Righteous living: a challenge for our contemporary world
November 8, 2023 - Wednesday, 31st Week in Ordinary Time
Psalm 112:1b-2, 4-5, 9
At the centre of Psalm 112 is a righteous person who fears the Lord, obeys His commandments, and helps those in need. Two virtues that stand out in the fragment of Psalm 112 that we are reflecting today upon are justice and generosity. The righteous person “conducts his affairs with justice” and “lavishly he gives to the poor” (Ps 112:5, 9).
We live in a world where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Although some claim that the quality of life has improved and many people have been lifted from poverty, the fact is that 1 percent of the world’s population - the so-called super-rich - hold in their hands “nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together”. According to Oxfam, one in ten people on Earth are going hungry and “at least 1.7 billion workers now live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages”. Then, Oxfam makes an interesting comparison between Elon Musk, well-known to most of us and Aber Christine whom probably nobody knows. “Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, paid a “true tax rate” of about 3 percent between 2014 and 2018. Aber Christine, a flour vendor in Uganda, makes $80 a month and pays a tax rate of 40 percent”.
The book of Proverbs states that “whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will reward them for what they have done” (Prov 19:17). In the Gospel of Luke (Luke 19:1-10), we meet Zacchaeus the rich tax collector who after an encounter with our Lord gave half of his “possessions to the poor”, and to those he cheated in anyways, he was willing to “pay back four times the amount.” Jesus’ response to this lavish act of generosity was: “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham” (Luke 19:9). The question is: can the super-rich of our times emulate the generosity of Zacchaeus?
In the Fall of 1999, I was working in East Timor, one of the poorest nations in the world. The Catholic community that I was serving lived deep in the mountains close to the border with Indonesia. My main concern was how to help them generate income and how to provide transport that was not available in the area. Together with the help of other Claretians and generous donors from Germany, I was able to establish a coffee cooperative run by the local women and get a truck for the local community that transported the goods and the people to the cities located in the coastal areas.
Conducting our affairs with justice and lavishly giving to the poor have a lasting impact on those who are generous and on those who receive the help. Our daily acts of kindness can go a long way without us even realising it. The psalmist says that the generosity of the righteous person shall endure forever. It is not only the recipients of their acts of generosity that are going to remember them but also the Lord. In the Vatican II document on the Church in the Modern world, we read:
“For after we have obeyed the Lord, and in His Spirit nurtured on earth the values of human dignity, brotherhood and freedom, and indeed all the good fruits of our nature and enterprise, we will find them again, but freed of stain, burnished and transfigured, when Christ hands over to the Father: "a kingdom eternal and universal, a kingdom of truth and life, of holiness and grace, of justice, love and peace." (Gaudium et Spes, 39).
Psalm 112 serves as a reminder of the blessings that come from living a life of righteousness, compassion, and integrity. The wisdom of Psalm 112, if applied in life, could set us on a journey towards a more equal and just world. The question is whether we are willing to listen to it and put it into practice.