Memorial of Saints Saints John de Brébeuf and Isaac Jogues, Priests, and Companions, Martyrs [USA]
Note: Jesuit Churches in the USA celebrate this feast with greater solemnity and therefore use the proper readings. Other churches will likely use the weekday readings linked above and referenced in the reflection below.
What is the danger of riches? That being rich, we become self-satisfied and forget that all we have and all we are comes from God. Such is the case with the rich man who builds bigger barns in today’s Gospel parable; he is satisfied with his material wealth and feels secure in his possessions, even though his life will shortly come to an end. He fails to recognize that, in the eternal scheme of things, none of those possessions matter.
If today’s Gospel warns against the pride that comes from material riches, today’s reading from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians steers us away from the pride that comes from spiritual riches. Paul preempts such spiritual pride when he says to his Gentile audience, “You were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you once lived following the age of this world.” Moreover, Paul asserts that “all of us . . . were by nature children of wrath”; he does not exempt himself as a Jew. It is only “because of the great love” of God that we human beings have received salvation, which is “the gift of God; . . . so no one may boast.”
How do we militate against the temptation to pride that comes from riches? By cultivating spiritual poverty, by recognizing our existential need before God. Let us, therefore, ask for the grace of this poverty of spirit today, that we may place no confidence in possessions nor in our own works, but only in “the immeasurable riches of [God’s] grace in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”