Mark 10, 17-30
Sunday, 10th October 2021 (28th T O B)
There are times in our life when we must make important decisions for its further development. Our happiness may depend on these decisions, or we may face what is to come with disappointment or even bitterness. According to the values we have as a foundation, this is how we are to direct our future.
This Sunday’s first reading praises true wisdom, the wisdom that will lead me to make a discernment in order to be truly happy. And in the Gospel, the episode of the rich young man who asks Jesus “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” According to him, he is good, dutiful, faithful to the principles of the law of Moses. But he went on to ask Jesus, who showed him a more demanding path, since it involved giving up much of ourselves for the sake of others, and then following him. At these words “he frowned and went away sorrowful, for he was very rich”.
There are many Christians, good Christians, who have not been able to take that step forward. There are still many “values” that stand in the way. “One thing you lack”`. Comfort, hedonism, the false security of material goods still bind us to perishable values. The search for true wisdom must lead us along the path of renunciation, of forgetting ourselves in order to put others first.
We are living in times of a lack of vocations. There is a lack of Christians who decide to commit themselves to the challenge of Jesus: “sell what you have, give to the poor and then come and follow me”. Young people who feel the loving gaze of Jesus and allow themselves to be challenged by it. God is ready to give them a hundred times more than they give up, and of course they will inherit eternal life. Let us ask the Lord of the harvest to send labourers into his harvest.
Juan Ramón Gómez Pascual, cmf
