18th Sunday in Ordinary Time
The bible does not develop our understanding of God along a straight, progressive line. The men who wrote the Book of Proverbs and Wisdom, for instance, assumed that those who believed in God could detect his actions in history. Even in this life God punished sinners and rewarded the good with riches. In that sense life was predictable enough. However, the men who wrote Job and Ecclesiastes (and they were writing around the same time) held that life was totally unpredictable and arbitrary. If these two men were writing today, I'm sure they would take Ballybrit as an example of how unpredictable life is. These two writers held that all questions relating to are quite futile. God's intellect, they insist, is so far above our human intellect that we can never figure God out.
The reading we have here today is from the latter stable, the 'unpredictable' stable. As the writer observes today: "All things are vanity." The author can't even find a pattern in God's rewarding and punishing people. "Here is one," he writes, "who had laboured with wisdom and knowledge and skill; and yet to another who had not laboured over it, he must leave property." Evil people can have more happiness and fulfillment in their lives than good people.
In a parallel way, Jesus echoes this pessimism of Ecclesiastes when He comments on the rich man's impending death: "You fool," God says, "this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they then belong?"
But there is an enormous difference between the first reading and the Gospel: by the time of Jesus, a belief in the afterlife had emerged. In the century prior to the birth of Jesus, a school of Jewish Pharisees reached the conclusion that those who formed a relationship with God in this life would continue and grow in that relationship in the next life. Their insight became a kind of Biblical Rubicon; this insight opened up a whole new and broader perspective. The possibility now open up that what appears meaningless now may achieve its own meaning at a future time, or in a future life.
It enables Paul to write those famous lines to the Colossians which we have in our second reading today: "Brothers and sisters: If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not of what is on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ your life appears, then you, too, will appear with Him in glory."
As a good Jew, the historical Jesus emphasized our being fulfilled and happy in this life; but, as a Pharisee, He also pointed us in the direction of the next life. Paul, as a Christian, believes the risen Jesus is the essential part of that next life.
Yet, both Paul and Jesus teach that we have to sacrifice some of this life to attain the next. "Put to death," Paul writes, "the parts of you that are earthly." And in the situation of brothers arguing over an inheritance, Jesus warns, "Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one's life does not consist of possessions."
One of the most important components of Paul's and Jesus' belief about the next life is that we can create elements of our future existence in the way we live right here and now. "Put on the new self," Paul encourages the Colossians, "in the image of the creator. Here, there is not Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythians, slave, free; but Christ is all and in all."
Paul presumes that all the barriers dividing and separating us on earth will be shattered when we gather in heaven. That's why he encourages us to sacrifice the security such divisions offer and to begin destroying those barriers long before we leave this earth. Our question to become one with all people is the clearest sign that we believe in a heaven.