Homily for 18th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
18th Sunday of Ordinary Time

July 31, 2022
Eccl 1: 2; 2: 21-23
Ps 90: 3-6, 12-14, 17
Col 3: 1-5, 9-11
Luke 12: 13-21
Ursulines et al., The Fountains, Tuckahoe, N.Y.
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx

“Vanity of vanities!  All things are vanity” (Eccl 1: 2).

One commentator has summarized the Book of Ecclesiastes as “all is hot air.”[1]  It seems to be a pessimistic Scripture, proclaiming that all our toil is useless, all our days are filled with grief, both the wise person and the fool have the same end.  “A live dog is better off than a dead lion” (9:4).  Ecclesiastes is a book to cause us to think about who we are, why we’re here, where we’re going.

The Garden of Earthly Delights (Bosch)

Qoheleth, the preacher, whose words fill this book, laments that someone who works diligently and wisely must leave his property to someone else.  In my experience, the only man since ancient times who “took it with him when he died” was Salesian Fr. Wallace Cornell.  Fr. Wally came to New Rochelle in the summer of 1986 to make mission appeals in various parishes on the weekends.  He got started on that; but on the morning of July 10, he was found dead in his room at our residence, having had a heart attack during the nite.  Because of rules about moving money from one country to another (which I don’t know), someone decided that the easiest way to send Fr. Wally’s funds to Australia would be to enclose them in his casket before his body was sent home.  I have it on reliable authority that there was a communications lapse between our mission office and the superiors in Australia, and the money went into the ground with Fr. Wally’s casket—and later had to be dug up and retrieved.  However unintended, he really did take it with him!

Of course, whatever went to Australia with Fr. Wally was useless to him:  vanity of vanities!  He was no fool like the rich man in Jesus’ parable, like those who measure the success of their lives by the size of their bank accounts and investments, the number of rooms in their mansions (like you see in the real estate section of the Sunday NYT), their glamorous cars, their fashionable wardrobes, their amorous conquests, the vacations they take in the Alps and Polynesia, the lies told by their make-up.  “The things you have prepared,” all that you’ve accumulated and enjoyed during your life, “to whom will they belong?” Jesus asks the rich man in his parable (Luke 12:20).  “One’s life doesn’t consist of possessions” (12:15).

Who are we?  Why are we here?  Where are we going?  Read St. Paul:  “If you were raised with Christ, seek what’s above. . . .  When Christ your life appears, then you too will appear with him in glory” (Col 3:1,4).

We’re God’s children, not merely the dust to which we’ll return, not merely “the changing grass” (Ps 90:3,5), as Qoheleth and the psalmist may have thought in their ignorance about immortality and the great gift of life in Christ.  “We may shout for joy and gladness all our days” (90:14) because God has created us for life, not for vanity, not as hot air.  You remember the old words of the catechism:  “God made me to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next world.”  Well-intentioned Qoheleth didn’t know that, thru no fault on his part, nor did the self-centered rich fool in the parable.

Therefore St. Paul urges us to “put to death” all earthly vanities—he names several vices of which we may have been guilty before committing our lives to Christ, and perhaps after, too (Col 3:5)—and urges us to “put on the new self” re-created in God’s image (3:10), the image of our Risen Lord Jesus.  In this holy Eucharist, Christ comes to us bodily, sacramentally, to renew and reinforce in us his sacred image, the image of a virtuous woman or man, preparing us for immortality, “to appear with him in glory.”

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[1] Days of the Lord: The Liturgical Year (Collegeville: Liturgical, 1991), 6:148.