18th Sunday 2025
Ecclesiastes 1:2, 21-23; Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11; Luke 12: 13-21
I have previously begun a homily with a question drawn from a song, and I make no apology for doing so again, as I believe this question to be particularly apposite to today’s First Reading and Gospel, and indeed, to today’s world. The question is
Sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Of course you know the answer: “Another day older and deeper in debt”, the song being “Sixteen Tons” originally recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford (yes, honestly) circa 1960, though there is a much better recent version by a band named Southern Raised. Google “Sixteen Tons by Southern Raised” and I guarantee you a treat.
Why do I quote it? I do so because it fits today’s readings, but also because it describes the situation facing many people both in our own country and around the world, particularly in the Developing World, whose development is hindered by debt and corruption. The world over, we see the situation described in Ecclesiastes and St. Luke, the rich becoming richer at the expense of the poor.
This isn’t a political matter, it is a moral and religious matter, a matter of corporate sin, about which Pope St. John Paul II used to speak so eloquently. Our Lord, in today’s Gospel, makes it clear that the rich man of the parable is guilty of sin, the sin of covetousness or pleonexia and that he will suffer the consequences.
Yet governments and political parties advocate greed and covetousness, lauding them as virtues instead of denouncing them as sins and vices. Even in the developing world, politicians and others enrich themselves at the expense of the poor. Blessed Floribert Kositi was last month beatified as a martyr. He was a devout Catholic and newly qualified customs officer in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who was beaten to death for rejecting bribes and threats, as he refused to allow into the country contaminated and therefore potentially poisonous rice.
Not only the DRC but many countries in Africa are exploited by developed countries for their mineral deposits, for which local people dig their sixteen tons whilst seeing no benefit to themselves, instead becoming “older and deeper in debt”. Debt is a massive issue on a national scale, as countries in Africa and elsewhere are crippled by interest payments. The Catholic Church, especially through the agency of CAFOD, Aid to the Church in Need, and others, has campaigned vigorously for the cancellation of debt, as have secular organisations. As individual Catholics, we should be supporting such campaigns.
Yet in our country and others, it is easy to find a similar situation, with the rich benefiting at the expense of the poor. Much of the hostility to immigrants comes from people who are struggling to survive, despite working every hour God sends, or on the other hand being unable to find work. Their situation is exploited by wealthy politicians and rabble rousers, who make immigrants their scapegoat, as their predecessors in the 1930s targeted Jews.
Our own government and, still more, the government of the USA, have slashed Overseas Aid, a move which has proved popular with struggling people, whose call is to “look after our own”. We should indeed be looking after our own, but by targeting the rich and covetous, rather than those who are poorer still.
The opposite, however, is happening. In America, Congress has approved Trump’s bill which deprives tens of thousands of poor citizens of medical care in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, a grievous sin which even the normally supine US Conference of Catholic Bishops has denounced. In this country, a supposedly respectable newspaper published, a week or two ago, a leading article condemning in unbelievably harsh terms the proposal for a Wealth Tax which might be a small step towards redressing the balance, while at the same time perhaps reducing the guilt of today’s equivalents of the rich man of the parable. So extreme was this article that I had to check the date to ensure that it wasn’t 1st April.
Both the author of Ecclesiastes and, most importantly of all, Jesus Himself denounce the injustice arising from covetousness, and the exploitation of the poor to benefit the rich. Are we, in the light of the Gospel and of Catholic Social Teaching, playing our part, by lobbying MPs, by supporting campaigns, not as a matter of politics but of justice and of faith?
