Today's Gospel

Be Careful What You Look At

Welcome back to Radical and Relevant, where each day we explore the genius of the Gospels and look for ways, large and small, to apply Jesus' teachings to our lives. Today's reading is from the Gospel of Luke 12:13-21. "One of the multitudes said to Jesus, 'Teacher, bid my brother, divide the inheritance with me.' But he said to him, 'Man, who made me a judge or divider over you?' And he said to them, 'Take heed and beware of all covetousness. A man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.' And he told them a parable, saying, 'The land of a rich man brought forth plentifully. And he thought to himself, "What shall I do? For I have nowhere to store my crops." And he said, "I will do this. I will pull down my barns and build larger ones. And there I will store all my grain and my goods." And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.' But God said to him, 'Fool, this night, your soul is required of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God?'"

What jumps out at you today? Remember we're always looking for a word, a phrase, or an idea to connect the Gospel of the day with our day. A couple of things jump out at me. One was the word covetousness. Jesus said, "Take heed and beware of all covetousness." We see this in Genesis. The woman sees the fruit. That's the first thing that happens. She sees the fruit and she desires the fruit. She covets the fruit. What happens is we see and then we covet. And so if we want to do, as Jesus is saying here, "Take heed and beware of all covetousness," we need to be careful what we're looking at because we see and then we covet. That's why advertisers advertise the way they do, right? It used to be, it still is to some extent, they sent us all these catalogs in the mail. And we flipped through it, and 10 minutes later, we need 10 things that we didn't need 10 minutes ago. And of course, we don't need them at all. But we see, and then we covet.

And now it's these ads that follow us, right? You go on the internet and you look at one thing, and then these ads sort of follow you everywhere you go. Why do they do that? Because they know we see, and then we covet. So they want us to see, so that we will covet. And so we need to be mindful of, "Okay, what are we looking at in all sorts of ways?" And that's a challenge in our society, right, because it's everywhere. Everywhere is stuff that we shouldn't be seeing and we shouldn't be coveting. And so that jumped out of me, that word covetousness jumped out of me today. And then the last phrase really struck me as well. Jesus says, the first part of the last sentence is, "So is he who lays up a treasure for himself and is not rich toward God." It's a beautiful phrase, rich toward God. And are we being rich toward God? Let's go out, amazing day, and be rich toward God. Remember, Be Bold, Be Catholic.