Catholic Preaching

The Answer to the Burning Question in Our Hearts, Eighteenth Sunday (C), August 3, 2025

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Msgr. Roger J. Landry

Annunciation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Suffern, New York
Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
August 3, 2025
Eccl 1:2.21-23, Ps 90, Col 3:1-5,9-11; Lk 12:13-21

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

  • Earlier this morning, in his Mass for the Jubilee of Youth at Tor Vergata in Rome, Pope Leo sought to help the nearly one million young people from all over the world recognize and choose the path of true happiness. “There is a burning question in our hearts,” he said, “a need for truth that we cannot ignore, which leads us to ask ourselves: what is true happiness? What is the true meaning of life?”… We continually aspire to something ‘more’ that no created reality can give us; we feel a deep and burning thirst that no drink in this world can satisfy. … The fullness of our existence does not depend on what we store up or, as we heard in the Gospel, on what we possess (cf. Lk12:13-21). … Buying, hoarding and consuming are not enough. We need to lift our eyes, to look upwards, to the ‘things that are above’ (Col 3:2), to realize that everything in the world has meaning only insofar as it serves to unite us to God and to our brothers and sisters in charity.” He reminded them of what his spiritual father St. Augustine wrote about in his Confessions, that he had waited far too long to love God. He was deaf to God’s calls and shouts, blind to God’s flashing, searching for what could satisfy in the created things of God when God was already at work within him. Eventually he received eyes to see and ears to hear, eventually he breathed God’s fragrance and began to pant for him, tasted his goodness and hungered and thirsted for more, was touched by him and began to burn for his peace. Pope Leo wanted the young people of the world, and the not-so-young, to learn from St. Augustine’s mistake, to make up for lost time, and to follow Jesus the Way, Truth, Resurrection and Life along the path that leads to the joy that alone will satisfy the human person’s restless heart.
  • Today’s readings bring us into the heart of this mystery of the meaning of life and of the choices necessary to have life to the full. The words from the Book of Ecclesiastes have never lost their prophetic shock: “Vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!,” it says, before going on to say that eventually our worldly wisdom, knowledge, skill, toil and property will all pass away. None of these has lasting value. This is reinforced in the Psalm, which compares worldly treasures to grass that springs up in the morning but by evening wilts and fades under the scorching sun. As a result, the Psalmist prays, “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart.”
  • Jesus in the Gospel responds to that prayer, answering the question that his vicar on earth this morning indicated was the most important to ask: What I am living for? What am I working for? Many in Jesus’ time, and many today, are living vainly because they’re living for money and the things of this world rather than for God. Jesus today describes how easy it is to make making money an idol by means of a story about a rich farmer who, after a copious harvest, tore down old silos and built bigger silos to store his crops, totally unaware that his life was soon going to be over and then none of it would matter. In response to the nice problem of over-abundance, rather than use his massive surplus of food to feed the hungry, he thinks only about himself and about hoarding his earthly wealth. He didn’t care that many others didn’t have the bare necessities. Charity wasn’t even in the picture. And he had a rude awakening coming. That night he would die. “You, fool, this night your life will be demanded of you,” Jesus puts into the mouth of his Father. “And the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” Jesus drew the moral of the story: “Thus it will be for the one who stores up treasure for himself, but is not rich in what matters to God.” He was the poster boy for a life of vanity, which doesn’t mean just “egocentric” but “worthless.”
  • Jesus said these words in response to someone in the crowd asking him, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” Over the course of my priesthood, I have been shocked at how many times I’ve had been asked to get involved in familial disputes like the one Jesus was requested to resolve. This man obviously thought that his brother was wronging him and wanted Jesus, the just one, to intervene. This man’s brother probably was wronging him. But underneath this appeal for justice, Jesus saw two things at play. First, the petitioner was thinking that gaining the inheritance was more important than maintaining a good relationship with his brother. How many people today still think and act in these terms, allowing money or other vanities to separate them and keep them apart for years, decades or even to the grave! Second, Jesus saw that, despite what was likely a just request, the motivation underneath it was not justice but primarily greed disguised as righteousness. Jesus didn’t come from heaven to earth to settle inheritance disputes but to make us aware of a totally different type of inheritance. St. Paul would say that “love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim 6:10) and that means that all sin can be summarized in a sense by a desire to place possessions, or money, or the things of this world, and ultimately oneself over other people, including one’s family members. Jesus gives not only the petitioner and the crowd but all of us an important antidote as medicine against this spirit of acquisitiveness that leads to all types of sins: “Beware of all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions!”
  • The problem for many today is that they think that life does consist in the abundance of possessions. We idolize the rich and famous. We watch programs and buy magazines about them, devouring whatever can give us a window into their life. While few of us spend much time setting our hearts on mansions, private airplanes, superyachts, fancy cars, butlers and chauffeurs, many spend their time dreaming about and working for much larger homes, new cars, housekeepers and the like. They can deceive themselves pretending that because they’re not rich, they’re not greedy, while many are obsessed about mammon, spending far more time thinking about money and material concerns more than they think about God. Few of us, today, with increased urbanization, are tempted to build larger barns for surplus produce, but many of us worry and some are even obsessed about increasing the size of our stock portolios, retirement accounts, pensions, bank statements, homes and vehicles. The most fitting equivalent of our grain bins would be the explosion of storage units everywhere. When we no longer need something for our day-to-day life, after our dresser drawers, closets, attics and basements are full, we just get storage lockers. Even when no longer have use for something, we still hold onto it in case at some point we might need it later, while so many others might use it now. To all of us in this culture, Jesus calls us to become rich in what matters to God. In the passage right after today’s section, which unfortunately is not included, Jesus tells us: “Sell your belonging and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” Jesus wants us all to be rich in what matters, to be greedy not to fill attics, basements, storage facilities or ever bigger houses, but to build spiritual barns full to the brim with what lasts.
