by Leela Ramdeen, Chair, CCSJ and Director, CREDI
On Monday and Tuesday T&T’s Carnival will be in full swing. Enjoy yourselves. Remember, everything in moderation! Read today’s Gospel Mt 6:24-34. “Set your hearts on His kingdom first, and on His righteousness….” Once we have our priorities right and know how Christ’s disciples are supposed to behave, we will do the right thing.
Lent begins on Wednesday, March 1. Pope Francis’ Lenten Message for 2017 is entitled: The Word is a gift. Other persons are a gift. The Holy Father bases his theme on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Lk 16:19-31). He says the parable “provides a key to understanding what we need to do in order to attain true happiness and eternal life…It exhorts us to sincere conversion… Lazarus teaches us that other persons are a gift. A right relationship with people consists in gratefully recognising their value. Even the poor person at the door of the rich is not a nuisance, but a summons to conversion and to change.”
Inter alia, he says: “Lent is a new beginning, a path leading to the certain goal of Easter, Christ’s victory over death. This season urgently calls us to conversion…Lent is a favourable season for deepening our spiritual life through the means of sanctification offered us by the Church: fasting, prayer and almsgiving. At the basis of everything is the word of God, which during this season, we are invited to hear and ponder more deeply.”
Lent is “a favourable time to renew ourselves in the encounter with the living Christ in his Word, in the sacraments and in others.”
“Lent is a favourable season for opening the doors to all those in need and recognising in them the face of Christ. Each of us meets people like this every day. Each life that we encounter is a gift deserving acceptance, respect and love. The word of God helps us to open our eyes to welcome and love life, especially when it is weak and vulnerable. But in order to do this, we have to take seriously what the Gospel tells us about the rich man.”
Pope Francis reminds us of St Paul’s warning that love of money “is the root of all evils”. It is also “the main cause of corruption and a source of envy, strife and suspicion… At the root of all his (the rich man’s) ills was the failure to heed God’s word. As a result, he no longer loved God and grew to despise his neighbour…Money can come to dominate us even to the point of becoming a tyrannical idol instead of being an instrument at our service for doing good and showing solidarity towards others, money can chain us and the entire world to a selfish logic that leaves no room for love and hinders peace.” In the rich man’s life “there was no place for God… His only God was himself.”
The Holy Father bases his Lenten message theme on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Lk 16:19-31).
Let me make it clear that the Church does not say that individuals/people should not seek to make money. However, we must not let money become our ‘God’. He rightly says that the desire for wealth can become a “tyrannical idol” that blinds us from the needs of our neighbours. Remember that all of us have responsibility for each other; to build the common good; and to work towards the well-being of our neighbour.
He says: “The rich man’s greed makes him vain…His personality finds expression in appearances, in showing others what he can do. But his appearance masks an interior emptiness. His life is a prisoner to outward appearances, to the most superficial and fleeting aspects of existence…The lowest rung of this moral degradation is pride…The rich man dresses like a king and acts like a god, forgetting that he is merely mortal. For those corrupted by love of riches, nothing exists beyond their own ego. Those around them do not come into their line of sight. The result of attachment to money is a sort of blindness. The rich man does not see the poor man who is starving, hurting, lying at his door.”
Niall Cooper, Director of Church Action on Poverty, UK, rightly reminds us that we should ask ourselves: “Where do we place ourselves in the story of Lazarus and the rich man? And what will it take to convince us as a society to share our wealth more equitably? Where would we find Lazarus today? And where would we look for the modern-day equivalents of the rich man? What would the world look like if we valued each person as being of equal worth?…As the rich man was judged by his treatment of the poor man, the outsider, the non-person at his gate, so too will we…Our task as Christians is to live as if another world is possible – a world in which all are equally valued – and through our actions to help to bring this world into being.”
