Every liturgical celebration has messages for our reflection, and we explore some of those contents from the readings or the rituals of each occasion. I was looking at the different ways we could approach today’s messages from Qoheleth, including the vanity of life and the seeming injustice of the inheritance of human toil. Indeed, as the book announces, “vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2), and again, “what does a man gain for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun?” (Ecclesiastes 2:21-23). These verses challenge us to confront the absurdity we sometimes feel when hard work yields little satisfaction or less meaning. To compound this situation, we find life disjointed or futile when measuring effort against outcomes.
As a case scenario, we find this tension in today’s Gospel, where someone in the crowd interrupted Jesus, pleading, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me” (Luke 12:13-21). The scene unveils a typical human pattern seen in fighting over possessions, cutting corners, and even undermining others in pursuit of material gain. Yet Jesus refuses to arbitrate. Instead, he warned against greed, underscoring the more profound truth, touching on the clear message that many of the things we fight and even destroy one another for today will not matter to the children of the next 25 years. But here also is the other thing: the temptation to ignore basic needs and the longings of life and slip into dissatisfaction or communal breakdown because of the fleeting nature of things. This paradox is what Ecclesiastes invites us to sit with and reflect on this weekend.
Carefully put out for us by the Church, today’s liturgy blends these concerns to point us toward wisdom that helps discern and prioritize what matters for our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. In the second reading to the Colossians, St. Paul urges us to “seek what is above” and not be consumed by what is below when thinking about these matters. During the Eucharistic prayer, the priest usually invites us to lift our hearts, and we respond, “We lift them to the Lord.” This response and practice is more than a ritual; it is an orientation of the soul and an invitation to action. Consequently, we have the task to weigh each decision we intend to make with the question: Is it honorable, praiseworthy, and aligned with the Spirit of God? Psalm 90 is clear about the urgency to expedite our response to this concern when it reminds us in one of the verses, “If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts.” We must, therefore, “put to death” all that is earthly in us, especially regarding greed, impurity, deceit, and put on the new self, renewed in the image of its creator (Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11). Today, we pray that God’s spirit guides our thoughts, what we pursue, and how we live. Amen!
Amen . Thank you for the beautiful homily Fr. God is so good 🙏🙏