26 September 1984
Zakopane, Poland

My dear Friends in Christ,

In the first reading of today's Mass there is one of the most beautiful prayers of the entire Bible. Let us listen to it again. "Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny Thee and say, `Who is the Lord?' or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God." (Prv 30:8-9). What a wise prayer it is, for when we have too much money, too many good things, we tend to forget God, and when we have not sufficient to live upon and our stomachs are empty, we blame God and, as the author says, profane His name.

Most of the people of the world must live out their lives in great poverty. It is said that two-thirds of the world's population go to bed hungry every night. So, if we do not go to bed hungry, we have a lot to be thankful for. We must be considered as part of that one-third of the world which is not considered to be hungry. Perhaps we are not hungry, but we are not rich. Take comfort from the thought that, when God Himself decided to come into the world, He chose to be among that group of persons among whom we find ourselves. It is true that Our Lord said that He had not where to lay His head. When we consider the strenuous life He led when He was preaching in various parts of Palestine, and the long journeys He took on foot, we must conclude that He was a physically strong man. He would not have been a physically strong man if His mother, Mary, and Joseph had not fed Him well as an infant and as a young and growing boy. So, we can conclude that He was not poor to the extent that, as an infant and as a boy, He had not sufficient to eat; nor was He rich. We know that He was born in a stable, because there was no room for Him in the inn. If Mary and Joseph had been wealthy people, they would have been able to buy their way into the inn. We must conclude that Joseph was a conscientious tradesman and that he earned sufficient money to keep his wife, Mary, and her Son, Jesus, in sufficiently good circumstances to enable Jesus to grow into the strong man portrayed in the Gospels.

Jesus Christ was not rich. He chose to live poorly and there is not a shadow of doubt but that He died in abject poverty. They even took the clothes from His back and cast lots for them. When He died, He had no money to leave, no property, not even a shirt on His back. We may not be considered to be rich people nor are we considered to be extremely poor, thanks be to God. What we as Christians have to watch could be expressed in one word, and that word is more. We always seem to want more money, more pleasure, more power, and it is desiring more that can draw us away from Christ and make us unhappy people.

There is a little story told about a poor man who was talking to a king one day. The king had much land. The king said to the man: "I will give you as much land as you can run around between the rising of the sun and its setting." "Agreed," said the poor man. So the next morning when the sun rose, he started to run around one field and then another and then another, and so on through the day. When the sun was setting, he had accumulated quite a large amount of land, though before the sun disappeared he saw one other field he would like. He had to run up a hill to reach it. So he ran up the hill and, just as he reached the top of the hill, he dropped dead. Friends came to the king and said: "What will we give this poor man?" The king thought for a moment and replied: "Give him six feet. That is sufficient ground to bury him." It was the man's desire to have more that brought about his death. So all of us have to guard against greed of every kind. "Jesus said to them: `Take heed and beware of greed of every kind.'" (Lk 12:15).

So if we have sufficient food for ourselves, our families, and reasonable comfort in our homes, let us be content. Let us spare a thought and some money for those who, unlike us, are suffering from extreme poverty which tempts people, in the words of the reading in today's Mass, "to profane the name of the Lord." (Prv 30:9). A very great