The Best Investment
August 5, 2007

Readings for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Reading 1: Eccles. 1:2; 2:21–23

Responsorial Psalm: Ps. 90:3–4, 5–6, 12–13, 14, 17

Reading 2: Col. 3:1–5, 9–11

Gospel: Lk. 12:13–21

Link to Readings

By Father Nicholas L. Gregoris

Most unfortunately, many individuals in our society live to work, rather than work to live. What evidence do we have of this? We can point to the ever-increasing materialism that encompasses us, which has furthered the divide between the extremely rich and the extremely poor among the nations of the earth and helped to perpetuate the evils of global hunger and disease. Nor can we ignore the scandals that have rocked the corporate world, oftentimes fueled by a utilitarian logic that proclaims that “might equals right” and “the end justifies the means.”

Furthermore, living to work has also led to other forms of abuse and exploitation—from human trafficking and the sex trade, to the neglect of children by career-obsessed parents, to the disintegration of family activities like common meals and vacations, and a blatant disregard for Sunday as a day of rest.

Work, with its accompanying anxieties, preoccupies our minds and hearts, so much so that we begin to value ourselves and those around us by how much we earn or produce. If Our Lord could say in the Gospels that “the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath”; similarly, we believe, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, that “work is for man, not man for work” (no. 2428).

Sacrificing to Idols

Morally speaking, work has a neutral value in and of itself. In this sense, basic human actions like eating, drinking, and sleeping become morally problematic only when we fail to keep these activities in their proper balance in our lives. While work is most certainly good and necessary for man’s livelihood—something that affords man a dignity that sets him apart from irrational creatures, something that is demanded of him by his Creator in order to subdue the earth—work was never meant to enslave man.

Political philosophers like Karl Marx, who lived in the nineteenth century and who co-authored with Friedrich Engels the “Communist Manifesto” (1848), reduced the value of man to his work-load and production and to the class struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. In so doing, Marx created an atheistic philosophy that declared religion the “opium of the people.” In the twenty-first century, do we see how empty those words really are, how truly vain?

As Christians, we should understand that man’s fundamental dignity and value do not derive from his paycheck or bank account, but from his identity as a creature made in God’s image and likeness, destined to live eternally in the world on high.

But work is not the only idol to which contemporary secularized society offers the homage that is due to the one true God alone. Man also has an awful tendency to worship false gods like those mentioned in our second reading: “immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and the greed that is idolatry.”

Heavenly Economics

According to God’s economy (plan) for our eternal salvation, we have been bought at a price. That price is God’s own Body and Blood, which nourishes and strengthens us in the Mystery of the Holy Eucharist and is a pledge and promise of future glory.

God calls each one of us to give up vain pursuits, to abandon the narcissism so prevalent in our day and so entrenched in our culture. Rather than espousing secular values that amount to a modern-day version of the “vanity of vanities” decried in our first reading, we need to rediscover the virtues of Christian living and the true value of the Gospel as “the pearl of great price,” for which we should be willing to sell everything we have.

Jesus teaches us in the Gospels that where our treasure is, there will our hearts be. If this is true, then we need to take better inventory of our lives. We need to make sure that God is our number one priority, for we cannot serve two masters. We cannot serve both God and mammon, for we will end up loving one and hating the other.

As long as we continue to fix the eyes of our hearts on earthly realities, we will not be able to focus our attention on heaven, our eternal home. Heaven, for us Christians, is the ultimate reason why we exist. Heaven should be motivation enough to do all that we do each day for the greater glory of God and for the sanctification of our souls.

Make the Best Investment

Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician and philosopher in the seventeenth century, purposed a wager, known as “Pascal’s Wager.” He challenged us to bet or wager on God rather than against Him. Why? Because if you were to bet in favor of God’s existence and live a godly way of life on earth and then discover that God does not in fact exist, you would lose nothing. On the other hand, Pascal argued, if you should bet against God’s existence and live an ungodly way of life on earth, then you run the risk of losing everything. Pope Benedict XVI said as much in his Inaugural Mass in St. Peter’s Square on April 24, 2005, when he reminded us that Christ takes nothing away from us but rather gives us everything.

Faith, you see, is man’s best investment. Why? Because God can neither deceive nor be deceived. God is a perfectly simple Being. He is always the same (semper idem). He will never go back on His word or promises. He will never short-change us for having placed our trust in His providential care.

This is why the rather negative outlook of the sacred author of our first reading is balanced by the more positive outlook of the psalmist who prays: “And may the gracious care of the Lord our God be ours; prosper the work of our hands for us! Prosper the work of our hands!”

As providential as God is on our behalf, He calls us to cooperate in His plan of our salvation. The word “cooperate,” derives from Latin and it means “to work with.” The motto of Pope Benedict XVI, based on the writings of St. Paul, is cooperatores in veritate (cooperators in the truth).

