,_RP-P-OB-67.152.jpg)
Jesus said to his disciples:
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth,
where moth and decay destroy, and thieves break in and steal.
Most of us aren't hoarding wealth or living on massive piles of gold like Smaug the dragon. We generally don't think of our lifestyles as excessive. And that may well be true. We may live what appear to be lives of moderation and yet still have hearts that are fixated inordinately on things that can only provide temporary satisfaction. There can be idolatry even without obvious excess. In proof of this we see that treasure is not always about literal wealth. Think of the Gospel we recently heard where people preferred to have their reward from how others saw them. This was where their treasure was, and it was doomed to fail eventually. We should ask ourselves, what is our treasure? What sorts of things do we imagine ourselves to be unable to live without?
But store up treasures in heaven,
where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal.
Storing up treasure in heaven means we must do more than pretending to care or tacitly acknowledge the primacy of heavenly things. We have to learn to actually care about them more than the merely earthly. We need holy habits to help make putting first things first possible and, eventually, easy. We only get holy habits with the help of the Holy Spirit, for they are his gifts and his fruit in our lives.
For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.
We can assess where our treasure is stored and our hearts are dwelling simply enough. What place does the Kingdom have in determining how we spend our time, talent, and treasure? What priority do the sacraments have in our lives? Do we contribute regularly to the Church and good charities? Do we cultivate friendships that build us and others up in the Lord? Now, most of us will hear about time, talent, and treasure and immediately feel guilty that we aren't doing enough. And then we quickly realize we can't possibly do enough and start to despair. But it isn't about the quantity, it is about the quality. And the quality comes from the priority or primacy of what we place first and the way that informs our subsequent decisions and logic.
The lamp of the body is the eye.
If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light;
We can train ourselves to grow accustomed to the light or we can remain in darkness. It is all a matter of the things to which we allow ourselves to be consistently exposed. We perform, as it were, behavioral conditioning on ourselves by our choice of those things to which we give attention. The light may seem harsh and jarring at first, but the more we come into it the more we will find it empowers us to live in greater freedom. By contrast the darkness seems easy but it leaves us constantly spiritually stumbling and, as it were, stubbing our toe. Jesus himself is our main source of light, and his word is a lamp to our feet. Let us learn to let him and his word illuminate our hearts.
Thereupon all the people of the land went to the temple of Baal
and demolished it.
They shattered its altars and images completely,
and slew Mattan, the priest of Baal, before the altars.
If there is anything in our lives that is taking the place of God let us tear down the altars and images and idols and make space for God to reign. Then we can be like the people in the first reading, who, with the city quiet at last, rejoiced.
No comments:
Post a Comment