“It will be hard for one who is rich to enter the Kingdom of heaven,” as Jesus says in today’s Gospel, because such a one fails to recognize that true riches are not to be found in the accumulation of goods or honors. Pursuing such things that pass away rests upon a mistaken valuation of the “dishonest wealth” of this world (Luke 16:9). Furthermore, the pursuit of riches (of whatever kind) rests upon a logic of scarcity, a logic in which everything is finite. But lovers and poets know that love, the only true wealth, is infinite and therefore cannot be exhausted. Thus, in Romeo and Juliet’s famous balcony scene, Juliet says, “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep. The more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite” (2.2.140–42). Love follows a logic of gift, a logic of abundance and not of scarcity.
Saints, too, understand this logic of gift even more deeply than the lovers and poets do. For the saints are those who, as Peter says in today’s Gospel, “have given up everything” to follow Christ. And since God is never to be outdone in generosity, what is given up is given back, but in new and mysterious ways, in a radical transformation of the gift given. Thus Jesus, who “emptied himself” and poured out his life for us to the Father, was raised to life in the glory of the resurrection.
Perhaps today we can meditate on this logic of gift, the logic of overflowing and abundant life that lies at the heart of the Kingdom of God. And we can ask for the grace to be poured out more and more for God’s service, knowing that in God’s goodness, we will receive far more than we can give.