28th Sunday Ordinary Time (B) 13 October 2024 Challenge
I prayed and wisdom was given me (Wis 7,7). Wisdom to know what to do with everything else.
If wisdom is sorting out desires, then God must be our first desire.
God may be hard to know but He is the deepest object of our
desire.
If we get a taste of the Lord (Taste and see Ps 34 (33),8) we will find it a delight to discover Him.
There are two false trails we could take.
One is to doubt God's promises to us, of such things as heavenly reward, and from today’s Gospel, manifold return on what we give up for the Kingdom.
The other is to doubt that God asks any more of us than a general compliance with a few commands here and there, not exerting ourselves in the pursuit of a holy life.
The rich young man of today’s Gospel was succumbing to the second temptation, a watering down of what true discipleship requires.
He was too attached to his riches, when he should have been attached to Jesus Christ.
So it can be for us, that we fear losing what we have, and are not sure if there is compensation for that. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Not with God.
Remember those quiz shows where you could either take the prize and go, or come back next time to get bigger prizes – but if you come back you might lose the lot!
As disciples of Our Lord we are very much in the category of ‘coming back next week’, always striving for more – more knowledge of God, more compliance with His will, more expectation of a joyful result.
We risk loss of some earthly securities, but we have the main treasure, the central point of the whole operation – the gaining of Heaven.
We can settle too easily for too little. We might settle for just a few earthly possessions, like money, health, friends, career etc, length of life, and say that is enough.
If we have those things, thanks be to God, but we do not stop there. We strive for higher things.
We need more belief in what we believe! We doubt God, not His existence, but His providence.
Jeus came to give us so much more than a few earthly assets. And He came for a lot more than telling us to be just more or less the same as everyone else.
It is easier to go along with the flow, but rarely the right course.
We take the path of serious resistance (not least resistance). We do not follow the ways of the world.
We take the demands of the faith seriously, eg if your eye should cause you to sin, pluck it out (Mt 18,9). If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife, children, brothers, and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. (Lk 14,26).
We don’t have to be a St Paul with shipwrecks and floggings etc (2 Cor 11,23ff).
God knows what we are capable of, each one to his own capacity.
We can take it with small steps; we gradually grow in faith and readiness to commit. If we read the signs as we go, we will grow in confidence and understanding – this is what wisdom does. We start to see things the right way up.
We do the small things but we don’t think that either the promises or the demands are small-scale. There is a great deal more, and we are discovering it.
We must ‘come back next week’… to seek bigger prizes!
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