabbi again said, “That’s
not correct.” Several other students
gave other answers but none of them got it right. Finally in exasperation one of the students
said, “Then tell us, Master. What is the correct answer?” And he said, “You know that night has ended
and daytime has come when you can look on the face of another person next to
you and see your brother and your sister, because no matter what time of day it
is if you cannot do that then it is still night.”
Our readings today,
especially the first reading and the gospel, deal with people who are
luxuriously wealthy, people who are caught up in themselves and in the enjoyment
of their money. And sometimes we think
when we hear these readings that that is what Jesus is attacking. Wealth. But it really isn’t. You see the money is just kind of the
background of the story. It has nothing
to do with what the real point of the story is.
It’s only one example of what Jesus is talking about.
You notice in the first
reading why the prophet condemns the people?
He said, “You are living it up and you don’t even notice the poor of
And in the
gospel with the rich man, the exact same thing. Here is a
man. He obviously saw that poor beggar,
Lazarus sitting outside his door because he knows his name in the middle of the
gospel. He says, “Send Lazarus to dip
the tip of his finger in water.” So he
knows who he is. But the problem was he
never cared. He was so wrapped up in
living his own life that poor Lazarus suffered right there and it didn’t matter
a bit to him. That is why he ends up in
hell, in that place of torment and suffering.
I think the message of the
readings today is that we as human beings have a purpose in life. We were created by God for a reason. We were created in His image as beings who are capable of love.
Beings who are capable of getting beyond
ourselves in living a life of care and concern about others. And yet how often things in
life can stop us from doing that.
Whether it’s money, power, popularity, whatever it is, there are so many
things in life that can make us turn in on ourselves and to think that we are
all important and my wants and my needs come first, and as long as we are
taking care of ourselves and making ourselves feel good with these things then
we don’t care about anyone around us.
That is the danger of selfishness, the danger of self-centeredness.
Because as we see in the
gospel, Jesus points out what is wrong with that. We have the rich man who focussed
so much only on himself that he created around himself a void, a chasm that
could not be broken into. He sealed
himself up in loneliness, in ice cold neglect for all eternity. He managed to separate himself from God, and
he managed to separate himself from his brothers and sisters because he erected
that barrier of coldness, of uncaring around him and he found himself in hell.
You know one of the classic
descriptions of hell comes from Dante. And
Dante portrays hell as frozen lake of ice where people are stuck in total
isolation and loneliness and coldness for all eternity. That’s really what we believe about
hell. It’s a place where we are totally
separated from God and His love, and totally separated from other human beings
and their love. We exist in a loveless,
lonely condition for eternity. How
painful that is when we are beings whose very purpose is to receive love and to
give love.
Today’s readings remind us
to not ever let anything in our life become so important that it would separate
us from caring about our fellow brothers and sisters.
You know, financially we all
are called to take care of our own needs and to take care of the needs of our
family. That’s a granted. That’s not a bad thing, that’s a good
thing. But, we cannot go so far as to
think that every single last penny we make should be used for that
purpose. We have to be open to also
sharing some of it with the less fortunate around us. We are given only so much time in life by God
and so often that time becomes precious and we have to use it for ourselves and
to get what we want and to go where we want to go and to get finished the
things that we want to get finished. We
can’t do that. We can’t allow that value
we put on time to separate us from our brothers and sisters and keep us from
spending time serving them and helping them.
We may possess all kinds of
talents and gifts within us, that could very easily look upon ourselves and
treat ourselves as gods, as people to be admired, as people to be worshipped
because we are so wonderful with all these gifts, that we forget that those
gifts were given to us to share with our brothers and sisters in ministry at
some time.
Today as we celebrate the
Eucharist we celebrate Jesus, who was God, who is God, but He never thought
only about Himself. His life was for us
and for all. And He comes right now to
give us His very body and blood as food for our journey. If we allow it to happen, what we receive
from this altar today can change us. It
can open the doors of our hearts. It can
throw away that isolation of selfishness and self-centeredness that we have
allowed to accumulate and leave us once again with hearts open, not just to
myself, but also to God and to my neighbor.
But it only happens if we allow it.
This sacrament is not magic. It
is Something, it is Someone who comes to heal us and
He asks us to cooperate in being willing to turn away from those things that
entrap us in that coldness of non-caring so that we can once again become the
people we were meant to be. A people who
love and care for one another.