To Be and Not To Have

18th Sunday of the Year

There is a homily that I wanted to give last weekend that I did not give because that homily would have touched on some issues that are still not clear to me. But our Gospel today confronts these same issues, so I figure I might as well tell you something about what that homily would have said. And then with today’s Gospel we can move toward some clarity regarding the living of the Christian life.

Here is the issue that remains unclear to me: the Christian life in regard to wealth and possessions. I think that for most of my life I believed what most Christians seem to believe about the moral life and wealth: sin is the problem but not wealth itself or owning things. To possess wealth might make the Christian life harder in some ways but there is also a great opportunity that comes from possessing wealth. The communion of saints is replete with lives whose wealth served as the condition of possibility for astounding works of charity. So, wealth and possessions are neutral realities in our moral lives: to those whom much has been given, surely, much will be expected. Every Christian is called to use the gifts they have received for the building up of the kingdom of God, whether those gifts consist of two copper coins or five talents. The challenge for the moral life is not wealth—not possessions themselves—but rather what we do with what we possess.

A few years ago, I started to question that traditional narrative about wealth and the Christian life. A theologian named David Bentley Hart out at the University of Notre Dame published an essay in Church Life Journal entitled A Prayer for the Poor. In the essay, Hart gives an account of wealth and the moral life in the context of Jewish tradition at the time of Christ’s public ministry. Indebtedness, servitude, poverty: these were operative norms for many of the people who were witnesses to Christ’s teaching. The poor were continually called to court to resolve unpaid debts, usually to their great harm. What we might call 1st century predatory lenders—the wicked men of the Gospels—worked the streets to take advantage of the poor at every opportunity. And so, Christ—says David Bentley Hart—preached a Gospel message that is far more critical of wealth and possessions than what the average Christian seems to believe today.

In fact, Hart claims that poverty and indebtedness give the necessary context for making sense of the Our Father—the prayer we heard at the heart of last week’s Gospel. The second half of the prayer, says Hart, is all about real, genuine, authentic oppression of the impoverished in an unjust society. The prayer as we know it today comes from a history of bad translations and misunderstandings. Hart says that the original Greek of the Gospel—when properly translated—gives us the following lines of prayer:

Give us our bread today, in a quantity sufficient for the whole of the day. And grant us relief from our debts, to the very degree that we grant relief to those who are indebted to us. And do not bring us to court for trial, but rather rescue us from the wicked man.¹

Now, I want to be clear: for me the challenge in Hart’s essay has little to do with the translation of the Our Father. The prayer that we know for ourselves is a prayer of the Church—it is a prayer of our liturgy—and there is no warrant for changing its words or altering its meaning. Moreover, there is no doubt that David Bentley Hart is a theologian who routinely challenges the Christian tradition on important matters of belief. And that’s ok; challenges to faith force us to engage with faith . . . to become better followers of Christ.

Here is the question struck me upon reading the essay: what if many of us Christians have just missed the power of Christ’s teaching on wealth and possessions? What if there is a dimension to the reality of the Gospel that makes a demand on our Christian lives that many of us ignore? A dimension to the reality of the Gospel that that sets expectations that many of us fail to meet? What if there is a way we are failing in our Christian lives, and we just don’t know about it? What if Christ speaks about wealth in the Gospel with a seriousness and a purpose that is dismissed too easily when it comes to our moral lives? There is the question that haunts me from Hart’s essay.

And I think the question is very much grounded in our Gospel for today. Christ makes a distinction between being and having: one’s life does not consist of possessions. Who we are—who we are as persons made in God’s image—stands in no relation to what we possess. The language that Christ uses is absolute—the teaching is not that one’s life does not only consist of possessions but that one’s life—in no way whatsoever—consists of possessions. The parable that follows raises the stakes. First, Christ says that to possess wealth requires a person to live a life preoccupied with concern for how to manage that wealth—and there is the vanity of which we hear in our first reading from Ecclesiastes today. Our lives are eternal, but our wealth—our possessions— are not, so only a fool would invest so much into an aspect of life that cannot endure eternally. Second, Christ tells us that God does not care about wealth; money and possessions do not matter to God, but our lives do. To possess wealth is to become invested in an aspect of life that is of no interest to God, and that seems to me like no way for a Christian to live. The Christian, we are taught in Matthew’s Gospel, is not called to build up fortunes in this life but rather to store up treasures in heaven.

