Jer 13:1-11 / Mt 13:31-35
We have a great fondness for words like “my” and “mine,” and we take great pleasure in totting up lists of our assets and the other things we call “ours.” But it’s all a fiction and a hallucination, because nothing is ever really ours. A mental stroll through the castles and palaces of Europe makes that abundantly clear. Here are the things that “belonged” to Henry VIII and Louis XIV, but where are Henry and Louis? They don’t live here any more. All they now possess is all they ever possessed: their loves and their deeds of love.
And so it is with us. We and all our things are as transient as that linen loincloth in the Old Testament reading from Jeremiah. In the end, entropy wins, everything falls apart, and all that remains in our hands is our loves. What a tragedy it would be to pass through an entire lifetime with all its stresses and strains and then to end up empty-handed. Don’t let that happen to you!
