Homily for the Feast of St Laurence, 2010

Weekday Mass, Feast of St Laurence

Matthew 6:19-24

The Church today doesn’t give us one of the usual Gospel readings for martyrs. So we don’t have encouragement about enduring under persecution, or taking up your cross and following Jesus. Instead we have a reading which reflects the incident of the “treasures of the Church” in the story of Saint Laurence.

But, in a way, this story about your true treasure is about martyrdom. Martyr in Greek means “witness”. It’s a word that the Church uses of those who have been killed in hatred of the faith because the greatest witness that someone can give is their life. But being killed doesn’t make you a martyr, it’s what you bear witness to that matters.

Martyrs are people who have discovered that the deepest truth of their life is founded and rooted in God and not in themselves. They have grasped this with such solidity and integrity that the whole of their life flows from this discovery and reflects this truth, even in the face of violent opposition. They have discovered the falsity of the idea that you can create your own life and fabricate your own personality.

I bought a shirt recently, which is quite a nice shirt, but unfortunately has a vacuous slogan stitched into the label, presumably as a fashion statement. It says, “remember life is all about creating yourself to be the best you can be”. Martyrs are people who have seen through nonsense like that. They bear witness to the truth that the ground of our being is in God who creates us and is not something we construct for ourselves.

This is at the heart of what Jesus is teaching us in today’s Gospel reading. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth.” “You cannot serve both God and wealth”. Treasures and wealth can be taken literally, of course. “It could be you”, runs the lottery strap line. Notice how ambiguous that is. It could simply mean, “you could win the lottery”. More insidiously, it could be suggesting that “you”, the unique unrepeatable person that is “you”, is something that might start to happen once you get your hands on all that money.

This applies to anything we cling on to by which we try to define ourselves, through which we try to construct our own life. Success, a good reputation, a high powered job, being the perfect partner or parent.

We may indeed have those things, or we may not. Either way, they do not determine who we are. We do not receive our being from them, so we don’t need to cling on to them as though we did. We don’t need to make them our treasures. Psalm 62 says “if riches increase, set not your heart on them”. Jesus says that if we seek after wealth, if we set our heart on it, far from it liberating us, it will become our master and we its slaves. The ways in which we try to possess and control end up possessing and controlling us.

So there are two approaches to life: one is a delusion which says we can create ourselves but actually takes us further and further away from the source of our being; and the other discovers the truth of our being in God, and receives that being as a gift. We simply exist because the creator calls us into being. We can therefore trust that our being, the truth of who we are, is safe, no matter what.

Once we grasp that, risk and contingency can be reimagined as part of the adventure of being created, and not something we need to guard against. We can renounce possession and control. We do not need to protect ourselves by building up treasures on earth. We do not even have to protect ourselves by clinging to life. Embracing death with integrity becomes a witness to the truth if we know that the source of our life is in God who is beyond death, and that the gift of our being is never going to be taken back or annulled. The martyrs knew this. The challenge of Jesus in today’s Gospel is for us to grasp that, too.