Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle C
Reflecting on Luke 16:19-31
Has there ever been a time in our lifetimes when the words of today’s gospel were more desperately needed, or more thoughtlessly unheeded? The Church has written so many encyclicals about the right use of wealth, and today those words are about as popular as the Ten Commandments, of Amos’ railing against the corrupt rich in his day, or of the story of Lazarus and Dives.
We all have our theories of how bitter lies are somehow taken for truths, especially lies about those who are poor, and how they got that way.
When St. John Paul II defended the primacy of labor in his encyclical “Laborem Exercens” (1981), he was derided by a columnist in Fortune magazine for being “wedded to socialist economics and increasingly a sucker for Third World anti-imperialist rhetoric.”
As John McKenzie, SJ wrote, reflecting on St. John Paul II’s prophetic voice, “They saw him as a benighted Pole who failed to understand the sanctifying grace of consumerism.”
Are we guilty of the crimes that Amos attributed to his own people: self-indulgence, frivolous distraction, willful ignorance, and cruel neglect of the poor?
Paul’s first letter to Timothy—that beautiful second reading today—reveals the kind of persons we might be: people of integrity, kindness, piety, steadfastness, and love, people who fight the good fight of faith, people of true nobility.
Conservative commentator and Orthodox Jew Ben Shapiro asked atheist Bill Maher this question: “Why do you and I agree on morality like 87.5%? We both grew up in Western society, which has thousands of years of Biblical morality behind it.”
We are the inheritors of this morality. Dives is not the hero of this story.
In what ways are you taking care of Lazarus at your door?
Kathy McGovern ©2025