“If you wish to
be perfect, go sell what you have and give
to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then
come, follow
me.” (Mt 19,21)
This was the
reply of Christ to that young man who,
despite being faithful to God’s commandments, still felt
something was
missing for him to gain eternal life, that is, the
perfection of man,
the fullness of his humanity.
went away sad, for he had many possessions.” (Mt 19,22)
What a pity
that this young man failed to understand what Christ was
proposing to
him! What a missed opportunity he had! It was already
Christ who gave
him the clearest and surest answer to his question.
But his
attachment to his many possessions blinded him
from the truth of the highest order that Christ himself
told him. It
is this attachment that we should be most wary of,
because it can
truly lead us to the worst of what is now known as
cognitive
distortion.
In fact, Christ
himself lamented against this crazy
tendency of ours that would lead us to stick to things
that perish in
exchange for what will last forever and will bring us to
our eternal
life. “It is easier for a camel,” he said, “to go through
the eye of a
needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of
God.” (Mt 19,24)
Yes, like the
rich young man, we may be following the
general indications of God’s will as expressed in the
commandments.
But we have to understand that this obedience to God’s
commandments
that specify what is naturally good for us, still needs
to be
perfected with our total self-giving to God which is shown
also in our
self-giving to others.
Such total
self-giving to God and to others is when we
start entering the supernatural character that our life
is supposed to
have, since we are the very image and likeness of God,
children of
his, meant to share in God’s very life that obviously is
supernatural.
We are not
meant to live a purely natural life. There is
no such thing. Our nature opens us to make a choice
between a
supernatural life with God or an infranatural life. But
make no
mistake. Our supernatural life with God does not
eliminate or suppress
what is natural in us. What it does is to purify and
elevate to the
supernatural order what is natural in us.
And so we can
say that what Christ meant when he told the
young man about selling everything and giving everything
to the poor
and then to follow him is that we of course should have
things or
possessions for the simple reason that we always need
things. But we
just have to make sure that we are completely detached
from these
things.
That complete
detachment is not just a matter of emptying
ourselves completely. That detachment and self-emptying
should lead us
to be completely filled with love for God and for the
others. In other
words, the acquisition, use and enjoyment of things in
this life
should be a function of our love and total self-giving to
God and to
the others.
That part of
Christ’s reply about giving everything to the
poor precisely refers to our love and self-giving to the
poor. That’s
because our love for God always involves our love for the
others who
can be described as poor since they will always be in
need of God.
Christian poverty has nothing to do with emptiness and
nothingness,
but rather with filling ourselves with God.
It’s when we
manage to live this kind of poverty that we
actually would be enriched and perfected, as we make
ourselves truly
identified with Christ, turning ourselves as God’s image
and likeness
which is what God wants us to be.
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