Today’s readings: Ecclesiastes 1,2.2,21-23; Colossians 3, 1-5.9-11; Luke 12, 13-21.

Considering the attention that we pay on a daily basis to vanity in this day and age does not really help make our faith in Jesus Christ more relevant and credible. In the words of the book of Ecclesiastes in the first reading there is a streak of existential nihilism that does not match at all with the gospel philosophy.

To put today’s theme in the right perspective, we have to refer to St Paul’s teaching in the second reading about the new and old self in us. It is so easy for us all to enter into ruts, to lose perspective of things and to miss the right way of relating to things. That is the old self, tied to mechanisms that actually do not let us live fully and truly.

Life has to be lived and enjoyed. There is nothing wrong in enjoying life and its beauties and niceties. But we need to own our lives, rather than be owned by life’s own mechanisms. From the moment in the gospel of Luke that Jesus starts his way to Jerusalem and speaks of discipleship, he never ceases to highlight the need for interior freedom.

The worst thing about possessions is when we become possessed by them. That is slavery, which robs us of the new self. The gospel of its very nature makes us explore the blessedness of the life of virtue and the misery of the opposite of virtue. It speaks of avarice, greed, the inner need to grab and keep as much as possible for oneself. That distorts the joys of life.

The Christian tradition ranks greed even ahead of lust. Throughout the gospel, Jesus spoke much more of money, of the wrong relation with possessions and of mammon, than of sex. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa, speaks of “the immoderate desire for temporal possessions”. It is not just the desire of things in itself or the desire of earthly possessions that amounts to something evil, but the “immoderate” desire for them.

The gospel parable today teaches that the folly of avarice is that it assumes happiness comes from possessing, from having things. But as Peter Kreeft writes in his book Back to Virtue, “Happiness can only come from being, not having. Happiness is in the heart, the centre of one’s being”.

That is exactly what today’s readings ask us to examine: what constitutes the centre of our being. Because, as the gospel says, “a man’s life is not made secure by what he owns”. The issue here is how are we valuing our daily existence, what we consider as giving us status and identity. Life cannot be bought or sold. When it becomes a good, it ceases to be goodness in itself.

The gospel also opens our eyes to a richness “in the sight of God”. There is the other side of history and of life which we cannot ignore. That consists of whatever opens our life to the mystery, to what transcends the material world and all that is transitory.

A disordered relation with what we have or do not have leads inevitably to deep suffering in life. It is not the case of entering into analysis of the dominant culture that puts profit above everything else. We all acknowledge that we live in a culture where the need to be consumers is contagious.

But what we are mainly invited to explore with honesty is the choices we make on a daily basis and how they are changing our perspective on life in general. We are all called to be hands on from day to day. Otherwise we would not even notice what our life is tragically missing.

Poverty, material and spiritual, is in real fact what predisposes us internally to believe or not to believe. For the Church it constitutes also the precondition for any form of evangelisation, be it old or new. This has always been the golden thread across the proclamation of the prophets of old, of Jesus, and of the Fathers of the Church in the early centuries. In this regard, the insistence of Pope Francis on a Church of the poor and for the poor makes his papacy outstandingly prophetic.