Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Today’s readings (in the evening cycle) incorporate Psalm 49, a prolonged invective against a totalizing trust in wealth.

Thinking back to Fr Matthew’s sermon last Sunday on the Gospel lesson (Luke 3:7-18) in which St. John the Baptist admonished his audience to share their goods with those living without—here is the same theme, with the same note of urgency.

The psalmist suggests that our reason for trusting in wealth stems from a basic desire for redemption. Can this impulse explain the madness of our society’s current rush towards wealth building? How else can we make sense of a society dedicated to the idea that people should be free to make choices, primarily to allow for the accumulation of as much wealth as possible? Is this an exaggeration? I do not think so. If I am wrong, and it is a caricature, it is (as somebody once wisely said) recognizable as a picture.

But against such priorities the psalmist assures us that it is impossible to pay a ransom for our lives, for our lives are too precious to ransom with money.

Dear friends, in my own striving to provide for those in my care, I must not lose sight of this truth! Everything in this life will crumble. Everything will be reduced to dust. Only our lives, our souls and resurrected bodies will move into the next life, and nothing will matter then except for our spiritual development.

This is what St. John and the psalmist say so resolutely, and what we ignore when our materialistic culture sucks us in: our life, our redemption, our reason to be is all found in Christ! What else is there?

My musical extract today is a prokeimenon from the Byzantine liturgy: a short psalmic phrase, sometimes found before readings. This music speaks so powerfully!

The words are from verse 3 of Psalm 49:

Το στόμα μου λαλήσει σοφίαν.
My mouth shall speak wisdom.

Yours in Christ,

—Justin