Bishop Anthony B. Taylor
Bishop Anthony B. Taylor delivered this homily July 30 at the St. Meinrad Seminary alumni reunion.
I have a nephew who, when he was 2, had a blanket that he dragged around everywhere he went. He called it his “bunny” because it had a cloth rabbit’s head attached to one corner and cloth feet attached to two of the other corners.
I’m sure we’ve all experienced children becoming particularly attached to some object that they carried around with them everywhere they went. My nephew never strayed very far from that bunny and screamed if you tried to take it away from him. I remember one time when it was filthy dirty from being dragged everywhere. His mother put it in the wash — and he cried and cried until he got it back.
The bunny was his security blanket. Without it he felt insecure. We thought his attachment to the bunny was funny because we could see that the “security” it gave was all in his imagination. We knew that the real source of his security came from his parents. But he couldn’t see that. To him the bunny was very important.
In today’s Gospel Jesus encounters a rich young man. He was a good person. He obeyed the commandments and was faithful to his religion. But he had a security blanket — he was attached to money. We are not told that he was greedy — he may even have been generous up to a point. We are not told that he was materialistic either — maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. But what we are told is that when challenged to give it all up, to rid himself of all his wealth and make himself equal to the poorest of Jesus’ followers, he couldn’t do it. He clung to his security blanket. He clung to his money, his “bunny.”
When we hear this Gospel, it is easy for us to think that Jesus was being unfair. Wouldn’t it have been enough to ask for a big donation? Or even to ask him to “give until it hurts?” Wasn’t it unfair for Jesus to demand that he give it all up?
When you read the passage carefully, it is obvious that Jesus could care less about the money. What Jesus was interested in was the growth of the young man. As long as a person clings to a security blanket, as long as he clings to an illusion of security, he will never find true security. That nephew is now a 32-year-old attorney and you can be sure that he doesn’t take “bunny” with him to the office. There came a time when he was ready to discover that the true source of his security was not his blanket.
In our Gospel, Jesus is asking the rich young man to do essentially the same thing — to grow beyond the need for that security blanket. And this Gospel speaks directly to our condition as well. Jesus asks us to put aside our “bunny,” so to speak, to put aside the illusion that money can make us secure; or status; or success; or popularity. Jesus invites us to see things a little more clearly. He invites us to see that it is God himself who is the source of our security and not anything else. And certainly not money. There is relatively little that money really can do.
A good question to ask yourself is how you react when the Lord takes some of it away from you through some “reversal of fortune” — for instance, losing your job unexpectedly or if the stock market plunges, greatly reducing the value of your retirement portfolio. Do you become frantic and fearful, like my nephew who cried and cried when his mother took his “bunny” away from him and put it in the wash?
His “bunny” was filthy; sometimes the Lord uses such reversals to purify our motives and discover where our true security lies. Money cannot protect us from illness or crime; money cannot keep our kids off drugs or out of jail; money cannot make our marriages happy or protect us from insanity; money cannot keep our country out of war or our children out of trouble; money cannot get rid of that hollow feeling deep inside or the unnamed anxieties that keep us awake at night. If you think that anything other than God can give you true security, you are as deluded as a 2 year old with a bunny. According to Jesus, that self-delusion was the tragedy of the rich young man, and that self-delusion is why it is so difficult for rich people to enter the kingdom of God. That is why it is “easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle …”
The obvious question in today’s Gospel is to ask “Where do you place your trust?” What are your security blankets? How much cushion do you feel you have to keep in your accounts? Do your investments really make you feel secure?
At what point does that distortion begin whereby a person passes beyond prudent planning and begins actually to trust in his riches? Pope Francis calls this idolatry and he draws special attention to the idols of money, power and pleasure.
If you can’t bear to imagine what it would be to lose what you have, then you’re clutching that security blanket pretty tight — and worse, you are an idolater: you are worshipping a god who cannot save. We’ve all heard of people who commit suicide following some financial reversal — starting with all those people who jumped from tall buildings to their death following the stock market crash of 1929. They couldn’t bear facing life without their “bunny.”
Jesus offers the rich young man life and a real source of security in place of the illusion to which he was clinging so tightly. The young man went away sad. Rather than him possess money, it is clear that the money possessed him; he couldn’t let loose of it. Do you still rely on your security blanket? What is possessing you, hindering you from following Jesus fully, with all your heart and mind and soul? Jesus is calling you to set it aside and begin to follow him more fully.
And what is true for each of us individually is also true for us collectively as Church. During his just-ended pastoral visit to Brazil, Pope Francis described numerous obstacles such as clerical careerism, self-referential theologizing and excessive preoccupation with institutional concerns as impediments which hinder the Church from reaching out with evangelical zeal to those on the margins of society who need us the most. Pope Francis, like Jesus, challenges us to let loose of our ecclesiastical security blanket and instead risk everything to bring hope and practical help to our brothers and sisters in need. He is right on target when he challenges us to invest less of our time and energy in institutional crisis management — which are often little more than tempests in a teapot — and devote far more of our time and energy to tackling far greater crises out there in our ever more alienating secular society. And not just in works of charity — also in working for justice! We who have a voice are obligated to know the needs and be the voice of those who due to circumstances are voiceless, for instance: undocumented immigrants, inmates in our penitentiaries and the child in the womb.
Pope Francis not only wants the Church to do a better job of reaching out to the poor than in the past, he wants us to become a Church of the poor. A Church in which the poor have real ownership for their parish and diocese. A Church in which the voice of the poor is heard and their concerns addressed. A Church in which the poor have a place at the table when decisions are made. And Pope Francis insists that for that to happen, we have to become a Church that is poor. A Church which does what the rich man in the Gospel you just heard refuses to do. A Church in which we each set aside individually our own personal security blankets, and in which we collectively set aside our institutional security blanket, leaving behind everything, in effect, in order to follow Jesus fully and faithfully.
