As your pastor, as one appointed by God and the Archbishop to be your shepherd, do you know what I want to give you? I want to give you Jesus. In fact that is my reason for being: to give you Jesus. And so I do, in the Eucharist and in the other sacraments, and in preaching, and in praying for you, and in serving you as I do. I also know that the reception of the gift of God’s giving Himself to us in so many ways, depends on our receptivity to God’s gift of Himself.
Today’s Scriptures show us the way to be open to the Lord’s gift of Himself: it’s the eye of the needle.
The eye of the needle is one of my favorite biblical images. It’s a technical term for a small opening in a city gate. In biblical days cities were surrounded by a high wall to protect those who lived inside the city. There was no outdoor lighting so the nights would be so dark that on moonless nights you couldn’t see your own hand in front of you. Imagine how dangerous it would be to be in the dark and open to the violence of invaders, robbers, and worse.
So, at night the city gates were closed to keep everyone safe during the night. There was however a small door in the city gate called “the eye of the needle.” It was so small that you would have to put down whatever you were carrying and bend down and squeeze in so as to get inside. And if you were someone coming to the city to sell your wares early in the morning of the next day but got to the city after dark, you would have to unload your pack animal, say a camel, and get the camel on its knees and lower its head and then crawl through the eye of the needle on its knees into the city.
This is the image Jesus evokes in talking about how hard it is to enter the
All of us think our worth is determined by what we have, especially if we have a lot. Think of how hard it is for those whose homes are being foreclosed on now. Think of what it would be like to lose our home, our income, our job, our savings, and everything else that we become so attached to as we move through life.
Think of how our attachments keep us preoccupied, and think of the ingenuity we use to amass and protect what we have. Now, there is nothing wrong with protecting our assets, and our standard of living, but the danger for those who acquire worldly goods is the temptation to think that those material goods are what make us feel secure.
Jesus challenges us on that kind of thinking. There are things that are more important than our things. We need to be like Solomon and pray for wisdom which is far more important than our riches. So is character, nobility, generosity, and above all: putting God first. In fact, Solomon tells us, and so does Jesus, that if God is first all things will be given to us in abundance, oh, along with persecution!
If we really want to receive the gift of Jesus in such a way that there is no one else, and nothing else, that is more important than He, and if we really want our entire lives to be dedicated to Him, and if we really want to enter the Kingdom of God, then we need to go through the eye of the needle. We need to ask Him to humble us so we can be willing to detach ourselves from those attachments that are more important to us than they should be. Then we need get on our knees and lower our heads before the Lord. Thus we will learn that we cannot earn our way into the
Putting God first is what we call stewardship. I now invite a member of our Pastoral Council to help us begin thinking about being good stewards.
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