Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Yr C 2025

Title

The “things that are above” are not vanity

Outline

It is easy to get caught up with the affairs of this life

First, some are necessary, such as putting the garbage in the bin or preparing meals. Second, some trigger our inward “stuff”, such as my felt need for security coming from my parents’ sense of insecurity having lived as young adults through the Depression. Third, the world, the flesh, and the devil are constantly trying to get us to focus on it. But in itself, that is, if not done out of love for or obedience to God, it is “vanity of vanities” or “emptiness,” as Qoheleth says. Nations collapse, fortunes are left at death and often dissipate, monasteries are reduced to ruins, Orders die out, and all people die.

Part of a prayer I pray each morning is, “Grant me the Spirit of Wisdom that I may despise the perishable things of this world and aspire only after the things that are eternal.” These include things done in this world, but out of love for and under the guidance of God.

This is what Jesus teaches in Luke

The parable is part of a major theme in Luke of wealth and poverty. Jesus starts in the context of justice, te sharing of an inheritance, with Jesus bypassing the justice issue to point to our tendency to greed or grasping, concluding, “one’s life does not consist of possessions.” We may think that our vow of poverty has put us past this, but there is often some things that we grasp. My biblical books sit in boxes in a room in Mission House as I search for a library to accept them. I want to be free.

The parable goes on to describe a wealthy man whose fields by God’s grace brought in such a harvest that he lacks room to store it. His bright idea is to build larger barns and rejoice in his material security “for many years.” God says, “You fool!” He would die that night. Why had he not said, “Let us generously share all but what is needed until the next harvest?” Then he would have died rich in what matters to God.

So we are to seek what is above

This is not to be “so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good,” as the saying goes but to do everything from the perspective of Christ, for our “life is hidden with Christ in God.” And that life will not die or decay, but “When Christ your life appears, then you too will appear with him in glory.” Everything done out of obedience to and love for God, out of his love flowing through us, increases that hidden life.

This involves a death to our purely mortal “stuff,” “the parts of you that are earthly: immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and the greed that is idolatry.” Oh, and all lying too, and also this worldly distinctions. And that is a death, a fight to the death with the powers of this world. And thank God that our bodies with be transformed and resurrected, but that stuff will not be. Yet this is a long fight: if it were not I would be out of a job as a confessor.

In all we do, then, whether taking out the garbage or singing like angels or teaching on the virtues we are to act from “the new self, renewed in the image of its creator. In other words, we act out of love for God and in the love of God for others. In this way Christ will be all and in all in practice and not just in eschatology.

Thanks be to God.