18th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)
Picture: cc Lee Craven on Flickr
By now, many of us will have seen videos of the moment that unlucky black Mazda toppled into a sinkhole along Tanjong Katong Road. What a shock it must have been for the poor driver! Several people interviewed at the scene expressed surprise that this should happen here in Singapore. And who can blame them? Aren’t we surprised too? Which of us would expect the road we are travelling on to suddenly dissolve into a gaping emptiness? But what if we were to live at a place where sinkholes are a routine occurrence? Where everyone knows they will appear. We just can’t predict exactly when. How would that change, if at all, the way we use our roads?
This is the question our scriptures pose to us today. To see this, it’s helpful to recall that the word that keeps recurring in the first reading, the word vanity, can also be translated as emptiness. Vanity of vanities. All is vanity! … Emptiness of emptinesses. All is emptiness! Why does the preacher say this? Isn’t it because, no matter how wise and intelligent we may be, or how diligent and successful, or rich and famous, or even pious and holy, all of us remain mere mortals. We know that, at some point, this road of life, along which we are now travelling so confidently, will dissolve into the emptiness of death. Forcing us to leave behind everything we may have painstakingly accumulated or accomplished, or spent sleepless nights agonising over. We know this will happen. We just don’t know exactly when.
Which raises for us an important question, provided we are willing to entertain it. How, if at all, might the expectation of death influence the way we live our lives? There are various possible responses to this question. The rich man in Jesus’ parable models one possibility. Take things easy, he says to himself, eat, drink, have a good time… The way the parable is told, the rich man seems to say this because he has forgotten his own mortality. He assumes, mistakenly, that he will live forever. Which is why God calls him a fool, before shocking him with the news that he will die that very night… But isn’t it reasonable for someone to choose the rich man’s response – to eat, drink, and have a good time – precisely because they expect to die? Since we can’t avoid death anyway, why not make the most of life while it lasts? Even draw up a bucket list of things we wish to enjoy? Is this really such a foolish thing to do? Isn’t this a far better approach than that of the workaholic, forever slaving away anxiously, obsessively, compulsively, without knowing how or when to take a break?
Perhaps. Except that death is not the only emptiness that threatens to swallow us up. Doesn’t Jesus highlight another in the gospel? Watch, and be on your guard against avarice of any kind… And what is avarice, if not a deadly bottomless sinkhole? That impulse to keep grasping and acquiring, accumulating and hoarding, if we do not learn to curb it, can so easily become an all-consuming idol, extracting ever more costly sacrifices from us, including our own health and well-being, as well as that of our children. This form of idolatry, this worship of a false god, can swallow up not just individuals, but also whole communities and societies, nations and even churches too. And isn’t it often the more vulnerable among us, who suffer the consequences most? Could the vaping menace – which has received so much attention in the news lately – be one recent example?
So how might we Christians respond? Isn’t it by first recalling that the Lord Jesus offers himself to us as the foolproof Way to avoid idolatry in all its forms? Not by seeking to escape death, but by learning to embrace it out of love and mercy. For our sake, Jesus took on a mortal life. He came among us poor and humble. Even allowing himself to be swallowed up by the sinkhole of the Cross. Only to be raised up in glory on the third day. And isn’t this the same Path to which the second reading invites us to commit ourselves anew, when it reminds us that, by our baptism, we have all died with Christ? Died to our old life of sin, so as to be raised up to the new life of grace. Relying on the strength we receive from the Lord, especially when we gather for the Eucharist, we are to strive to kill, or mortify, everything in us that belongs only to earthly life. Everything rooted in idolatrous self-indulgence. Not only are we to put on a new self, together we are also to look forward, and to work toward a new world, where Christ is everything and… is in everything. What this looks like in the concrete will depend on our specific situation in life. But something we may consider, if we haven’t already, is to learn to live more simply, so that others may simply live.
Sisters and brothers, whether they take the form of death, or avarice, or the Cross of Christ, could it be that sinkholes are far more common than we may think? If so, how might we let this reality influence the way we live our lives today?
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