28th SUNDAY OF THE YEAR
‘He went away sad, for he was a man of great wealth’
The rich young man who meets Jesus appears to have it all. He is essentially decent, upright, enterprising and moral, but he does have one great flaw. He is in the grip of wealth. Back in the first century the Roman philosopher Seneca suggested that ‘wealth is the slave of a wise man, the master of a fool’. The young man represents the many in our world who are incapable of letting-go, taking the extra step. They may avoid doing wrong, but Christianity is more about doing than avoiding. It calls us to ‘cast out into the deep’. Respectability is not enough. When Jesus asked the young man to abandon his attachment to material possessions He was trying to get him to understand that we make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. No one has ever grown poor by giving. St. Francis was surely reflecting on this passage of Scripture when he said: ‘remember that when you leave this earth, you can take with you nothing that you have received-only what you have given’.
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