21 October 2024 - Monday of the 29th week
Homily
Dear brothers and sisters,
This Gospel deals with two of Luke's favourite themes: poverty and prayer. Jesus tells the parable of the rich farmer who wants to build bigger and bigger barns to store all his wheat and everything else he owns. God said to him: ‘ You are a fool. Who will use all that you have stored up for yourself? The lesson about the precariousness of our earthly existence is obvious enough. But this parable is the answer to a prayer, and it is followed by a conclusion.
When we read this Gospel in a community context such as ours, it takes on a special meaning. In community life there are many ways of hoarding. One can hoard a certain number of working tools: books and magazines, for example. But this is limited, out of necessity! You can also accumulate wealth that is not material. You can act to be appreciated and admired, in which case you accumulate esteem, gloriol, if not glory. We can make ourselves indispensable in various hidden ways, and so we accumulate a certain power, and so on. That is why Jesus' last sentence in today's Gospel is a light for us: “ This is what happens to the one who accumulates for himself, instead of being rich for the love of God ”. That is the important point. Everything we do, do we do it with God and the community gathered in his name in mind, or do we do it for ourselves?
We can then go back to the beginning of our Gospel, and to the scene that provoked this long response from Jesus through a parable. A man comes to him and asks him to tell his brother to share his inheritance with him. And Jesus' response is that such things do not concern him. Here we can find an explanation for all the prayers we make that seem to go unanswered. In most cases, these are prayers in which we want God to help us to become rich for ourselves, rather than rich for God.
So let us ask God to purify our hearts of all our selfish preoccupations, to enable us to seek together what is good for the whole community and what can enrich us spiritually for God as a community whose vocation is to be a place of his presence.
Armand VEILLEUX