18th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 3 August 2025

We are now just halfway through our celebration of our Year of Jubilee, opened by Pope Francis last December but to be concluded by Pope Leo at year’s end. Throughout, we have had the theme of Hope greet us each time we come to our church with its invitation that we renew the hope in our hearts through our discipleship of the Risen Christ and most importantly that we become those who can give hope to others in a world in which hope is in short supply, and becoming increasingly so.

A Year of Jubilee – following the pattern of Jubilee into which the Book of Leviticus calls the people of the Old Testament every 50 years – invites us into a period not just of celebration of all that God has done for us, and will do in the future, but also a time of reflection and renewal. It is an opportunity to come home to ourselves and to reflect on what is most important in our lives, to re-connect with those whom time has enabled to drift to the edge, to get our priorities in order again.  It is a time of re-orientation from which then we might keep journeying into the future with great sureness and clarity.

Every Jubilee for the people of the Old Testament was, in fact, an opportunity for the people to remember the covenant that they had with God. They were a people who had been slaves in Egypt, delivered by the hand of God, and promised a new land of liberation yet only after a period of wandering in the wilderness.  Foundational as this was to their identity, it was something the people could forget. And so, the prophets, especially, call the people, from time to time, back into the desert to remember. A year of Jubilee was a structured reminder. The Jubilee practices of forgiveness of sin, the release of prisoners, the remission of debt, the leaving the land fallow were all ancient ways that sought to engage this recalibration of life, not just on a personal level but also as communities.

Of course, life itself has the tendency to remind us who we are.  A good deal of life we can be under the illusion that we are in control. But something happens – a tragedy, a death, a threatening prognosis, a failure – and we realise that we are not in control. We are reminded that life is fragile, that we are fragile.  Each time, a choice presents itself – do we defend ourselves from this truth, or do we enter the truth with a renewed openness to the Mystery of God in which we are encompassed. The first response is fundamentally one of fear; the second is one of hope.  We place our hope not in what we possess but in the One who possesses us.

The man in the parable we have heard is not condemned for being successful. He is condemned for thinking that his wealth could secure his soul. He says to himself, “You have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”  And yet, Jesus calls this man a fool—not because he was prudent, but because he forgot the fundamental truth: our lives are not our own.  No amount of saving or success can insulate us from the fragility of life. In forgetting that, he forgets God, and his dependence on a Mystery greater than himself.

But not only God, others too become forgotten.  Why is Jesus, throughout the Gospel, adamant about the virtue of poverty, a state of having no possessions?  It is a rally not against wealth as such, but rather the recognition that the more we have, the more we must defend. And the more defensive we become, the more fearful we have become.  And the more fearful we lead our lives, the more isolated we become. We cut ourselves off. And yet, for Jesus this is deathly. Life flows when we move beyond fear, and live in openness to one another, in a communion of life that recognises we are brothers and sisters.

What then might be the barriers we have put between ourselves and others? What are we storing up? What barns are we building that we must then defend? What are we seeking to defend at all costs?  This may not just be something material; it may equally be an idea, a memory, a hurt, a habit.

What, though, would it mean to be “rich in what matters to God”? Perhaps it would mean to live with open hands, to live with the logic of gift rather than of accumulation, to live with the logic of forgiveness rather than of revenge? To live with the courage that signifies we have not put our hope in what we possess, but rather in the promises of Jesus to us.

If each of us were to do this, our community itself can become truly a sign of hope a sign of hope in a fractured world, where the lonely find belonging, and where every person knows they are not forgotten.

But this is only possible if we are those who live by hoping in what is unseen, by trusting in what endures, and by becoming rich in what matters to God. Then we become a people of holy poverty and holy abundance—empty of fear, and full of trust. 

Because hope, true hope, never stores—it always gives.