These Are The Treasure Of The Church

“God loves a cheerful giver” is one of the most quoted lines Paul ever wrote, and one of the most domesticated. It shows up on pledge cards and stewardship envelopes, and we file it somewhere near the parish budget. Then the Church sets that line beside a Roman deacon lying on a gridiron, and beside Jesus telling us that a seed has to be buried in the dirt before it grows anything at all.

Today the Church celebrates the Feast of Saint Lawrence, deacon and martyr. Lawrence had charge of the material goods of the Roman church in the middle of the third century. When the prefect demanded that he produce the Church’s treasure, Lawrence took three days, gathered the blind, the lame, the leprous, the orphaned, and the widowed, lined them up, and said, “These are the treasure of the Church.”

He could do that because he had already settled the question sitting underneath the money. None of it was his to hold. And neither was he. Most of us are willing to give off the top of the pile, which costs us the top of the pile and nothing more. Paul and Jesus are both asking about something further down. They’re asking about the seed itself, the thing you were planning to keep so that you’d still have something next year.

The Readings

First Reading: 2 Corinthians 9:6-10

The point is this: he who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must do as he has made up his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that you may always have enough of everything and may provide in abundance for every good work. As it is written, “He scatters abroad, he gives to the poor; his righteousness endures for ever.” He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your resources and increase the harvest of your righteousness.

Gospel: John 12:24-26

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If any one serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there shall my servant be also; if any one serves me, the Father will honor him.

Scriptural Analysis

Paul gives two entire chapters of Second Corinthians to a fundraiser. Chapters 8 and 9 are one sustained appeal for the collection he is gathering among the Gentile churches to relieve the poor believers in Jerusalem, and today’s verses sit at the center of the second appeal, the section where he stops maneuvering and simply tells the Corinthians to give liberally.^[1]

He opens with a farmer’s proverb: whoever sows sparingly reaps sparingly, whoever sows bountifully reaps bountifully. It sounds like a quotation from Scripture, though Paul composed the line himself out of the wisdom tradition standing behind texts like Proverbs 11:24-26.^[2] The Greek behind “bountifully” is ep’ eulogiais, literally “on the basis of blessings,” and Paul had used that same word eulogia two verses earlier for the collection itself. The Corinthians have been blessed. Now the blessing moves through them and out. The measure Paul has in mind is proportion. What came in the door goes back out the door.

Verse 7 turns from quantity to motive. Paul wants every single member in on this, even though the final gift will be collective, and he wants it given “not reluctantly or under compulsion.” Sadness in giving marks the man who lets go only because he cannot find a way not to. Compulsion means pressure, including pressure applied by Paul himself, which he refuses to use. Then he grounds the whole appeal in Proverbs 22:8 as it stands in the Greek Old Testament, where the proverb says that God blesses a cheerful giver. Paul changes one verb. He writes that God loves a cheerful giver.^[3] That single word moves the argument off the ledger and onto the heart. God has a particular affection for the person whose open hand looks like his own.

Verse 8 puts the floor under everything. God can make every grace abundant for you, Paul says, so that you always have enough of everything. The word translated “enough” is autarkeia, self-sufficiency, and in the first century it was a technical term borrowed from the Stoics and the Cynics for the ideal of needing no one. Paul picks that ideal up and turns it over.^[4] Whatever sufficiency you have is a gift from someone else, and it was handed to you so you could reach toward other people rather than close the door on them. Independence gets converted into a capacity for good work.

Then comes the Scripture citation, Psalm 112:9, “He scatters abroad, he gives to the poor; his righteousness endures for ever.” Here is a detail most of us read past. Psalms 111 and 112 are a matched pair in the Psalter. Psalm 111 describes God as merciful, compassionate, providing food for those who fear him, with a righteousness that endures forever. Psalm 112 describes the just man in exactly the same words.^[5] The order matters: the just man can mirror those qualities because God went first and made him able to. Notice that the Church has us sing Psalm 112 as today’s Responsorial Psalm. The refrain is the whole argument in one line: blessed the man who is gracious and lends to those in need.

Verse 10 closes the circle. God is the one who “supplies seed to the sower and bread for food,” language drawn from Isaiah 55:10-11, where the rain and snow do not return to heaven until the earth has been made to give seed to the sower and bread to the eater, and God’s word likewise does not return to him empty. The phrase “harvest of your righteousness” comes from Hosea 10:12.^[6] Put those two allusions together and Paul’s point lands hard. The seed in your hand was never yours to begin with. God supplied it. God multiplies it. The generous man is a channel, and a channel that refuses to pass anything through has stopped being a channel.

Turn to the Gospel and the same image reappears, this time in the mouth of the Lord and this time about a death.

John sets the scene carefully. Some Greeks have come up to Jerusalem for the feast and ask Philip for an audience with Jesus. They are Gentiles, and the moment word reaches him that Gentiles are asking for him, Jesus announces that the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. The whole Gospel has been holding that hour in reserve (John 2:4, 7:30, 8:20). Now the world is coming to him, the ingathering of all peoples has begun, and the hour opens.^[7]

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Saint Thomas Aquinas makes a small observation here that unlocks the verse. Wheat has two uses, he says: bread and seed. Jesus is speaking of wheat as seed, since wheat ground for bread never sprouts. And “dies” doesn’t mean the grain loses its power; it means the grain is changed into another kind of thing, which is why Paul can write that what you sow does not come to life unless it dies (1 Corinthians 15:36). Then Aquinas states the consequence flatly: “unless I die, the fruit of the conversion of the Gentiles will not follow.”^[8] The Greeks at the gate and the grain in the ground are the same subject. Jesus is telling those Gentiles why they can come to him at all.

