Today’s Gospel starts with what seems to us at first glance a perfectly reasonable request: a man in the crowd asks Jesus to persuade his brother to share their inheritance between them- “give me a share of our inheritance”. It sounds like a request for justice, for fair shares, and so we are perhaps a bit surprised at Our Lord’s rather cool reaction and refusal to get involved- “Who made me your judge or the arbitrator of your claims?” We need to look at that request of the man in the crowd a little more closely- what is it really about? What is he really saying? As so often, to make sense of these things we have to go back to the original greek text. The word we have translated as “inheritance”- kleronomia- is actually, as the RSV, always more accurate, knows, a word meaning property, or real estate. Divide up the property, is what the man is saying. And the word for “arbitrator” –meristes- is literally a word that means “divider”, the one who splits the property up. Now, in the Jewish world at the time of Jesus, normally a dead man’s estate passed whole and entire to the firstborn, what we call in legal terms primogeniture. But you could ask to have it split between the children, which is the norm in some countries like France today. The problem was, would the farm, or whatever the state consisted of, still be viable once it was split up? And this is part of what we must consider this morning: is it OK for me to have what I want from life, what I think of as rightfully mine, is this a legitimate ambition? And especially, we need to consider, is it still OK if my taking these things for myself means taking them away from somebody else? Because usually, my having something will mean someone else, perhaps someone equally or more deserving than me, not having it. And what do we think about that?
Don’t worry, I am not going to use this as a springboard to preach against material things and to urge renunciation upon you. How could I, who you all know, am one of the most acquisitive of people, risk such a thing! No, there is nothing wrong, as far as I see it, in wanting and acquiring the good things of this world- up to a point, and as long as we recognise- as the Church has been teaching from the great Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century to the present day- that possessions come with responsibilities as well as rights. The idea too that you might want to put something by for a rainy day, does that seem so bad? It sounds like the action of a prudent person, and I am sure we would all like to be in the comfortable position of the rich man who says to himself “you have plenty of good things laid by for many years to come”, and indeed, perhaps some of you are!
And again, I have to say I rather like the sound of the advice the rich man gives himself: “take things easy, eat, drink, have a good time!” Food and drink, especially wine- especially perhaps Cotes du Rhone- these are surely among the good gifts of a loving Father that we are expected to relish? Enjoying the fruits of creation, appreciating the good things of life, well, it’s almost a religious duty, depending how you look at it. So I often reason with myself.
But there is a danger in all this, isn’t there. And the danger seems to me that in what seems like a proper desire to become self-sufficient, to stand on one’s own two feet in life, and to have your pension plan sorted and your investments ticking over nicely, you can begin to think that you have got life under your own control. What a delusion! And somehow then God is often gradually sidelined, because he is needed so much less, as there are fewer and fewer occasions when we feel frail and unprotected and when the future frightens us, and these, as Fr Bosco reminded us last week, are usually the only occasions in which we turn to God in prayer at all. This is why in his version of the Beatitudes St Luke can say just “Blessed are you poor”- God will always be a vivid reality to people who have no money to shield them from whatever life throws at them.
But life will throw things at us, whoever we are and however much money we’ve got. And we fool ourselves, don’t we, if we think that our possessions and policies, that make us feel so secure, are the source of our ultimate security- as Jesus says “a man’s life is not made secure by what he owns”. The good things of life, which we rightly enjoy, may be taken from us without warning- look how we are reeling in St Saviour’s this week from the sudden death of our beloved Josephine, gone from us in the twinkling of an eye. She is someone, we may safely guess, who is going straight to the heavenly banquet, but can each of us be so sure about ourselves? Will I be going straight from the foie gras and the Cotes du Rhone to the nectar and the ambrosia of the feast with the saints? At the moment it is too close to call….
And so, while we still have time, that most precious of our possessions, and one that may be taken from us any second, let us sort out our portfolio for Heaven, and just as we might go to a financial adviser to get our investments on to a solid footing, let us think about going to another sort of specialist, let us take a searching look at our spiritual life and make a visit to the Confessional this month. Let us make ourselves rich, then, whether we can make ourselves honestly rich in the sight of the world or not, rich in the sight of God. Lord Jesus, give us the grace to keep “our thoughts on heavenly things” as St Paul says, so that when the demand is made for our souls, we will not appear before you empty-handed, but be able to offer you a hoard made up, not of gold and silver, but of our prayers an good deeds. Amen.
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