These are hard teachings. And I think these teachings place before us a question: is every Christian called to give away their possessions for the sake of living real Christianity? The story of the rich young man told to sell what he has to pursue perfection in life—is that the story of every authentic Christian life? I admit that I still lack some clarity when it comes to wealth and the Christian life, but my answer to that question is no. Every Christian life is unique and called to a special mission for the sake of the kingdom. To say that to those whom much is given, much will be expected requires that we take seriously the truth that to every Christian life something is given: a mission, a vocation, a state in life. The story of the rich young man—that is his story of relationship with Christ, not ours. The witness of the saints assures us that for some, wealth is the condition of possibility for astounding works of charity; for others, to forsake worldly possessions for the sake of the kingdom is the calling they have received from Christ; and for many people, Christ calls them to live somewhere in between in their service of the kingdom.

And yet . . . Christ is also clear that possessions—wealth—are a stumbling block to discipleship. We cannot easily follow Christ burdened by the weight of what we own. There is an order—a structure—to discipleship in the Gospel: renounce wealth, pursue chastity, and live obedience. And that structure of discipleship holds true for any person who would follow Christ. For the the Christian, the renunciation of possessions is the first step toward a life of obedience to the will of the Father. The life of wealth, possession, acquisition: these are the kinds of pursuits that fill our lives with preoccupations and concerns that separate us from Christ and distance us from the poor who Christ says will inherit the kingdom of God.

As I told you at the beginning of my homily, my thoughts on these matters are not clear. From the perspective of vocation and personal mission, it seems to me that taking givenness seriously requires accepting that some are called to use wealth and possessions to build up the kingdom of God. But from the perspective of discipleship in the Gospel, to renounce wealth and possessions is a first step forward for any person who would dare to follow Christ. Can we reconcile these two positions with one another? We might be able to do so. There is a chance that the Christian life regarding wealth and possessions reduces to a single command: within whatever life you have been given, live simply and seek to renounce all that you do not need to live the life that Christ has given you, for anything else that you possess will keep you from following Christ.

Getting the Christian life right means getting life right when it comes to what we own. And as far as the Christian life goes, to live as simply as we can within the life that we have been given while using the whole of our lives to build up the kingdom . . . that might be as much clarity as there is to find on these issues. But deeper and more essential to the Christian life is always the attitude behind our actions—the disposition within our interior lives that shapes how we live. And what troubles me about Christianity in the world today is many of us want to live comfortable lives filled with possessions. We hear Christ speak about wealth and possession in the Gospel and our immediate instinct is to search for some kind of spiritual meaning, some kind of metaphor or allegory that softens the words of Christ’s teaching—surely Christ is not condemning wealth and possessions in a literal sense? The kind of life and those kinds of teachings are hard. Who could accept them?

I wanted to give this homily because these are the attitudes—the kinds of interior dispositions—that threaten to keep us from Christ. These kinds of attitudes and interior dispositions will not make us into better disciples. To want to follow Christ is to want to eliminate whatever obstacles stand between us and Christ. And to possess more than we need to fulfill our service to the kingdom is to erect a barrier to discipleship. And it seems to me that many of us—maybe most of us—build up these kinds of barriers in our lives. I have heard many confessions in my two years as a priest, and have heard confessions to all kinds of deadly sins: pride, gluttony, lust, sloth, envy, anger. But the deadly sin that receives the least amount of attention by far is avarice—good old-fashioned greed for material possessions. Which makes me think that either most people do not struggle with the sin, or that most people do not know there is a sin here to confess. And yet . . . there is a sin here. For though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.

1. David Bentley Hart, “A Prayer for the Poor.” Church Life Journal (June, 2018).

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/a-prayer-for-the-poor/