for August 18
Tuesday of the Twentieth Week in Ordinary Time

The first reading gives us a stark portrait of ridiculous human behavior that would be comical if it were not so tragically destructive: the idolatrous pretensions to divinity. “A god am I,” the fool protests, “I occupy a godly throne in the heart of the sea!”

How many times in human history have we seen this kind of preposterous claim made by men in positions of power. They force others to accept their grandiosity with a straight face even though the fraudulent nature of their claim is obvious to all.

Of course, in today’s world this kind of behavior is seldom acted out to its full absurdity. Thanks in part to the Old Testament prophets who long ago taught us the awesome reverence that is due only to the true divine person, we seldom see such blatant idolatry. But the prideful arrogance exhibited by so many powerful leaders today is even more insidious, compounded by the fact that the holding on to unchecked power requires the employment of instruments of violence and oppression unknown before the advent of modern technologies.

We once naively thought that in this country we were immune from this kind of arrogant abuse of power. But now there are signs that even in America such corruption can undermine what we thought were impregnable democratic institutions. The preposterous narcissism of some of our leaders would be only comical if it were not so tragically destructive.

The prophets like Ezekiel decry this phenomenon when they see it being played out on a grand scale by the powerful who hold sway over others. Jesus in the New Testament, following their lead, reinforces theses prophetic admonitions by applying them to our own lives and behaviors—we who cannot sin on a grand scale, but only in the small and private recesses of our ordinary lives. 

In some sense, all sin is a form of idolatry, when we pledge our allegiance to an object or possession that in no way deserves to be ranked as a supreme value in our lives. In the gospel today, the disciples falsely assume that wealth and riches are a sign of God’s special favor. But Jesus corrects them by pointing to the temptation that material wealth presents to the human heart. This is the cliche of the “almighty dollar” at whose altar we worship when materialism is our religion and material goods and luxuries are the only values we pursue. With the scandalously unequal distribution of wealth in today’s world, it is easy for the wealthy to make affluence into a false god and the poor a special object of derision and exploitation. We are discovering in these days that even we, who may not be wealthy at all, still participate in a system that relies on idolatrous practices to benefit some at the expense of others.
—Walter F. Modrys SJ

Today’s readings can be found on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ website.