Catholic lectionary for 10 August 2019

King James Version (en)

King James Version (en)

2 Corinthians, Chapter 9, verses 6-10

⁶ And he proceedeth in stirring them up to a bountiful alms, as being but a kind of sowing seed, ¹⁰ which shall return a great increase to them

⁶But this I say, He which soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully.

⁷Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver.

⁸And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work:

⁹(As it is written, He hath dispersed abroad; he hath given to the poor: his righteousness remaineth for ever.

¹⁰Now he that ministereth seed to the sower both minister bread for your food, and multiply your seed sown, and increase the fruits of your righteousness;)

Read more:2 Corinthians, Chapter 9

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9

9:6 He that soweth sparingly shall reap sparingly; he that soweth bountifully shall reap bountifully - A general rule.God will proportion the reward to the work, and the temper whence it proceeds.

9:7 Of necessity - Because he cannot tell how to refuse.

9:8 How remarkable are these words! Each is loaded with matter and increases all the way it goes. All grace - Every kind of blessing. That ye may abound to every good work - God gives us everything, that we may do good therewith, and so receive more blessings. All things in this life, even rewards, are, to the faithful, seeds in order to a future harvest. Pro 22:9

9:9 He hath scattered abroad - (A generous word.) With a full hand, without any anxious thought which way each grain falls. His righteousness - His beneficence, with the blessed effects of it. Remaineth for ever - Unexhausted, God still renewing his store. Psa 112:9

9:10 And he who supplieth seed - Opportunity and ability to help others. And bread - All things needful for your own souls and bodies. Will continually supply you with that seed, yea, multiply it to you more and more. And increase the fruits of your righteousness - The happy effects of your love to God and man. Isa 55:10

John, Chapter 12, verses 24-26

²³ He foretelleth his death

²⁴Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

²⁵He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.

²⁶If any man serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there shall also my servant be: if any man serve me, him will my Father honour.

Read more:John, Chapter 12

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12

12:24 Unless a grain of wheat die - The late resurrection of Lazarus gave our Lord a natural occasion of speaking on this subject.And agreeable to his infinite knowledge, he singles out, from among so many thousands of seeds, almost the only one that dies in the earth: and which therefore was an exceeding proper similitude, peculiarly adapted to the purpose for which he uses it. The like is not to be found in any other grain, except millet, and the large bean.

12:25 He that loveth his life - More than the will of God; shall lose it eternally: and he that hateth his life - In comparison of the will of God, shall preserve it. Mat 10:39.

12:26 Let him follow me - By hating his life: and where I am - In heaven. If any man serve me - Thus, him will the Father honour.

NOTES

Paul presents arguments traditional in Judaism, rooted in the equally traditional understanding of poverty—first and foremost as a spiritual condition rather than a material situation. At first glance, it may seem that he is speaking of exchanging material goods for...

Paul presents arguments traditional in Judaism, rooted in the equally traditional understanding of poverty—first and foremost as a spiritual condition rather than a material situation. At first glance, it may seem that he is speaking of exchanging material goods for certain spiritual ones, even for salvation. The Savior Himself sometimes said things that appeared similar at first glance, as when He proposed that the rich young man who came to Him should distribute his earthly wealth and receive another, heavenly treasure in return. But in reality it is not so simple. This is not a straightforward exchange of one kind of wealth for another; it is rather a refusal to acknowledge as one's own what belongs to one. Nor is the issue merely the relative nature of property rights as such—something that has no place when speaking of the Kingdom. It is about a person's attitude toward what they consider their own.

What do we put into the concept of “our own”? Do we use it for something that belongs to us by right, something deserved, earned, and lawfully acquired? Or are we speaking of something given to us for our use, perhaps even for life, but only for our use? With regard to property, we all understand perfectly well—if, of course, we take the trouble to think about it even briefly—that it has been given to us for our use, if only because we will not take it with us when we leave this world. With things such as knowledge, talents, or abilities, the situation is often less obvious, at least at first glance, because much or all of what has been listed seems to belong to us inseparably. With regard to knowledge, for example, many are convinced that they achieved everything themselves.

But a person who has become poor in the spiritual sense understands that this does not belong to them either—at least not until they have become their true self, and one can become one's true self only in God's presence, which certainly does not depend on the person at all. A person truly possesses only themselves; everything else is given to them only for a time and can never replace what matters most, what God alone can give. In such a situation, owning or possessing anything is no more than an illusion. When a person parts with this illusion, they cease to regard their riches—whatever those riches may consist of—as their own. They have been given to the person for use and can easily be passed on to others if that is better for everyone. Shared. Donated. In short, relinquished in one way or another: given away completely when material goods are concerned, or made the possession of others to the same degree as one's own when knowledge, talents, or abilities are concerned.

