Power versus Poverty. 1st temptation
Manila retreat 8
1st Temptation and the vow of Poverty (Mt
4:1-4)
The first aim of the temptations is to make us forget or doubt our
relationship with God: “If you are the son of God…”
Satan wants us to use what God has given in order to prove what we
are. So our skills, gifts, are not anymore at the service of the
kingdom of God but a way to overcome our doubts. Psychologically
speaking, to make you fight your doubts is the best way to put the
doubt in you. The same sentence will accompany Jesus in the words of
many devil possessed people, when just before the miracle they would
say “I know who you are” as to put the doubt on Jesus. When Jesus
is on the cross, the words of the bystanders are the same: “He
saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let
him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. He
trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said,
'I am God's Son.” (Mt 27:42-43).
Jesus is called to make a miracle in order to prove his relation with
God. It is the temptation we face when we fall in the efficentism: we
feel the need to perform well in the apostolate in order to be good
religious or happy in our vocation. This is also the reason for many
people to reject God; after all, he is not solving the problem of
poverty and hunger of the world.
The second subtle meaning of the temptation is in the fact that
making a miracle to satisfy his need Jesus would prove that what we
feel becomes automatically a right and should be satisfied. This puts
material thing above all else in our life. Jesus says quite clearly:
“Man does not live on bread alone”. Jesus reminds us that the
spiritual is more important than the material.
Our vow of poverty is the spiritual answer to this temptation and to
the problem of poverty of the world. Our vow of poverty does not
solve the problem of the hungry, the homeless, but teaches us that
the problem is not solved only looking at the material need of these
people, and also that rather than miracles or shows of power we
should point to the sharing.
Jesus, who refuses to make bread for himself, will not refrain to
make bread for the thousands and finally give the bread of eternal
life to all. Big nations speak a lot about poverty but have no idea
of what it means. They speak about eradicating the poverty but they
cannot succeed because they lack the most important instrument: the
courage to sacrifice and to share their richness.
Marxism used well the topic of sharing when it said that only
communism can guarantee bread for all, but forgot completely the
spiritual part.
In the episode of the multiplication of bread (Lk 9:12) Jesus gives
people bread because they had left everything to go to him and listen
to his word (man lives not on bread alone). The vow of poverty will
be successful only if it follows the dynamics of the miracle of the
multiplication with its three preparatory moments: 1- To leave behind
everything to follow Jesus, 2- to nourish on the word of God and 3-
to step into the dynamics of love which make us realize the needs of
the others and bring us to share with them the little we have.
When we do not respect this order of things, the material things
themselves collapse (see the fall of both marxism and capitalism).
Pope John Paul II in the document Vita Consecrata
89 says clearly that the vow of poverty is needed in today’s
society to contrast the secular mentality according to which we must
satisfy all our material desires, even when these contrast with the
needs of the other. The satisfaction of our material needs should
never be a priority, but subjected to the growth of our spiritual
needs, and should never bring to contrast with the others but to
sharing. All through history we have examples of saints living the
poverty as a choice. The Church constantly needs such witnesses of
the Beatitudes to contrast the culture.
That is why in Matthew 5:1 Jesus says: “Blessed
are the poor in spirit, theirs is the Kingdom of heaven”. Poor in
spirit, because we can have people who are poor but curse their
situation, they are not blessed. The promise to the poor is not the
possession of the paradise but of that kingdom of God which Jesus is
preaching about and we have seen yesterday. If you change the
position of the words in the sentence you understand that better: To
whom belongs the kingdom? (the fellowship of Jesus), who can be
called Christian? To those who are poor in spirit. They are the lucky
one. This means that the fellowship of Jesus is possible only through
poverty in spirit. It is not an optional. Of course to be poor in
spirit, if it does not have real consequences in our material life is
a lie and so will not bring us the bliss.
Somebody may say: “It is too difficult!”,
Jesus answers: “Either you are salty or you are useless” (Mt
5:13).
Somebody may say: “But what will happen to us?”,
Jesus answers: “God will take care of you. Look at the birds of the
air and at the flowers in the fields”. And this is the third point
regarding poverty: God will take care of us. Poverty is the way to
show to God that we trust in him (Mt 6:26).
The challenge of religious life today is in this
radical way of accepting and living the vows. Whatever else we do,
other people can do too. In fact, nowadays we have many religious
movements, secular institutes, and third orders, societies of
apostolic life, which live, at different levels, their commitment to
the Lord and to the world. They can adopt many of the styles of the
world and do the same apostolate we do in their own way as good
Christians. It is not up to us to live that kind of commitment. We
have one spirituality, they have a different one.
So the beatitudes are for all but the degree of
commitment is different.
The 3rd
beatitude is actually the same as the first. “Blessed are the meek,
they will inherit the earth”. In the Hebrew language the word for
poor and for meek is the same. In a society based on greed and power,
those who were meek ended up always to be also exploited and poor.
Jesus says of himself: “Learn from me for I am meek and humble of
heart” (Mt 11:29).
Meekness is the way chosen by God to be king: look
at all the prophecies about the Messiah. The meek will inherit the
earth because the king of the earth is the “meek”.
God promised the land to Abraham and Moses and
Israel got it through great battles and fights. Now in the new
covenant this does not happen anymore: the land is given to the meek
not to the victorious. When we expect to conquer or achieve things
only using power we are in the Old Testament and bound to fail. The
trust in providence, of which we just spoke, tells us that God will
give us everything we are in need of, not in return to our merits but
out of love.
Jesus, the Son of God, has come to preach a world
of peace and harmony, where everybody are brothers, children of God,
where there is no division of race, colour, religion, because
everybody recognizes the name of God as Father.
So recapitulating we have three aspects necessary
for living properly our vow of poverty:
- First place should be given to the spiritual things Mt 6:33 “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all the things shall be added unto you”.
- We should concretely show trust in God.
- The choice of God should bring us to sharing our things with the others: share with the poor and provoke the rich.
This often brings us to real detachment and also
alienation of our material possession.
- In order to make space and better concentrate on the spiritual.
- Because we can share only what we have
- And because when we do not have anymore human security we remain only with our trust in God.
What are the challenges for religious today?
Our worries are mainly about material things.
We look for a stable position and work
We look for comfort
We look for safety, for all the instruments that
can make us successful
We ask for what is necessary, then for what is
useful, then for what could be useful and so we end up in a much
better and more comfortable position than those around us and to keep
such position we often have to say no to the requests of those who
come to knock at our door.
We adjust to the mentality of the world and are
afraid to be stumbling blocks.
Jesus sends the disciples to their first mission
and orders them to take nothing with themselves Mk 6:8-9).
We are afraid to suffer and work hard: “Strive
to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to
enter and will not be able” (Lk
13:24).
We find difficult to accept transfers, to get adjusted to new
environments, new food, new climate.
We become more and more independent.
For personal work
- How much are we willing to give up in order to be faithful to the requests of the apostolate and of the superiors?
- Which image of us have the people who live around us and those who come daily to our works?
- What is there in my life that I would never give up? Why?
- If my superiors would ask me to go to a new assignment to a poorer house or area, maybe far, how would I feel?
- What worries me about my future?