Homily for Luke 12:13-21 Eighteenth Sunday

Last week we began speaking of prayer as the spiritual food of our soul; if we need to eat to keep our bodies alive and healthy, how much more do we need to pray in order to feed our souls and to keep them healthy and alive. We also discussed the need to pray with persistence and trust, trust that our heavenly Father loves us as His Children. The Father already knows what we need and so will only give us the good things we need, but not necessarily the things we want. For our prayers to be answered we need to forgive one another and to pray correctly (with the proper disposition of heart). We ended by revealing the secret of the prayer of the saints, a secret that sadly most Catholics will not put into action. That secret is prayer in front of the tabernacle, prayer in front of the Holy Eucharist. The Eucharist is literally Jesus in His human body with His human heart, and the Human heart of Jesus is the only way to the Father’s heart.

Today the Holy Spirit wants to slap us out of our complacency. In the words that He inspired, we hear that all things in this world are vanity. The wise man writing in our first reading, inspired by the Holy Spirit, is confronting the evils of this life- in particular suffering and death. It makes no sense to him. He has long observed that both the good and the evil man will face suffering and death. This is why he can conclude that the pursuit of earthly things is vane. All is vanity.

What he is really trying to point out is that all the things of this earth which takes us away from an intimate relationship with God are worthless. All the things in this world will have to be left behind including those people we love—so why do we strive to make this world our permanent dwelling especially when it is such a vale of tears…in this life all must suffer both the good and the bad, all must die leaving behind everything.

In this life then, we must strive for the higher things, the things of the Spirit—seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Our earthly desires and passions will take us away from our heavenly calling if we seek to fill our desires and passions with created things instead of God. Comfort and pleasure, not to mention sinful pleasure, are obstacles for us to reach God if we set our hearts on them. Our hearts are made for God, not for things of this world, whether it be the riches of this world or the comfort and pleasures of this world. Only God can fulfill the deepest desires of our hearts. And so our hearts will never rest until they rest in our God alone.

It is this wisdom of our first readings that Jesus in our Gospel today, uses in his advice to the man who approached him. The death of a father had just taken place and the two sons are arguing over, of all things, the inheritance. The reality of death confronts them, not only their father’s death but their own, (for whenever we face the death of a loved one, we also face the inevitability of our own death) and yet the one wants more of the inheritance than what he has received. He appeals to Jesus to intervene on his behalf- after all it’s only fair…This is, of course, a familiar situation. How many families are torn apart by fighting over the inheritance after a funeral?

Jesus reads this man’s heart- and finds there…greed. In the face of his suffering, this man thinks that more material goods will fill the void in his heart. And so Jesus responds to the request by telling him a parable. “Where is your treasure?” Jesus asks. Is it in the things of this world…or the things of heaven?… Are you too worried and anxious about obtaining more possessions to be concerned about your eternal salvation…are you more worried about obtaining money, than obtaining the greatest of all treasures, Jesus Himself?

Jesus here want us to seriously reflect that this life is short and the next life is long, eternally long; are our hearts then really set on obtaining heaven...are we really taking our conversion and salvation seriously enough? Jesus is reminding us of our mortality and warns against greed and the reliance on riches. He tells us that death will come quickly and unexpectedly. Death comes for us all sooner or later (sometimes sooner), then judgment, then heaven or hell. Are we ready for death today?

Let me share with you a story I just heard, a priest I know once gave a homily on today’s gospel. He asked the congregation. What if today was your last Mass? Your last homily? Your last Holy Communion? How would you attend, how would you pay attention and listen? Would you open your heart? (In other words he was asking, “are you taking your salvation seriously enough.)

He said this homily and these questions were made very unforgettable when the ushers came forward at this very same Mass to take up the collection. As one of them genuflected before the altar he suffered a heart attack and dropped dead as he did so. It was his last Mass and his last homily. I am sure that nobody in church that day ever forgot it either. Are we willing to risk living an eternity separated from the Love of our heavenly Father by taken it all for granted, by assuming we’ve already made it or thinking there is plenty of time?

And so, Jesus again speaks of the necessity of prayer, the necessity of forming that intimate union with our God and doing it now—one’s life does not consist of possessions, but in obtaining and possessing God (the one thing that Matters).” If we instead, make the object of this life the values and things of this world our relationship with Christ and our lives will lose meaning. With our hearts set on things we slowly become stupefied in the sleep of indifference. And in this indifference we will no longer be able to realize that the greatest gift in this life is the Holy Eucharist which is Jesus, the only way to the Father.

If we don’t center our lives on Jesus in the tabernacle we may think that we are living good Christian lives, but we are not. We will take our eternal salvation for granted; we will presume every one goes to heaven when they do not. Away from the Eucharist we will become slave to our senses—wanting only comfort and pleasure; we will think only of the things of earth and not of the things of heaven, we will become complacent. We will want only for material things and so will become attached to the created things of this world instead of the Creator of the world.

In the end, all will be vanity, for we will have sought in created things that which they can not give. What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and suffers the loss of his own soul? Eternity is forever! Work out your salvation with fear and trembling!!! If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts.

Let us realized that if we are not going to take our salvation for granted, if we are going to bear fruit in our lives, the fruit of salvation for ourselves and others, then we must place our hearts often next to the tabernacle, which is under the cross. The Eucharist is Divine; it is Jesus; it is God. The Eucharist is not only the secret of prayer, it is the one and only door way to heaven; it is heaven. There alone will we find the consolation we desire and the strength in the Lord we need to survive the trials of this life. There alone will we find fulfillment to the deepest desires of the human heart, our heart, and reach a union forever with the God who is love. May we pray today for the grace of heeding the words of Jesus and doing so now. Let us pray for the grace to discover that our hearts will only be satisfied with union with our Lord. May our Holy Communion today be an occasion where we discover more deeply the true importance of our relationship with our Eucharist Lord and so may it lead us to the communion with Him forever.