18th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C, Aug 3, 2025)
“Thus will it be for those who store up treasure for themselves but are not rich in what matters to God.” (Luke 12:21)
Each of us has been given a precious treasure. It is a unique and completely exquisite treasure that God has fashioned as God’s handiwork and gift to the recipient. It is the treasure of oneself. Each of us reflects a particular aspect of the infinite fulness of love and goodness that is God. We are ‘chips off the old block’ as the saying goes. And because God is infinite, so each and every person is a unique expression of God. Our glory is to be enfleshed spirit and our journey through this earthly existence is to live in such a way as to give full expression to the spirit within by expressing that spirit through our bodies, minds and hearts. We are meant to be the heart and hands of God to one another, each one of us in the unique way that is what makes her or him a particular expression of God. This can only be done by being in touch with something deep within us. The precious treasure of you and me is that we are a living relationship with God and one another. To be alive is to be in relationship.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells the crowd the parable of the man who hadn’t yet discovered who he really is. In other words, that as he walked this planet, he was wrapped up in himself. He would ‘store up treasure for himself.’ He hadn’t yet discovered that in the give and take of relationship, the inner stretching that takes place when we spend our life, the precious treasure of our beautiful expression or ‘chip’ of God in becoming rich in what matters to God we become who we really are. No one is an island, as another saying goes, and to live as if one is, is what Jesus calls being a fool. It’s completely missing the point of our existence so that when the time comes that we return the life God has given us to him, we come up empty-handed.
Jesus doesn’t have a quarrel with being rich. He doesn’t call that ‘greed.’ Jesus says that greed is, at heart, missing the point of our existence and amassing ‘things’ as a way of insulating ourselves from God and the growth and stretching that comes when we live the demands of relationship not only with God but with each other. That is why Jesus is always speaking of forgiveness, of really loving one another in him. One’s life does not consist of possessions, Jesus says, external and internal. Father, give us the true freedom of being rich in what matters to you.