And every church community, insofar as it lives as people are meant to live in the Church with a capital C, must likewise be ready to share everything it has with those in need. Not because one “must” or because it is “required,” but because otherwise God's breath, the breath of the Kingdom, will not be able to breathe freely in that community—just as it cannot breathe freely in the heart of a person who is not ready to share. This is what Paul is reminding the recipients of his letter.

The thought of a soul that must be hated may seem strange and even absurd. Why, indeed, should a person hate the most precious thing he possesses, the very thing that makes him himself? For the sake of precision, however, it must be noted that the subject here is...

The thought of a soul that must be hated may seem strange and even absurd. Why, indeed, should a person hate the most precious thing he possesses, the very thing that makes him himself? For the sake of precision, however, it must be noted that the subject here is not the soul in the sense in which we use the word today, but simply life. Yet even with this understanding the question remains: why should a person hate his own life, given to him by God?

The simplest answer might be to refer to the Fall, which distorted this very life and turned it into a pitiful likeness of what it was meant to be according to God's plan. Such an answer, however, would be more characteristic of a Pythagorean or a Platonist than of a believer in Yahweh. In the pagan world, the idea that earthly life was an improper state for a human being was fairly widespread, among philosophers, mystics, and ascetics, of course. They saw the life of fallen humanity in all its ugliness and could imagine no other way out than rejecting it, a rejection which they thought freed a person from the power of the evil in which the world lies and in which the life of everyone who inhabits it unfolds. The Bible, however, nowhere speaks of rejecting life as a way of escaping evil; the spiritualism of the Platonists or Pythagoreans is alien to it. And Jesus' words about hating one's own life can hardly be understood in a spiritualist sense, whether that spiritualism is of the Greek or the Indian kind.

One Indian parallel, however, might be relevant here: the parallel with Buddhism and with the concept of nirvana that is central to Buddhism. Contrary to the widespread view, this is not a departure into non-being, but rather an experience of being, a being that is revealed only when a person distances himself from illusory, imaginary, inauthentic being, which he usually regards as real life. The Buddha suddenly realized that authentic being and true life are not at all where most people see them. That is why he came to hate life in an almost Gospel sense, not with the hatred that desires the destruction of what is hated, but with hatred in the biblical sense of the word, when a person distances himself completely from what is hated and excludes it from his life. To exclude illusion for the sake of reality: such was the Buddha's experience.

Christ Himself is this reality. He bears the fullness of the Kingdom within Himself, and everyone who comes to Him faces a choice: whether to remain with his own life, which sooner or later will run dry, or to renounce his own separate existence, giving his life to Christ and allowing Him to dispose of it. This is somewhat reminiscent of Buddhism, with the difference, however, that Buddhism is apophatic, while Christianity is cataphatic. With Christ and in Christ, the authentic being and true life that the Buddha sensed at the moment of his enlightenment entered the world. And to find them requires the same renunciation of what is one's own, separate, finite, and therefore inauthentic. Without such a renunciation, reality cannot be attained, whether it is the enlightenment of the Buddhists or the fullness of Christ's Kingdom.

When it comes to the Savior's earthly ministry, we understand that something unique is at issue: indeed, He alone was destined to be born and to live His earthly life as the Messiah; this was given to no one else. And yet...

When it comes to the Savior's earthly ministry, we understand that something unique is at issue: indeed, He alone was destined to be born and to live His earthly life as the Messiah; this was given to no one else. And yet His life became a kind of spiritual model suitable for every one of His followers. Moreover, there is simply no other model that allows one to enter the Kingdom, and apparently there cannot be, at least in our world that has undergone the fall.

This model is very simple in theory and not so simple in practice: a person must agree to part with his own life in order then to receive it again, but now as another life, in a new quality suitable for the Kingdom. The one who loves his life ("soul") as it is, in its present condition, cannot count on the Kingdom. The demand appears excessively harsh, but as we can see, this harshness is caused precisely by the specific nature of the fallen world, of which the life of each of us is a part. Even Jesus Himself, over whom original sin has no power, was not, during His earthly ministry, completely free from this specific nature: He, being fully and to the end an inhabitant of our untransformed world and part of it, became subject, if not to sin, then to death - though, of course, not in the same way as we are: death was possible for Him, not inevitable as it is for us.

And the only thing that can help us is readiness to renounce our life in its present quality, what Jesus calls "hating one's own life." It is worth remembering that in biblical language love and hatred denote not the emotional states we often mean by them, but an attitude of acceptance or nonacceptance toward that to which our will is directed. Nonacceptance of life, including first of all one's own life, in its present quality and state, and readiness to part with it for the sake of another, new life, constitute the necessary preliminary condition for beginning the path into the Kingdom: the path during which our former life will be remelted into a new one, fit for eternity.

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