Memorial of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Religious: June 21 (Fr. Karl Esker, C.Ss.R.)

The Good Word

Friday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

June 21, 2024 – Memorial of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Religious

Hello and welcome to the Word, bringing you the Good News of Jesus Christ every day from the Redemptorists of the Baltimore Province. I am Fr. Karl Esker from the Basilica of our Lady of Perpetual Help in Brooklyn, NY. Today is Friday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time.

Today’s reading is taken from the holy Gospel according to Matthew:

Jesus said to his disciples: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and decay destroy, and thieves break in and steal. But store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.

"The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light; but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be in darkness. And if the light in you is darkness, how great will the darkness be."

The gospel of the Lord.

In our gospel today, Jesus tells his disciples: “where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” We often think of a treasure as something material, like a pot of gold or a bank account, a shiny new car or a dream house. But it could just as well be a relationship, like a very dear friend or a significant other, or something less material, like ambition to power or status within a group. And it may happen that our lives seem so scattered all over the place, or so taken up with just getting my, that we lose sight of our treasure. Jesus warns that if we do not look for and choose our treasure well, we could end up losing it and everything else.

That is what we see in the first reading. There we hear the story of Athaliah, the mother of the king, who could not bear the thought of losing her position and influence when the king died. Her ambition led her to try to kill the whole king’s family and become herself the queen. She almost succeeded, but one of her grandchildren escaped, and when that child grew up, those officials who had remained faithful to God’s covenant proclaimed him king to the joy of the people; and Athaliah lost not only her position, but her life as well. It’s a story worthy of the Game of Thrones, but here the main point is not the intrigue, but God’s faithfulness to God’s people.

The question of the treasure is not so much what we do with it, but what we become with it. What is the value system we take on to attain our treasure? As Jesus in another part of the gospels asks: “What profit is there for one to gain the whole world and forfeit one’s life?” By life he means the full realization of our humanity in right relationship with God and with others. So, to choose the wrong treasure is to direct our lives toward something that will not help us grow as human beings and children of God.

This is where Jesus’ parable about our interior light comes in. We need to cultivate a sound conscience, otherwise it will be overgrown by the tangle of our desires and we will end up in darkness. We need a good eye to see our true selves and the true treasure that may lie hidden in our heart, overshadowed by the busyness of our lives.

One way would be to examine where we spend our time. Outside of work or study, how much time to I spend paging through social media? How important is it to score or give “likes?” Do I go crawling through some dark places of the Internet? Does my use of the Internet help me grow as a person, or does it just feed my curiosity and my fears. Am I becoming a slave to it? And what about the other areas of my life?

To cultivate a sound conscience and discover my true self, I need to spend time with Jesus in prayer and reflecting on the gospels; I need to invest myself in my relationships with my family, my work, and my church or neighborhood. This will help me to grow as a human being. Then I will know the value of the other things in my life, because my true treasure is God’s gift of myself and the ability to relate myself in love to God and to the others God places in my life. Only then can I truly be me.

May God bless you.

Fr. Karl E. Esker

Basilica of our Lady of Perpetual Help

Brooklyn, NY