Tuesday, July 14, 2020
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Wealth and Poverty
Footnotes tell us a great deal about Paul’s words here: “The dialectic of Jesus’ experience, expressed earlier in terms of life and death (5, 15), sin and righteousness (5, 21) is now rephrased in terms of poverty and wealth. Many scholars think that this is a reference to Jesus’ preexistence with God (his ‘wealth’) and to his incarnation and death (his ‘poverty’) and they point to the similarity between this verse and Phil 2, 6-8. Others interpret the wealth and poverty as succeeding phases of Jesus’ earthly existence, e.g. his sense of intimacy with God and then the desolation and the feeling of abandonment by God in his death (Mark 15, 34)”.
Once after Mass, a friend and I were discussing the homily and my friend offered his thinking on eternity. He said that he never has a problem imagining that time goes on into infinity before us, but that he stumbles when he tries to think of how time yawns back into our past. We concluded that this is one of the many mysteries we will never understand.
Today when we read these words of Paul, when we puzzle through the footnotes, when we think of how Christ always speaks to us through inversion, we believe that we are all looking for the intimacy with God we know exists. We all are looking for that comfort which is total union with God, with one another. We all are looking for the one person in whom we can place our total trust, the one person who always has our best interests in mind and heart.
That person is God whom we meet in Christ – the Christ we see in one another and the Christ we encounter in Scripture. We are comforted in Christ by the Holy Spirit. This is a mystery which we cannot unlock, yet it hovers always in our consciousness, tantalizes us with its fleeting clarity and its constant, enduring, encompassing emotion of love.
We so long to love. We so long to be loved. We so often forget . . . that we are love.
This is our wealth. This is what we ought to hold dear. For it is in forgetting this that we suffer poverty. It is in remembering this, and thanking God for this gift of love and of self, that we know we are rich. It is this marvelous God we are called to trust.
Adapted from a reflection written on June 13, 2008.
Senior, Donald, ed. THE CATHOLIC STUDY BIBLE. New York, Oxford University Press, 1990. cf 285. Print.
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