Msgr. Roger J. Landry

Annunciation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Suffern, New York

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

August 3, 2025

Eccl 1:2.21-23, Ps 90, Col 3:1-5,9-11; Lk 12:13-21

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Earlier this morning, in his Mass for the Jubilee of Youth at Tor Vergata in Rome, Pope Leo sought to help the nearly one million young people from all over the world recognize and choose the path of true happiness. “There is a burning question in our hearts,” he said, “a need for truth that we cannot ignore, which leads us to ask ourselves: what is true happiness? What is the true meaning of life?”… We continually aspire to something ‘more’ that no created reality can give us; we feel a deep and burning thirst that no drink in this world can satisfy. … The fullness of our existence does not depend on what we store up or, as we heard in the Gospel, on what we possess (cf. Lk12:13-21). … Buying, hoarding and consuming are not enough. We need to lift our eyes, to look upwards, to the ‘things that are above’ (Col 3:2), to realize that everything in the world has meaning only insofar as it serves to unite us to God and to our brothers and sisters in charity.” He reminded them of what his spiritual father St. Augustine wrote about in his Confessions, that he had waited far too long to love God. He was deaf to God’s calls and shouts, blind to God’s flashing, searching for what could satisfy in the created things of God when God was already at work within him. Eventually he received eyes to see and ears to hear, eventually he breathed God’s fragrance and began to pant for him, tasted his goodness and hungered and thirsted for more, was touched by him and began to burn for his peace. Pope Leo wanted the young people of the world, and the not-so-young, to learn from St. Augustine’s mistake, to make up for lost time, and to follow Jesus the Way, Truth, Resurrection and Life along the path that leads to the joy that alone will satisfy the human person’s restless heart.


• Today’s readings bring us into the heart of this mystery of the meaning of life and of the choices necessary to have life to the full. The words from the Book of Ecclesiastes have never lost their prophetic shock: “Vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!,” it says, before going on to say that eventually our worldly wisdom, knowledge, skill, toil and property will all pass away. None of these has lasting value. This is reinforced in the Psalm, which compares worldly treasures to grass that springs up in the morning but by evening wilts and fades under the scorching sun. As a result, the Psalmist prays, “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart.”


• Jesus in the Gospel responds to that prayer, answering the question that his vicar on earth this morning indicated was the most important to ask: What I am living for? What am I working for? Many in Jesus’ time, and many today, are living vainly because they’re living for money and the things of this world rather than for God. Jesus today describes how easy it is to make making money an idol by means of a story about a rich farmer who, after a copious harvest, tore down old silos and built bigger silos to store his crops, totally unaware that his life was soon going to be over and then none of it would matter. In response to the nice problem of over-abundance, rather than use his massive surplus of food to feed the hungry, he thinks only about himself and about hoarding his earthly wealth. He didn’t care that many others didn’t have the bare necessities. Charity wasn’t even in the picture. And he had a rude awakening coming. That night he would die. “You, fool, this night your life will be demanded of you,” Jesus puts into the mouth of his Father. “And the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” Jesus drew the moral of the story: “Thus it will be for the one who stores up treasure for himself, but is not rich in what matters to God.” He was the poster boy for a life of vanity, which doesn’t mean just “egocentric” but “worthless.”


• Jesus said these words in response to someone in the crowd asking him, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” Over the course of my priesthood, I have been shocked at how many times I’ve had been asked to get involved in familial disputes like the one Jesus was requested to resolve. This man obviously thought that his brother was wronging him and wanted Jesus, the just one, to intervene. This man’s brother probably was wronging him. But underneath this appeal for justice, Jesus saw two things at play. First, the petitioner was thinking that gaining the inheritance was more important than maintaining a good relationship with his brother. How many people today still think and act in these terms, allowing money or other vanities to separate them and keep them apart for years, decades or even to the grave! Second, Jesus saw that, despite what was likely a just request, the motivation underneath it was not justice but primarily greed disguised as righteousness. Jesus didn’t come from heaven to earth to settle inheritance disputes but to make us aware of a totally different type of inheritance. St. Paul would say that “love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim 6:10 ) and that means that all sin can be summarized in a sense by a desire to place possessions, or money, or the things of this world, and ultimately oneself over other people, including one’s family members. Jesus gives not only the petitioner and the crowd but all of us an important antidote as medicine against this spirit of acquisitiveness that leads to all types of sins: “Beware of all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions!”


• The problem for many today is that they think that life does consist in the abundance of possessions. We idolize the rich and famous. We watch programs and buy magazines about them, devouring whatever can give us a window into their life. While few of us spend much time setting our hearts on mansions, private airplanes, superyachts, fancy cars, butlers and chauffeurs, many spend their time dreaming about and working for much larger homes, new cars, housekeepers and the like. They can deceive themselves pretending that because they’re not rich, they’re not greedy, while many are obsessed about mammon, spending far more time thinking about money and material concerns more than they think about God. Few of us, today, with increased urbanization, are tempted to build larger barns for surplus produce, but many of us worry and some are even obsessed about increasing the size of our stock portolios, retirement accounts, pensions, bank statements, homes and vehicles. The most fitting equivalent of our grain bins would be the explosion of storage units everywhere. When we no longer need something for our day-to-day life, after our dresser drawers, closets, attics and basements are full, we just get storage lockers. Even when no longer have use for something, we still hold onto it in case at some point we might need it later, while so many others might use it now. To all of us in this culture, Jesus calls us to become rich in what matters to God. In the passage right after today’s section, which unfortunately is not included, Jesus tells us: “Sell your belonging and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” Jesus wants us all to be rich in what matters, to be greedy not to fill attics, basements, storage facilities or ever bigger houses, but to build spiritual barns full to the brim with what lasts.


• So the question is: where is our treasure? Is our heart truly centered on God? St. Paul in today’s passage from Colossians, which we hear every Easter Sunday morning at Mass, tells us, “If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not what is on earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” He summons us to focus on the things that matter. He reminds us that Christ is our life and therefore we should put to death the things in us that are earthly, that are vain, like, he indicates, the “greed that is idolatry,” and to “put on the new self … in the image of its Creator.” He summons us to live a different life. He wants us to become filthy rich in faith, well-heeled in hope, and loaded in love for God and for others, to place our treasure in God, in holiness, and in heaven. The apostle summons us, like great entrepreneurs, to seize every chance we have to grow “rich in what matters to God.”


• So how do we do that? What practical things characterize a life that seeks the things that are above, a heart that places its treasure in what matters? We can focus on four things.
  
  
  
  • First, it’s going to be a life that prioritizes prayer, in which we learn how to calibrate our heart to what God desires.
  
  
  • Second, it’s going to be a life that chooses the Sacraments. Do we realize that the Sacrament of Baptism is worth far more than receiving the inheritance of several royal houses? Th