The settlement of property and inheritance between brothers is a common cause of quarrels, separation and hatred! With him or those with whom we spent at least the first twenty years of our lives, together and dreamily loved, the time comes and we find ourselves in rivalries and conflicts and the presence of one for the other becomes "heavy" and unpleasant! How we will share our inheritances – each of us immersed in the smug certainty that he owns more than others – fills our hearts with demands, anxiety, cruelty and indifference to others and their needs. And when these are unfortunately commonplace and common situations between brothers, then one understands what happens between more distant relatives and even worse between strangers.
But why;
Why do people destroy relationships and loves of years, when money in any form is presented between them?
Because they have simply reversed that Gospel passage that says "how much is his life in abundance..." (Luke 12:15). In other words: Human life is not the greatest asset! But people say: "Life is to have a lot!"
So today, in the verse excerpt. 13-21, chapter 12 of Luke's Gospel, a man asks Christ to divide their property, in order to avoid any tragedies like the above! However, after Christ refuses, saying that he is not a judge - i.e., just a scale of equal distribution, but the "one who judges each one according to his works" - he points out to those who listen to him to be careful what dominates their hearts, because if they are filled with greed, they will sink into the delusion that they will have a real life only when they have a lot of money! And he added that if they identify "have" with "is" then they will be dangerous sleepwalkers!
Therefore, in order to wake us up from this dangerous possibility, Christ told the well-known parable of the foolish – ignorant – rich man.
He says there was a great harvest in his production and this unfortunate man thought that he now needed a bigger... savings bank - "I want to build a bigger storehouse". Such a thing, he believed, would ensure him a prolonged certainty of meeting his needs and sufficient satisfaction - "eat, drink, be merry". However, God has the final say in human life!
Human life is not just a hotel (in the hotel you go and leave whenever you want), but a mystery. It is the unknown enigma of when you go – you are born – and the unexpected unpleasantness of when you leave – you die!
Then, from all the toils of the "new storehouses" and the dreams of prolonged happiness, he hears: "You fool, is there anyone to whom what you have collected will forever belong?"
As one reads these nine verses from the Gospel according to Luke, three fundamental questions arise in one's mind:
1. How much is the day worth?
2. Who owns tomorrow?
3. What follows me to death?
Let us examine these questions for a moment.
1. The day is the unit of measurement, that is, the quantity which, multiplied, creates all the rest. It is the first and least basis that we have for the meaning of life to step on and to acquire content. If we are "killing time" then we will realize very quickly that we are dead.
If we "buy" our time then we will acquire useful mental property. As someone wrote to his son: "I advise you to take care of the minutes, and the hours will take care of themselves"!
2. Tomorrow is also a function of the day we live and go through. Tomorrow is structured today! But surely because every tomorrow is a day, every day we need to realize that what we "sow" today, we will reap tomorrow. So the day is worth a lot, since it gives us the possibility to "sow". But what we "sow" we should understand that we place them in God's hands. "In hope..." people are active in all their actions, both large and serious and small and minor. Tomorrow does not belong to us. Some day tomorrow we will no longer be "ἐν τοῖς οὖσιν", that is, to the living. Others will speak for us. Tomorrow also belongs to Christ.
3. So the route is from today to tomorrow and then to the common human destiny, death! A fact that cannot be disputed. For everything there is... maybe. There is no such thing as death! Everything may or may not happen. But there is absolutely no chance that I won't die! So every sensible person asks: When this happens, then of all that I have sown, of all that I have cared to acquire, what follows me? What has the ability to pass the control of the "fire" of death ... unburnt?
Behold, Christ tells this rich man that all that he has gathered "shall burn" on this night of his death! So what does it matter how many he had? What he can get now has value! "Warehouses" and "savings" turn out to be heavy and immovable investments. They "see" the boss "leave" and remain silent. They don't move and they don't move.
What is in the pockets cannot follow, since every man leaves naked. Only what is in the heart, which constitutes our personality, only this follows. But the heart is often easily deceived and struggles to fill... the pockets! When we accidentally indulge in this...sleepwalking, then our suffering heart will be left empty and tired because it will have...exhausted trying to fill our pockets!
Then we will hope for illusions and, completely mindlessly and stupidly, we will invest labors and struggles in cases overdue. Then our suffering heart - our soul, as the Gospel says - not being able to bear the orphanhood of being stripped of God's consolation, will try to console itself with "many good things written in many years".
Then money will become Mammon, i.e. the god of wealth, whose completely arrogant we become admirers and worshippers. Then begins the slide from the idolatry of money to the self-worship of our... "soul": "my soul, eat, drink, be merry ".
Then we become as "he who lays up riches for himself and not for God". But a real treasure is the one with which the heart "lives full" and is "satisfied".
Treasure is he who follows us, because he endures the passage through the fire of death.
Treasure is what brings us spiritually to God. Kindness, love, charity, giving!
A treasure is what we consider the most precious thing we have. "Where our treasure is, there is our heart" (Matthew 6, 34).
God wants to give us the treasure of the virtues of His "heart" (love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control), but when He comes to give them to us, He finds that we have full and useless our hands with a bunch of useless things and he has... nowhere to put them!
Let's walk wisely and not recklessly! Let us seek to acquire the virtues of Christ. Let us seek to be poor who seek the virtues of Christ to enrich their lives.
Only these can withstand the fire of death and are not... "clothes of foam"!
With love and wishes for sober choices and actions.
Fr. THEODOSIOS MARTZOUHOS
If the seed does not die...
Sermons on the evangelical readings of the Sundays of the year