  • So the question is: where is our treasure? Is our heart truly centered on God? St. Paul in today’s passage from Colossians, which we hear every Easter Sunday morning at Mass, tells us, “If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not what is on earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” He summons us to focus on the things that matter. He reminds us that Christ is our life and therefore we should put to death the things in us that are earthly, that are vain, like, he indicates, the “greed that is idolatry,” and to “put on the new self … in the image of its Creator.” He summons us to live a different life. He wants us to become filthy rich in faith, well-heeled in hope, and loaded in love for God and for others, to place our treasure in God, in holiness, and in heaven. The apostle summons us, like great entrepreneurs, to seize every chance we have to grow “rich in what matters to God.”
  • So how do we do that? What practical things characterize a life that seeks the things that are above, a heart that places its treasure in what matters? We can focus on four things.
    • First, it’s going to be a life that prioritizes prayer, in which we learn how to calibrate our heart to what God desires.
    • Second, it’s going to be a life that chooses the Sacraments. Do we realize that the Sacrament of Baptism is worth far more than receiving the inheritance of several royal houses? That the tiniest particle of the consecrated host, the smallest drop of Precious Blood, is worth infinitely more than all the wealth of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerburg, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined? That the Sacrament of Reconciliation is far more valuable than winning the lottery many times over?
    • Third, it’s going to life of faith overflowing in love, that rejoices to sacrifice for others, to give without counting the cost, that seeks to imitate Christ’s own charity. There are so many opportunities for us to give of our time, of the gifts God has given, of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, of the mercy we’ve received from God, of whatever material things we have in our possession, as a participation in God’s providential care.
    • Fourth, it’s going to be a life that treasures the Word of God, that hungers for every syllable that comes from God’s mouth and seeks to become a doer of that word.
    • Lastly, it’s by living the virtue of evangelical poverty. The Gospel verse today reminds us that the poor in spirit, those who place their treasure in the kingdom of God, are blessed. They are blessed indeed. Sisters of Life, like other consecrated religious, make a vow of poverty. This is such an important witness to everyone in the Church and the world of what truly matters. As St. John Paul II wrote in his beautiful 1996 exhortation, Vita Consecrata, the vow of “povertyproclaims that God is man’s only real treasure. When poverty is lived according to the example of Christ who, ‘though he was rich … became poor,’ it becomes an expression of that total gift of self that the three Divine Persons make to one another” (21) He says it is the potent Christian response to the “materialism that craves possessions, heedless of the needs and sufferings of the weakest, and lacking any concern for the balance of natural resources. … Its primary meaning is to attest that God is the true wealth of the human heart. Precisely for this reason evangelical poverty forcefully challenges the idolatry of money, making a prophetic appeal as it were to society, which in so many parts of the developed world risks losing the sense of proportion and the very meaning of things” (89-90).
    • As today we respond to the challenge that Jesus in the Gospel and his vicar in Tor Vergata are making to us, it’s important for us to recognize that the Lord is in fact summoning us to make a choice. Today’s words are not just academic, but highly practical. Elsewhere in the Gospel, Jesus in absolute terms that we cannot serve both God and money. We have to make a choice. We’re either going to serve God and that’s going to change totally the way we relate to money and the vain things of the world or we’re going to serve money and that idolatry is going to change the way we relate to God. This choice between God and mammon was the one offered to the Rich Young Man, who knew that something was missing from his life even though he was keeping the commandments and he came to ask Jesus what he needed to do to find fulfillment. Jesus told him that if he wanted to come to be perfected, if he wanted to have it all, he needed to sell all his goods, give the money to the poor, become rich in heaven, and then come follow him. When faced, however, with that choice between Jesus and his stuff, between the two types of treasures Jesus indicates, between God and mammon, the Rich Young Man chose his stuff, and went away from Jesus sad. Today Jesus meets all of us, like he met that young man upon whom he looked with love, and tells us that we need to make the choice the Rich Young Man, at least at that point of his life, was too afraid to make. Jesus challenges us, calls us and wants to help us to choose not the path of vanity, the complete waste of our time on earth, but to seek heaven and place our heart, and our treasure, in what will bring us lasting joy in this world and be the only thing that we can take with us into the new and eternal kingdom.
    • Every Mass is an opportunity for us to make that choice. In the Preface at the heart of every Mass, the priest says, “Lift up your hearts!” and we respond, “We have lifted them up to the Lord!” That’s the chief message of Jesus, not just during the liturgy but in life. Jesus wants us to “Lift up [our] hearts” from the idols we make so easily of material things, praying that we will say with all the choices we make, “We have lifted our lives up to the Lord!” In the Mass, we receive the greatest treasure in the world, Jesus himself, the pearl of great price, worth selling everything we have to obtain, and Jesus wants to help us to unite our life to what he desires, to what is truly good for us and others, and to what will lead us to riches that cannot be lost. In response to the culture that vainly cries out to get Jesus to intervene so that they can obtain earthly inheritances, at every Mass, we cry out to Jesus, with the inspired words of Psalm 16, “You are my inheritance, O Lord! … You, Lord, are my allotted portion and my cup. … Fair to me indeed is my inheritance.” This is the answer to the “burning question in our hearts” to which Pope Leo alluded this morning. This is inheritance, the treasure, that Jesus, his earthly vicar Pope Leo, St. Augustine, St. Paul, and indeed all the saints have chosen and are urging us today to choose.

