The futility of riches
September 22, 2023 - Friday, 24th Week in Ordinary Time
Psalm 49:6-10, 17-20
Psalm 49 is a wisdom psalm and its main theme is advice: do not envy the rich. However, it is doubtful whether the psalmist succeeded in convincing his audience because most people envy the rich. And this envy expresses itself in two ways: hatred of the rich or joining their company. We can make a revolution, go after the rich, steal their property and enrich ourselves. Or we can establish a big corporation exempted from laws that apply to individual persons and make loads of money.
The psalmist tries to convince us that to envy the rich is as foolish as the life that makes the pursuit of money its main goal. From the perspective of faith, such a life does not make sense. One cannot take his riches to the grave. Why then spend the entire life in pursuit of something that sooner or later we will have to leave behind? For the psalmist, the awareness that we all have to die should help us to look for true riches in life. But do we?
Saint Paul famously said that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs” (1 Tim 6:10). The richest person in the Bible was King Solomon. But his extravagant living ruined his name and the heavy taxation that he imposed on his people led to the division of the country into two kingdoms. The one known for his wisdom in his youth ended up foolish and unfaithful to the Lord. The danger of riches is also brought to us in the saying from Ecclesiastes: “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity” (Eccl 5:10).
The psalmist prepares us for the message of the Gospel where the poor are blessed and those rich who only care for themselves are called fools and end up in a place of torment. On the other hand, those who hold on to the Lord do not need to fear death. The psalmist says: “But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol” (Ps 49:16). And Saint Paul with a similar conviction proclaims: “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39).
So, let us not envy the rich but evangelise them instead. “Tell those rich in this world’s wealth to quit being so full of themselves and so obsessed with money, which is here today and gone tomorrow. Tell them to go after God, who piles on all the riches we could ever manage—to do good, to be rich in helping others, to be extravagantly generous. If they do that, they’ll build a treasury that will last, gaining life that is truly life” (1 Tim 6:17-19).