The next verse is the one that makes people flinch. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Aquinas handles it with a distinction that clears the whole thing up. To love someone is to will that person good. So loving your own life means willing your life good, and there are two ways to do it. You can will your life the highest good, which is God, and that is loving your life without qualification. Or you can will your life riches, honors, and pleasures, and that is loving your life in a limited, partial way. Read the verse with that distinction, and it stops sounding like self-loathing: the man who loves his life in the second sense, aiming it at what this world can supply, loses it in the first sense.^[9] Francis Moloney puts his finger on the same nerve when he describes those who fail in John’s Gospel as people clinging with closed fists to what is theirs.^[10]

Then the last verse, and here the readings and the saint lock together. “If any one serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there shall my servant be also.” The Greek verb Jesus uses for “serves” is diakoneo, and the servant is a diakonos. That is the word the Church took for her deacons. Lawrence was a diakonos of the church of Rome, which is precisely why this passage is read on his feast. And Jesus attaches a promise to it: the Father will honor whoever serves him. Aquinas notices whose honor is being promised. Jesus points past himself to my Father, and Aquinas reaches for Augustine to explain the weight of that: an adopted son can receive no greater honor than to be where the only Son is.^[11]

One more thing, and it is the reason today’s pairing is more than a liturgical coincidence. When Aquinas finishes commenting on the man who exposes his life for Christ, he writes that the same holds for anyone who risks his wealth and his goods for Christ’s sake and shares them with others to obtain everlasting life. And then he proves it by quoting a verse. He quotes 2 Corinthians 9:6.^[12] Seven centuries before this lectionary was assembled, Aquinas had already read these two passages as one argument. Sowing bountifully and falling into the ground are the same act described from two angles. Thomas Stegman says it plainly: Lawrence’s martyrdom shows that bountiful sowing reaches past the purse and finally calls a man to offer his own life in diakonia to God and to God’s people.^[13]

Daily Application

So what does a man actually own?

That is the question these readings put to us, and every one of us has a ready answer that we have never examined. We own our time, our money, our reputation, our plans for the next ten years, our right to be angry about the thing that was done to us. We give from the edges of all that and call it generosity, and it costs us nothing, because we made sure in advance that it would cost us nothing. Paul has already answered the question. God supplies the seed. It was never ours. It was on loan, and it was loaned for a purpose.

Pope Leo XIII, writing on the duties of the wealthy in Rerum Novarum, drew the line where the Church has always drawn it: once necessity is met and a man’s proper standing is provided for, what remains over is owed to the poor.^[14] That is the floor. Lawrence shows us there is no ceiling. He sold the sacred vessels off the altar and put the money in the hands of widows, and when the prefect came for the gold, Lawrence handed him a room full of beggars and called them the treasure. He could make that gesture because he had already stopped believing the gold was the treasure. Then he made a joke on the gridiron, “It is well done. Turn me over!”^[15] A man with nothing left to protect can afford to laugh.

The interior movement these readings ask for is relinquishment, and it has to happen before the check is written or it does not happen at all. Ask what you are quietly keeping in reserve so that God cannot spend it. For some of us it is money, and the honest test is whether our giving ever changes a single decision we make. For most of us it is something that costs more than money. The Saturday you have already assigned to yourself. The grievance you have carried for six years because letting it go feels like losing. The version of your future you have decided you are owed. Bury it. That is how a seed does the one thing a seed is for.

And notice what Paul promises on the other side of it. He promises sufficiency, so that you will always have enough and can keep giving. He promises that God will multiply the seed and increase the harvest of your righteousness. Jesus promises something better still: you will be where he is, and the Father himself will honor you. That is the return on a life poured out, and it is the only kind of life that has ever borne fruit.

Saint Lawrence, deacon and martyr, pray for us. Ask the Lord to loosen our grip on the one thing we have decided we cannot give, and give us the nerve to put it in the ground today.

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Notes

1. Jan Lambrecht, Second Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 8 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 146, 150. ↩
2. Jan Lambrecht, Second Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 8 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 146, 150. ↩
3. Thomas D. Stegman, Second Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 212. ↩
4. Stegman, Second Corinthians, 213. ↩
5. Stegman, Second Corinthians, 214. ↩
6. Lambrecht, Second Corinthians, 147. ↩
7. Francis Martin and William M. Wright IV, The Gospel of John, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 222-23. ↩
8. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, chap. 12, lect. 4, no. 1639. ↩
9. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, chap. 12, lect. 4, nos. 1643-44. ↩
10. Francis J. Moloney, The Gospel of John, Sacra Pagina 4 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998), 353. ↩
11. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, chap. 12, lect. 4, no. 1648. ↩
12. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, chap. 12, lect. 4, no. 1645. ↩
13. Stegman, Second Corinthians, 216. ↩
14. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (May 15, 1891), no. 22. ↩
15. “Saint Lawrence,” Saint of the Day, Franciscan Media, https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-of-the-day/saint-lawrence/. ↩