What I do when preparing a homily is that I, usually on Monday, look over the readings and decide which I will use in my preaching. Often I use the Gospel, but you may notice other times I use the first or second reading. I then research the passage and eventually write the homily after as much as fifteen pages of notes.
This week, I am using the Gospel, but as I read over the passage I found only five pages of notes to work with but I noticed something fascinating. Notice what Jesus says are the signs that He is the one:
the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them.[1]
Ok, let’s look at that list again. Obviously it is filled with miracles and they are great signs of His presence, especially in a world where medicine is so primitive. St. Alphonsus Liguori who wrote in the eighteenth century talking about the great medical use of leeches to bring healing and that was seventeen hundred years after this was written. You can imagine how bad the medicine was during Jesus’ time. The deaf hear, the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cured, this is powerful. No doctor could accomplish that as some can today, so it is a powerful statement. However, there is one other sign that really fascinated me: The poor have the good news proclaimed to them.
That is not miraculous per se but it is included in the list, giving it the same weight.
Let us define our terms. Who are the poor, the people who have no money—maybe.
Really money is just another form of social capital. People who have money have influence in a society, but there are other forms of social capital. Likewise, people may have money but no social capital, that happens occasionally. Finally, there are the people who have neither money nor social capital. They have no standing in society and have no power in the society. Some of them are too busy trying to survive in order to influence public policy. So, they have no social capital and therefore they have no expectation of any future in this society or any love of anything the society has to offer them. That is basically because society has little to offer them. They are on the margins and for the most part live in obscurity or on the street.
They are the ones who have the good news proclaimed to them. Why is that so important.
Jesus comes to offer all the kingdom of God. Jesus comes to show that every ton of this social capital is actually nothing compared to the gift of the Kingdom of God. The truth is that the real treasure is when we put our focus on the Kingdom of God.
I am reminded that my pastor when I was in St. Rose in Chelsea was a great fan of the stock market. To this day, he is one of my favorite priests.
It was around that time that the internet was really coming into its own. I asked him if he was going to invest in it and he said no. He said that everything he read on investing in it mentioned the caveat of the 1849 GoldRush on the West Coast. He said the only people who really made money at that time were not the those panning or digging for gold, but the people who sold them their tools: shovels, pickaxes and pans. They knew where the real money was.
He was going to wait until he saw whether or not he should invest. This is the principle that we see in this list.
First, Jesus is actually focused on teaching the people without social capital who usually are the blind, the lame, the lepers, etc. Jesus is teaching them not to be concerned that they are out of the social capital line, because there is another game in town, there are greater riches to seek by those who discover where the real treasure is.
That is the point of the good news of the Gospel. Jesus preached to the people who had no social capital in His time that there is greater treasure out there. His whole focus was teaching them how to find it.
That is the point of what we do. We seek that treasure, but also help others to join us. This treasure is infinite.
You realize we are surrounded by people busy in the gold rush. Why do people go to these institutions? Because some day they are going to make lots of money. You remember those posters that said: “Justification for higher education with five fancy cars in the garage of a mansion on the West Coast. There is nothing wrong with that. However, remember the focus of these institutions used to be more about vocation. It was not about making lots of money, but it was about being of service to others.
Jesus teaches the people that you can be of service to others even if you have no social capital. That is because your focus has to be on building your treasure in Heaven which is where the real return on your investment is.
This is one of the reasons why I teach it is not good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell, that is bourgeois Catholicism. Jesus never says that, he says build your treasure in Heaven. That is the message of the Gospel and that is what he taught the poor. He taught them where true treasure gives a true return on investment.
He taught them that truth in which they found Christ and lived with a whole different set of priorities to have an even greater return on their investment eternal life in Christ.
[1] Catholic Daily Readings. (2009). Bellingham, WA: Faithlife.
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