28 Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B Mark 10,17-30

People living on this earth know several ways to live well and comfortably. Probably the most famous way is to have wealth and enjoy it throughout your life. Every day, we witness how people chase wealth, and the media will slowly talk only about money. Today’s word of God proclaims a different opinion. King Solomon says in the Book of Wisdom: I prayed, and understanding was given to me, I asked, and the spirit of wisdom entered me. I preferred her to scepters and thrones and counted wealth as nothing compared to her. I didn’t even put a gem on her level because all the gold beside her is a bit of sand, and the silver beside her can be counted as mud. Jesus Christ says in the Gospel: It is difficult to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

According to God’s word, what is the rich man for? He who cannot control wealth and exalts wealth as his God. Let’s look at the apostles. They had their ships and nets, houses, fields, and vineyards; they had their families and circle of friends. That was their wealth. But when Jesus called them, they left everything and followed him. What a great contrast with the young man from today’s Gospel! He loved his possessions, and that is why he left Jesus disappointed. The apostles were not attached to possessions; Jesus was their God, but for the young man, possessions were God. It is a great misfortune for a person to allow himself to be possessed by possessions. We can trace it throughout human history. That is why some people rebelled against wealth; they knew the unhappiness brought by its large amount. For example, the Indians had heavy chains of gold which bound criminals. The Spartans had property divided equally and did not allow anyone to have gold. Therefore, they also produced iron coins, and since they were cumbersome, it was a problem to accumulate them in large quantities.

Right now, someone will feel that God’s word for today’s Sunday calls us to have nothing. However, this is also not true! The wisdom of Jesus and Solomon must be used for explanation. We need property because it is necessary for life, but we must handle it correctly and remain free for God and our neighbor. Wealth must not possess and fetter our hearts; it must not become our God. This fact is made clear to us by an incident from the life of Saint Pope Gregory. There lived a certain hermit who left everything and went to the desert. You only took the cat with you. When he felt bad or couldn’t pray anymore, he played with her. Once, he prayed like this: please show me in a dream what place I will get in your kingdom for having left everything for you. God heard him, and the hermit saw himself in his dream with the Pope. When he woke up in the morning, he felt insulted and grumbled to himself: So I, who renounced everything, should be next to the Pope, who constantly lives in wealth and luxury?! The next night, he had a dream in which he received a lesson: How dare you compare yourself to the Pope when your attachment to the cat is much greater than the Pope’s attachment to all the treasures he manages and which he generously distributes to the poor! Therefore, It is not reprehensible that we own anything, but that what we have binds us so much that we cease to be free. This bad human quality is called avarice.

Jesus wants to warn us. He asks us to practice his call and not to be attached to possessions daily. None of us can claim that this problem does not concern him. Let’s be careful! Jesus does not think only about money and wealth but also about other things that make a person an enslaved person, and so he attaches himself to them so that they become a god for him. It can be a passion for the game and drugs, but also the computer, the Internet, television, passionate enthusiasm for work, physical pleasure… These ” cats ” are often more important to us than God and our neighbor. Let’s take advantage of today’s Sunday and consider how it is in my life. What separates me from God and people? What is my heart drawn to? What is the “cat” in my life? In the next week, let’s try to free ourselves from these forms of wealth, learn to live freely, and work for God and our neighbors. Only then will we be truly rich in God’s eyes.