It isn’t often that a short reflection from another is one that I so fully agree with. This one comes from my friend Costanzo Donegana, a rangy, bearded, loveable and thoughtful Italian missionary priest who has worked for years in Brazil. He is also a journalist and has written many articles, but his little book of short thoughts entitled “A God who drives on the wrong side of the Road” is strikingly good. The one below has the title “Living dangerously”.

‘“Woe to you who are rich!” (Lk 6: 24) “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mark 10, 25)

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Is Jesus hard on the wealthy? Yes in regards to riches, but he has the greatest compassion for rich people. “Greatest”, because they live on the edge of a precipice and run the risk of plunging into it. Their lives are based on a misconception; the foundation stone of their lives is very fragile; indeed it contains in itself deadly poison. “In his riches, man lacks wisdom: he is like the beasts that are destroyed”, Psalm 49 declares about human beings in the carnal language of the Old Testament. Jesus shouts out against the wealthy to wake them up from their hypnosis to try, (with the greatest compassion), to move them away from the precipice.

Wealth makes them blind and they are unable to see Lazarus at their door: it is not that they are evil; they simply do not notice him, they ignore him. He has no part to play in their lives. They cannot see that Lazarus is worth much more than their possessions, precisely because he does not own them. He is a person, not an empty dummy as they are.

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 Lazarus at the Rich Man’s Door

   
The lie about wealth is dangerous for everyone because it is so bewitching. A poor person may be rich at least in his longings. It is a contagious virus that spreads and devours those who have caught it, emptying them of their humanity. To counter this Jesus proclaimed: “Blessed are the poor in spirit – right into their deepest fibres – for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”, (Mt. 5: 3) and the rich cannot enter that kingdom. The poor are blessed, i.e. fulfilled, whole, true, happy, without the need of anything, save that their humanity is from God, the only one they trust.

Jesus said all this, and moreover he lived like this, radically. Who knows why Christians and the Church (permit me the distinction) often think, and act so differently.

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How courageous, fatherly, manly and loving Jesus is, if you think about it!  If you know anything of Pope Francis, you would find he would agree 110% with what is written above!

Father Jonathan