The Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)
Dear brothers and sisters,
Every Eucharistic celebration invites us to reflect on that which is most important: “the encounter with the risen Christ who transforms our lives and enlightens our affections, desires and thoughts.”[1] The readings from the Sacred Scriptures today invite us to continue this reflection in a particular way by remembering that God turns humanity “back to dust” (Psalm 90:3).
We have recently seen two people each go to Jesus and demand he intervene in a personal quarrel and each time Jesus redirects the complainer’s focus to what is essential (cf. Luke 10:40 and Luke12:13). Two Sundays ago, he redirected Martha to what he called “the better part”; today, he redirects the man away from greed and idolatry (cf. Luke 10:42; Luke 12:21).
Jesus responds today with a parable particularly apt for our own age, one about a rich man who demonstrates neither gratitude nor generosity and who focuses only on this life. “He talks about himself only, or rather about what he owns, about his things: his harvest, his provisions, his possessions, his soul. He talks about his plans and about how he can preserve what is his” (cf. Luke 12:19).[2]
He is an ego-centrist. Each in their own way, the sacred readings today call us away from this mindset by directing our thoughts to death, something we especially do not like to think about today but from which none of us can escape.
Jesus speaks not of an earthly wealth, but of a heavenly one that will not pass away (cf. Luke 12:22). “Jesus does not say what this wealth is, just as he did not tell Martha what the good thing is that will not be taken away” from her (Lk 10:42).[3] What can we say, then, about this wealth?
The great Saint Augustine of Hippo reminds us that the New Testament cannot be understood without the Old, and that the Old Testament cannot be understood without the New. So it is that we can get a hint, maybe, of what this heavenly wealth, this better part, is.
Qoheloth – the preacher who in Latin is called Ecclesiastes - tells us in English that “all things are vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2)! The English word vanity was once more useful here, but – as often happens – the way we use the word today is different from how it was used in the past. It is used here to translate the Hebrew word hevel. It is tempting to translate hevel as “nothing,” but this does not quite get at the meaning of the phrase that all things are vanity.
Literally, hevel means “breath” or “vapor,” neither of which means nothing but both of which are ultimately ungraspable, which more closely approximates what Qoheleth is trying to say; he seems to be saying that all things are ultimately meaningless because nothing remains and all our efforts are futile and fleeting, but this was said by a man who did not know the Messiah Jesus Christ.
Because of this, some readers today accuse Qoheloth of being overly pessimistic because he focuses on the sadder reality of this life. In point of fact, he is not pessimistic, but directly realistic.
For twelve chapters, the preacher argues his [seemingly] pessimistic point. The passage we read today is only one of many arguments for it – that all our work dies with us, that “you can’t take it with you,” that whatever profit you make on earth does not follow you after death. He has even stronger arguments: the problem of evil and injustice, for instance, which infects every life and every age. All the preacher’s points are taken from simple observation of the world, observation of life “under the sun.” And despite progress in cleverness and information and science and technology and economics, “nothing is new under the sun” morally (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Science makes us smart and powerful but not happy or good. People are just as unhappy and wicked as they were in simpler and poorer ages, perhaps even more so. That data that the preacher assembles to make his case is massive, the argument is inescapable, and the conclusion is deeply depressing: the settled happiness and goodness we all desire is simply not attainable in this life.[4]
His insistence on the ungraspability of the meaning of life causes most moderns to avoid reading Qoheleth altogether. Instead, we should each ponder with him the meaning of life; we should struggle with the questions connected with it and search out the mind and heart of God.
If we strive after the answers to these questions with Qoheleth and wrestle with the seemingly contradictory answers we find, we will quickly learn that
Ecclesiastes is not an atheist. He speaks of God, but he tells us only what our observation of this world tells us: that God is a great mystery, that no one knows what he is up to or what will happen to us after death or even if there really is a life after death… Without divine revelation, without the divine initiative, without God coming down from his heaven into our earth, how can we know and how can we possibly climb the mountain to get there? We can’t. That’s the true pessismism that this book teaches us, and it’s a crucially necessary lesson. Religion is not a happy face; it’s realism, it’s the truth, the whole truth, including the bad news. Only then do we appreciate the good news.[5]
His searching and wrestling and pondering, his deep dives into what is most important, taught him that “prayer, life, is nothing other than a constant search for what is essential, what we really need, what enriches us before God.”[6] The true meaning of life is not to be found in the things of this world, however pleasing they may be, but in the one who created these pleasing things and who alone gives meaning to these passing realities.
Ultimately, Qoheleth knows this life has both meaning and purpose, but he cannot quite discover it. The Christian, too, knows this life has both meaning and purpose, but he knows it can only be found in Jesus Christ; the Christian knows the meaning and purpose of this life is to encounter Jesus Christ – risen from the dead – and to allow him to change our affections, desires, and thoughts until they become united to his own.
Here, though, we meet another important and unavoidable question:
What did Jesus leave the world that it didn’t have before? The world that the preacher describes – that is, the world full of evil and injustice and suffering and death and ignorance and failures, the world that in the end is just “vanity” – is the same today as it was before Jesus came. What did Jesus give us that we didn’t have before?
The answer is very, very simple. He gave us God. He put God, and union with God, into our hands. And when he did, what did our hands do with God? We killed him. We crucified him. And what did he do about that? He used that sin to save us from sin, and he used that death to save us from final death. Jesus’ Resurrection is the guarantee of our hope and our resurrection. That’s the incredible Good News of Easter, the Gospel; but we appreciate it only if we are honest enough to accept the bad news first: that without that, without God-for-us, without God coming to us, life is indeed vanity of vanities. Ecclesiastes is the truth and nothing but the truth – but not the whole truth, thank God.[7]
Amen.
[1] Pope Leo XIV, Homily, 3 August 2025.
[2] Pierbattista Cardinal Pizzaballa, O.F.M., Meditation for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, 3 August 2025.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Peter Kreeft, Food for the Soul: Reflections on the Mass Readings, Cycle C (Park Ridge, Illinois: Word on Fire, 2021), 517.
[5] Ibid., 518.
[6] Pierbattista Cardinal Pizzaballa, O.F.M., Ibid.
[7] Peter Kreeft, Food for the Soul, ibid., 518-519.
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