      •  

      The readings for today’s Mass were: 

      Reading 1
      Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:21-23

      Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth,

      vanity of vanities!  All things are vanity!

      Here is one who has labored with wisdom and knowledge and skill,

      and yet to another who has not labored over it,
      he must leave property.
      This also is vanity and a great misfortune.
      For what profit comes to man from all the toil and anxiety of heart
      with which he has labored under the sun?
      All his days sorrow and grief are his occupation;
      even at night his mind is not at rest.
      This also is vanity.

      Responsorial Psalm
      Psalm 90:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14 and 17

      R. (1) If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

      You turn man back to dust,
      saying, “Return, O children of men.”
      For a thousand years in your sight
      are as yesterday, now that it is past,
      or as a watch of the night.
      R. If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
      You make an end of them in their sleep;
      the next morning they are like the changing grass,
      Which at dawn springs up anew,
      but by evening wilts and fades.
      R. If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
      Teach us to number our days aright,
      that we may gain wisdom of heart.
      Return, O LORD! How long?
      Have pity on your servants!
      R. If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
      Fill us at daybreak with your kindness,
      that we may shout for joy and gladness all our days.
      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!
      R. If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

      Reading 2
      Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11

      Brothers and sisters:

      If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above,
      where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.
      Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.
      For you have died,
      and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
      When Christ your life appears,
      then you too will appear with him in glory.

      Put to death, then, the parts of you that are earthly:

      immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire,
      and the greed that is idolatry.
      Stop lying to one another,
      since you have taken off the old self with its practices
      and have put on the new self,
      which is being renewed, for knowledge,
      in the image of its creator.
      Here there is not Greek and Jew,
      circumcision and uncircumcision,
      barbarian, Scythian, slave, free;
      but Christ is all and in all.

      Alleluia
      Matthew 5:3

      R. Alleluia, alleluia.

      Blessed are the poor in spirit,
      for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
      R. Alleluia, alleluia.

      Gospel
      Luke 12:13-21

      Someone in the crowd said to Jesus,

      “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.”
      He replied to him,
      “Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?”
      Then he said to the crowd,
      “Take care to guard against all greed,
      for though one may be rich,
      one’s life does not consist of possessions.”

      Then he told them a parable.

      “There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest.
      He asked himself, ‘What shall I do,
      for I do not have space to store my harvest?’
      And he said, ‘This is what I shall do:
      I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones.
      There I shall store all my grain and other goods
      and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you,
      you have so many good things stored up for many years,
      rest, eat, drink, be merry!”’
      But God said to him,
      ‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you;
      and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’
      Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves
      but are not rich in what matters to God.”

      The post The Answer to the Burning Question in Our Hearts, Eighteenth Sunday (C), August 3, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

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