Week 29 Monday (Year 2)

Readings: Ephesians 2:1–10; Psalm 100; Luke 12:13–21

There are teachings on the dangers of wealth that are common to Matthew, Mark and Luke. One cannot serve both God and Mammon, for example. The image of a camel trying to pass through the eye of a needle is also found in all three Gospels: it is easier for a camel to do so than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.

But today’s parable is found only in the Gospel of Luke. In addition to his sensitivity and compassion – indeed, precisely because of them – Luke places particular emphasis on the dangers of wealth. He does not qualify the beatitude of the poor as Matthew does, by adding the phrase ‘in spirit’ – ‘blessed are you who are poor’ is Luke’s version, and it is he who adds the woes, beginning with ‘woe to you who are rich’. Jesus does not say ‘woe to you who are unduly attached to your possessions’, nor ‘woe to you who do not share what you have with others’. The mere fact of possessing things is in itself problematic.

‘None of you can be my disciple unless you give up all your possessions,’ we read in Luke 14. Luke 16 is one long warning. And Luke 16 is entirely centred on this warning against riches. Here we find the shrewd steward, the rich man and Lazarus, the Pharisees described as ‘lovers of money’, and a strange encouragement to the disciples to use money – ‘that defiled thing’ – in the service of the kingdom.

In Luke we find Jesus’ teaching on riches in its most radical form. This teaching is, so to speak, made tangible here. It is not a question of our attitude towards our possessions, but a problem that arises from having possessions. The warning is that human beings inevitably begin to find meaning, security and a sense of identity in their possessions. Instead of using them, our possessions somehow become us, and we become them. We accumulate treasures of various kinds (not just money) to secure our lives, to give them meaning and to affirm a sense of identity: to be somebody. If it is through what we have that we become somebody, then we have lost ourselves.

Jesus reminds us in today’s Gospel reading that ‘life does not consist of possessions’. To behave as if it did is to lose one’s life. To be truly ‘rich’ means to receive the gift of the Kingdom and to practise the generosity that lies at its heart: to let our possessions flow through us, so to speak, without regarding them as our own. It is another way of saying that we must become like Jesus who, though he was rich, made himself poor, so that we who are poor might become rich.