Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

“How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” Mk. 10:23

Here’s a trivia question for all you baseball fans:

What was the name of the center-fielder for an Oakland A’s minor league team that was voted the most valuable player during the minor league season of 2009?

Here’s some more info: His first name was Grant. In 2009, he hit 31 home runs, was one of the hottest rising stars in American baseball, and signed for a yearly salary of $430,000. He was an overnight sensation. He could probably already see his picture on cereal boxes and people lining up to have him sign bats and hats.

But then a strange thing happened. Just two months after signing this lush contract, Grant announced that he was quitting baseball. His family was stunned. Since the age of four, all he had wanted to do was play this sport that he was now walking away from.

What happened, people were asking? All Grant would say was he wanted “something more in life.”

It turns out that he wanted to be a priest.

In the fall of 2010, he entered St. Michael’s Abbey in Silverado, California. The man who was destined to be a household name changed his name. He now became Brother Matthew.

Still don’t know who he was? His name before becoming a member of St. Michael’s Abbey was Grant Desme.

If you got that right, you know baseball!

The first of the Ten Commandments tells us “Thou shalt not have false gods before us.” Idolatry is the ultimate sin. Idolatry, the worship of false gods is what Jesus is talking about here. He’s warning us against an excessive attachment to money, or, as Pope Francis puts it, “the idolatry of money.”

Money and power have always been a major temptation for us humans. Even Jesus was tempted in the famous scene where the devil takes him up to the highest mountain and tells him “all this can be yours if you will just bow down before me.” Jesus refuses the temptation, but just the fact that it is mentioned at all is very telling. It’s an issue every person has to come to terms with.

And it’s not that Jesus is telling us that money in itself is evil. What he wants to emphasize is: It’s how I use my money that is crucial. It’s the behavior and attitudes that wealth and privilege evoke that can be disastrous.

Does my life center on acquiring and using wealth? Am I depriving others around me of essential needs, while I immerse myself in the acquisition of more and more? Am I sharing my goods? Am I generous? Am I sensitive to the needs of the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the destitute?

This is what Jesus is telling us when he talks about “how hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God.” What he’s pointing out to us is how inordinately tempting it is to become people of “the More;” people who are never satisfied; people who can’t get enough. The getting and using of money can become a major addiction – to the point that it can kill our own soul.

That’s what Pope Francis is referring to when he says: “Blessed are those who … aren’t attached to money.” It’s the “attachment” that causes us to lose our way, to become blind to the needs of others around us, to become desensitized to the plight of those who have so little, if anything at all.

“Wealth,” says Pope Francis, is so powerful and so addictive that it can “take away the best of us.”

Notice in the gospel reading today, that, just like us, the disciples are very upset when they hear Jesus tell them that the addiction to money can be so powerful and all-consuming that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

The disciples are so disturbed on hearing this, in fact, that they say to one another: “Then who can be saved?”

Responding to this sense of hopelessness, Jesus offers a reassuring word for all hearers: what is impossible for humans is possible for God. As all things are possible for God, God is able to do that which is difficult, including empowering a wealthy person to sacrifice and to share for the sake of the gospel in order to join  God’s kingdom.

Who can be saved? With God, with prayer, with a conversion of heart, with a radical change in attitude, anyone can be saved.

There’s an old saying: “What you love reveals who you are.”

Grant Desme has made it clear what he loves.

Pope Francis has made it clear what he loves.

Jesus has made it clear what he loves.

Now you’re up to bat. What do you love?

Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.

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9/28/15