What I love about the period the Church spends in Ordinary Time between Corpus Christi and Advent is reading in a semi-continuous way through whichever of the Synoptic Gospels is the focus of that year. Being in Year C of the Sunday Lectionary, we are reading through the Gospel According to Saint Luke. In chapter nine, verse fifty-one, which marks the end of the Lord's Galilean ministry, Jesus "resolutely" determines that He is going to Jerusalem. And so, Luke takes us on a journey with Jesus and His disciples.
This journey narrative is the heart of the Luke's Gospel. Being harmonized with our reading from Ecclesiastes, today's Gospel sets forth the foolishness of making one's life about the acquisition of riches. Often, the pursuit of riches starts with the idea that attaining a certain level of wealth equals security. This then easily morphs into the acquisition and hoarding of wealth for it's own sake. It can even lead to the realization that wealth is a source of power.
Jesus and Qoheleth (the preacher of Ecclesiastes) both demonstrate in rather down-to-earth terms that security does not and cannot come from wealth. Qoheleth simply points out that acquiring is wealth is stressful. It eats up all your bandwidth and even deprives you of sleep. All for what? To leave all that you've spent your life in the service of to someone else? Ecclesiastes is likely the most existential book in all of Sacred Scripture.
Jesus mines this same vein. The self-satisfied man who has accumulated so much wealth that he needs to construct bigger barns in which to store it so that he can relax and enjoy himself will die the very night he sets forth his plan. Talk about futility! Apart from noting that Jesus'culture was not primarily a cash culture, like ours, the point of these two readings doesn't require much gloss or explanation. Sure, we can tell more updated stories but the moral remains the same.
Elsewhere in scripture we read not that money is evil- in and of itself it is a neutral means of exchange- but that "the love of money is the root of all evils" (1 Tim 6:10). Our current cultural and political situation graphically shows us this every day. Instead of envying the very rich, we should take the lesson from today's scriptures to heart. Sadly, the typical Christian response to this very straightforward teaching often starts with "But". It isn't pleasant to be provoked.
I'll be honest, as I am in within a few years of retiring from my secular career, I find myself thinking about and worrying about money way too much. All too easily, no amount of money seems too much because I want to be safe and secure, to eat, drink, and be merry. Sometimes money seems a better bet than God- though I am not supposed to say that out loud let alone write it down. This isn't to say things like retirement planning, having some savings, etc. are evil things. It is to say that they can easily become all-consuming, crowding out what should really matter.
It is in our reading from Colossians that we find the cure for what ails us. Among those things we are to mortify (i.e., "Put to death") are "evil desire" and "the greed that is idolatry" (Colossians 3:5). Wealth is more often than not a wellspring of vice. As Jesus teaches in Saint Matthew's Gospel, what you value is not only where your heart is but it's what you place your hope in. Vanity is deadly. What Qoheleth means by "vanity" is futility. The pursuit of wealth, of pleasure, of power are all futile in the end.
The evil and deeply disturbing push towards transhumanism is a result of this. Death entered the world because we wanted (and still want) to usurp God and be masters of ourselves and of the world. Rather than trust in Christ's overcoming death by His Resurrection, we seek to overcome death through capital investment in technology. By means of these technologies, making ourselves machines, our consciousness reduced to a data set.
Theologically we insist that likeness to God is lost through sin and can be restored by grace but the image of God every person bears is ineradicable. When faced with the dystopia toward which we are hurling ourselves at warp speed, I wonder if there will come a point at which this supposed ineradicability needs to be called into question.
So, if today you hear God's voice in the proclamation of these scriptures, harden not your heart. Learn to number your days rightly so as to gain wisdom of heart. Don't forget, your days are numbered. Memento mori is an important spiritual practice.
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