Tuesday of 20th Week, uneven numbered year
“And Jesus said to the disciples : ’Amen, I tell you, it is hard for someone rich to enter the Kingdom. Yes I tell you again, it is easier for you to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ When the disciples heard this they were astonished . ’Who can be saved, then?’ they said.”
This call to the young rich man didn’t work out, so Jesus proposes the following passage for us to meditate upon. Hurt, but serene and objective in his stance, he addresses himself to the disciples, without any judgment, from within His Divine Light. He speaks of the richness that appears as a real obstacle to advance in Divine Life, towards our future. The riches that provoke a turning in on oneself and how our goods make us heavy and have us lose all dynamism to move forward towards divine life. Poverty, on the contrary, and the fact of possessing nothing, appears as a way forward to Divine Life, allowing us to move towards what we desire. Francis of Assisi said that we should love poverty ’like a mother’. Our life is a journey towards a new birth! This new birth is a love that is offered to those who seek it. Those who have followed Jesus desire to be enlightened so that the glory of the Lord Jesus, his new Love for God’s Kingdom, finds all its place in us.
“Jesus gazed at them; ’By human resources,’ he told them, ’this is impossible; for God everything is impossible.’”
We can measure how much comfort gives us our bearings in this world. Our attachment to all these illusions weigh upon our liberty and makes the road a hard one towards our future life with God. What is our taste for riches? The security it can give us? Jesus will go as far as saying that evolution in our contact with God will be impossible : ’For men it is impossible but for God everything is possible.’ The Kingdom of God is not of this world! The disciples stay with the
bearings of a messianic Kingdom, an earthly one, of this world. It is not easy for us to make this conversion. Jesus is full of tenderness and mercy, there is a relationship between what we live now and the announced Kingdom!
“And everyone who has left houses, brothers, sisters, father, mother, children or land for my sake will receive a hindered times as much and also inherit eternal life.”
To consider what happens to us, what takes us away from our goods, our habits, this can help us to find our freedom once again. These painful losses that life imposes upon us are a grace coming from God, whereas they might seem to be unfair to us, they are surely what will help us become whom we truly are.It is proposed that we envisage with benevolence the fact of ’losing’ in order to follow Jesus. This makes our heart bare, capable of moving towards the Kingdom, for this Kingdom of Love teaches us that the Gift of God is fundamental. In the Kingdom of Love, the Gift is King! We need to be born once more to a new perspective coming from the Gift of God. From now on, let us place ourselves at the school of Jesus. ’I tell you, you who have followed me : at the New Birth when the Son of man will sit on his throne of glory, you too will be sat in the twelve thrones to judge the twelve tribes of Israel."