The best and most pure example of cooperation with God’s grace in the working out of God’s plan of our salvation is Mary of Nazareth, whose fiat, or “yes,” at the Annunciation loosed the knot of Eve’s disobedience. This is the consensus of the Fathers of the Church from St. Justin Martyr and St. Irenæus of Lyons to St. Augustine of Hippo, who wrote, “God who created you without you does not justify you without you.” Later on in the sixteenth century, the great Catholic Reformer and founder of the Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius of Loyola, gave us this piece of advice about cooperation with God’s grace: “Work as though everything depended on you; pray as though everything depended upon God.”

Working with God

Like Mary, the New Eve, we too must cooperate, that is, work with God, so that the work of our salvation may be carried forward, so that the good work begun in us through the Sacraments of Christian Initiation (Baptism, Confirmation and Holy Eucharist) might be brought to completion through the Sacraments of Healing (Penance and Anointing of the Sick) and Christian Service (Matrimony and Holy Orders). Like Mary and the other saints, we are being challenged today to engage in labors of love for the sake of the kingdom of God.

The Fathers of the Church and all the ancient monastic traditions teach us that God’s work (opus Dei) is primarily the work of prayer and the Sacred Liturgy. God’s work also includes obedience to the commandments and fidelity to the vows or promises we have made. None of this should be an onus for us, but rather a bonus, a true spiritual boon and blessing that permit us to look forward with joyful hope to that day when we shall all rest from our labors.

Our time and talent are not our own. Like the ability to work, they are gifts of God. For as Rabbi Abraham Heschel once said: “Everything we own, we owe.” We need to spend ourselves on God, manifesting solidarity with our neighbor, especially with the downtrodden and downcast, those who are both materially and spiritually impoverished.

The Church challenges us to give selflessly the gift of our persons to one another without holding back. Married couples do this when they engage in conjugal relations that are open to the gift of children as the fruit of their mutual love. In our daily routine, we need to heed the evangelical precepts to go the extra mile, to give the shirts off our backs, and give the laborer his just wages. If we put our stock in God’s will, then we will never go bankrupt. Instead, we will always find a more than generous return on our investment, learning to give to God what belongs to God.

The Right Stuff

When we forget that our origins are in God; when we forget that God is the source and summit of our existence; when we forget the price that God paid for our salvation by dying on the Cross; when we forget that the Holy Spirit sanctifies us with His inestimable seven-fold gifts; then we are in danger of being duped by that vanity of vanities that makes of work or any other creature an idol to which man foolishly bows down.

Only God can fill the emptiness that comes from crowding our inner selves with lots of “stuff,” the extra baggage we can get rid of in a good confession and at other times in spiritual direction with the same or other trustworthy priest.

Our freedom, the fullness of our joy, will be evident only when God will be all in all. God Himself is our prize, our inheritance. We must seize the day (carpe diem), lest we hesitate and find ourselves lost along life’s journey, further and further away from heaven, our true home. We will be able to experience the abundant life that Christ Jesus promised us in the Gospel if we detach ourselves more and more from material realities so as to become ever more attached to the things of Heaven, the “stuff” of saints.

This is the fundamental lesson of our Scripture readings today, especially our Gospel passage. The anonymous man in the crowd who wants Jesus to ask his brother for his inheritance fails to understand that heaven is our true and lasting inheritance. The treasure of the Mass is an infinite treasure because it derives its efficacy from the infinite merits of Christ, our all-merciful Redeemer, in whom we place all our trust. But even the treasure of the Mass is but a foretaste of our everlasting inheritance and, as St. Paul writes, the gift of the Holy Spirit acts as a down payment for our redemption.

The Good Life

In today’s Gospel, Jesus paraphrases a proverb of the Epicureans, a philosophical school of thought popular during Our Lord’s time, which taught that we should avoid pain at all costs and that we should eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we will die. This extremely pessimistic philosophy led to hedonism on the part of its adherents. The Epicureans and hedonists of our own time have lost sight of what ought to be man’s true goal in life, not an avoidance of pain, but the union of all our joys and sufferings to the joys and sufferings of Christ Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

The “good life” for us Christians must not consist in the vain pursuit of fleeting pleasures in this transitory life, but in the worship in spirit and in truth of the one, true and living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Let us prepare ourselves even better now in the context of this saving Eucharistic Sacrifice and Banquet to store up treasure for ourselves in matters pertaining to God who, in Christ, became poor that we might become rich by His poverty.

G.K. Chesterton, the great Catholic convert and apologist of the last century, put it well: “The golden age comes to men when they have, if only for a moment, forgotten gold.”

Father Nicholas L. Gregoris, a member of the Priestly Society of the Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman, holds a doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Theological Faculty Marianum in Rome and serves as the managing editor of The Catholic Response. He is the author of The Daughter of Eve Unfallen: Mary in the Theology and Spirituality of John Henry Newman, published by Newman House Press. He is likewise the translator and editor of Father Giovanni Velocci’s book Prayer in Newman, just released by Newman House Press.

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