Do people ever ask you want you come here for? They do me, and sometimes follow it with the words ‘well, I suppose at least you get paid for it’, which is true, but there are any number of ways of making more money far easier, very few of which involve opening your front door to perfect strangers who may or may not have something worrying going on in their mind. But as I point out, I do it when I’m on holiday as well, and even often on my days off, so that’s a non-starter. What they really want to know if whether what we do here is worth bothering with, does it make a difference? Does it fill the emptiness in your soul that opens and closes like the Ozone layer, depending how gaseous or windy we become. Is it worth learning the strange rituals, languages, tunes, colours and the rest of it. What is life all about? What’s the meaning of it all?

This is the underlying and perennial question for everyone and it is a question raised insistently by the readings for today’s Mass, which seems to suggest that it’s not something we have the answer to at all, unless we do exactly what our questioning friend hopes that we do – we hear the scriptures, study them and, once understood, we live them. We commit to them and therefore to each other, and that is maybe what people really are asking us ‘do you really love each other and do you really believe this?’

The rich landowner in today’s Gospel parable is simply concerned to make the most of the exceptional harvest for his own comfort. He is totally self-centred. ‘I’ and ‘me’ form the refrain of his soliloquy. He does not consider anyone else, nor reflect that death, whenever it comes, will deprive him of his wealth and pass it to others. But which of us, if we were farmers having a bumper crop would think in mid-harvest ‘gosh, I might die soon, so rather than putting my harvest in the barn I’d better curry favour with God and give some away. No. Harvests need barns and farmers are well provided with them, so into the barn it goes. We will hope and assume that the farmer, if it were us, would then carefully use the harvest to grind the wheels of life and use it wisely.

‘The Preacher’ of Ecclesiastes, in the first reading, regards it as a ‘great injustice’ that the fruits of his own toil and strain should go to someone who has not laboured for it. He certainly believes in God; but his God is incomprehensible in such a way that he dispenses pleasure and pain seemingly at random, and is maybe more akin to the God who people do not know and ask us about than the God we know and trust in. Is not the second question ‘if God is good, why do people have to suffer’, and the newspapers have exposed, quite rightly, the many atrocities which have been committed by the church throughout the world, so maybe we should be happy that people ask us these questions at all, and do not cross the road and seek shelter with other bodies.

In common with the people of his time the Preacher is unconvinced about an after-life. So he reckons that the sensible way for him to live is to take what comes his way, hoping for maximum enjoyment and minimum effort for himself. His words are echoed by the rich landowner: ‘take things easy; eat, drink, have a good time.’ And so we should, we are not Methodists and if we are called hypocrites, then we should remember that Christ was called just that a few times before even his friends abandoned Him. What we are not though, are producers and consumers, linked together simply by money, even though the pervasive and evil ‘Gospel of Wealth’ would suggest that we are. There is a widespread hunger for religion, expressed in New Age cults and the brittle certainties of exclusive sects. And these witness to the abiding human need. But too often these faiths depend on vague legends or fashions of spirituality, or on strong personalities whose ‘gospels’ turn out to be fraudulent. In contrast, St Paul (in the second reading) points us to a vision of human reality based on the concrete facts of Christ’s life, death and resurrection, and on our own actions in the here-and-now. God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son (Col. 1:13). This is the response to our friend’s question. We come because we live in the world, but God has overcome it and this is our message. That is why we put to death in us whatever is not of Christ: impurity, greed, anger, malice, lying. These are simply not consistent with being ‘raised with Christ’. Instead, the true human life should display compassion, humility, patience, forgiveness, love (Col. 3:12-14), all of them virtues that find concrete expression towards other people in the here-and-now. This is where we can find the meaning of life. Our life, the truly human life, ‘does not consist in the abundance of possessions’ although we will possess things, and thee is nothing wrong in that, we are not called to be parsimonious miseries, or Methodist, we are called to rejoice in what God has created while pointing to the truth that He has also created something far greater, which is our Christian hope. Hope, joy and faith are found in those whose ‘life is lived with Christ in God’, and who can consequently share something of his all-embracing love. That’s what they are looking for, and I hope it’s what we have found. Love.