It's very common to see people,
especially Christians, puffed up with conceit these days. They look
for admiration, boast of their power and influence and, as Pope Francis
says, "make themselves seen" with their life full of vanity.
Who is behind vanity?
It’s devil, the father of all liars and iniquities. We’re all in a make-believe
world. We fantasize a lot. Vanity, the Pope says, "is a particularly grave
spiritual illness":
When you help the poor, don't
sound the trumpet, do it secretly. The Father sees it, and that is enough. The
Bible very clearly says that when you get adulation and praises for the charity
or tithing in this world, you have already got back in return what you
deserved. We often want others to know that ‘I have given this amount to
charity or church’.
If you do it secretly in such a way that your
right hand doesn’t know what your left hand is doing, you will get a bigger
prize from the Father in Heaven. Our biggest worry should be: Are we sharing
enough with others? Like disciples did after the ascension of Jesus into
Heaven. Most of us are amassing much more wealth than we actually need.
Similarly, when you pray,
the Lord warned, do not do it to be seen, do not pray so that people will see
you; "pray in secret, go to your room."
Most of us Christians are Sunday Christians.
We run around to make more and more money for six days and on Sundays, we go to
church and let others also know that ‘I’m also a Christian’. There would be
dinners, receptions, cultural programmes and meetings, quietly adding to the
clericalism bedeviling the church these days. Praise and worship take a
backseat.
"Christians who live
that way for appearances, for vanity, seem like peacocks, they strut about like
peacocks," Pope recently said in a homily. Good description. Peacocks love
to display their colourful feather in bright sunshine.
Listen to what he says. “They
are the people who say, ‘I am a Christian, I am to that priest, to that sister,
to that bishop; my family is a Christian family.’ They boast. What about your
life with the Lord? How do you pray? Your life in the works of mercy, how's
that going?”
"How many Christians
live for appearances?” he asks. Their life seems like a soap bubble. The soap
bubble is beautiful, with all its colours! But it lasts only a second, and then
what? Likewise, our money can disappear in a second. We can become bankrupt. A
serious illness can strike a close family member, which can bring us back to
senses. Seek Jesus before such dreadful things happen in our life. It won’t
happen then. But we kneel down for hours of prayers after getting hit.
“Do I do good? Do I seek
God? Do I pray?” Pope asks. But we don’t have the time and inclination.
The life in this world is
finite. It ends one day. The life of a man is not more than 80 or 85 years.
After that, what? As Pope Paul VI said, the bare earth awaits us, this is our
final truth.
We’re caught up in this
world’s activities. We pretend that we’re busy.
Most of us behave as if
we are going to live for 1000 years. No. When we die much before that… we have
to leave our power, money, position and influence in this world. Only our soul
will go to the Creator, depending on our life in this world. We should try to
remind ourselves about this fact at least once daily.
