In the Name of the Father, the Son and
the Holy Ghost.
The Lord warns us today of how difficult
it is for a man who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God. Does it mean
that the Kingdom of God is open only to destitute, to those who are
materially poor, who lack everything on earth? No. The Kingdom of God is
open to all who are not enslaved by possessions. When we read the first
Beatitude, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of
Heaven’, we are given a key to this saying: the poor in spirit are those
who have understood that they possess nothing which is their own. We
have been created as an act of God, loved into existence; we are offered
by God communion with Him to which we have no rights. All we are, all we
possess is not our own in the sense that we have not made ourselves, we
did not create what is seemingly ours - every thing which we are and
which we have is love, the love of God and the love of people, and we
cannot possess anything because everything is a gift that escapes us the
moment we want to have possession of it and say, "It is mine".
On the other hand, the Kingdom of God is
really the kingdom of those who are aware that they are infinitely rich
because we can expect everything from love divine and from human love.
We are rich because we possess nothing, we are rich because we are given
all things; and so, it is difficult for one who imagines that he is rich
in his own right to belong to that kingdom in which everything is a sign
of love, and nothing can be possessed, as it were - taken away from
others; because the moment we say that we possess something which is not
given us either by God or by human care, we subtract it from the mystery
of love.
On the other hand, the moment we cling
to anything we become slaves of it. I remember when I was young, a man
telling me: Don't you understand that the moment you have taken a copper
coin in your hand and are not prepared to open your hand to let it go,
you have lost the use of a hand, the use of an arm, the use of your
body, because all your attention will be concentrated on not losing this
copper coin, - the rest will be forgotten.
Whether we keep in our hand a copper
coin, or whether we feel rich in so many other ways - intellectually,
emotionally, materially is irrelevant, - we are prisoners, we have lost
the use of a limb, the use of our mind, the use of our heart; we can no
longer be free, and the Kingdom of God is a kingdom of freedom.
On the other hand also, how difficult it
is to one who has never lacked anything, who has always possessed more
than he needs, to be aware of the poverty or the need of another:
poverty - material, emotional or intellectual, or any other lack. It
requires a great deal of understanding and sympathy, it requires from us
that we should learn to be attentive to the movements of other people's
hearts and to their material needs in order to respond to them. One says
in Russian 'A satisfied person no longer understands a hungry one';
which of us can say that we are hungry in any respect? And this is why
we do not understand the needs of people - of one another here, or of
people beyond the confines of our congregation.
So, let us reflect on that; poverty does
not mean destitution; it means freedom from enslavement to an illusion
that we are self-sufficient, self-contained, the creator of what we are
and what we possess. And also free from enslavement to what is given us
to make husbandmen of God.
Let us reflect on this; because if we
learn this, if we learn what Saint Paul said that whether he is rich,
whether he is destitute, he is equally rich because his richness is in
God and in the human love. Then we will be able, whether we possess
material things or not, to be free of them, and to belong to God's
Kingdom which is a Kingdom of mutual love, or mutual solidarity, of
compassion for one another, of giving to one another what we were given
freely.
Amen..
