Sunday Homily

Fr. Matt Yim, S.J. 

August 3, 2025

Treasure in heaven. Lands and homes and children and honor and status are not the stuff of that kind of treasure. In fact, it’s love of God and love of neighbor through all sorts of deeds done for the common good that is the real treasure. The love of God outpoured for us, which we take part in by loving good in return and loving each other, that is where our hearts should lie. That is what is really valuable. 

Which is admittedly pretty vague in its being so incalculable.

I may never see a million dollars or a thousand dollars, but I know it’s more real than an abstract concept. I know a bigger barn when I see one. It’s much harder to know if we’ve been loved enough or if we have loved another in turn. That’s what kind of trips us up. I mean, we do feel love and we feel its absence. We love so much that sometimes it hurts. At other times it feels like we could do anything. Love changes us in more ways that we might know. 

But, that’s where Qoheleth fails. Because, I have to say, Oh Qoheleth, it can’t be all that bad? Can it?

Tradition tells us the author of Ecclesiastes was none other than King Solomon after he’d connived his way on the throne, after he’d sold his own people into slavery and given away the lands of their birthright. Looking back on the shambles he made of his life, the way he failed to love, Solomon basically says, what a waste. All the scrambling for power, all the mistakes, all the regrets, all of was in the end worth nothing because in the end none of it endures.   

And that has got to be deeply troubling to people who’ve placed their life’s ambition and their total worth on acquiring one more granary. The way the world measures success is not how God measures success. 

The English major in me has read enough literature about this. The couch potato in me has watched enough television and movies to know that this feeling of doubt or uncertainty and shame is something that isn’t just limited to Qoheleth’s time. The ambition that drives people to do and say things that they will regret later isn’t something from scripture only. And—to be fair Solomon, for all his wisdom, was one of the worst kings of the combined kingdoms of Israel and Judah. It’s just that in literature or in film or on tv the reckoning comes in half and hours time. Life rarely if ever follows that kind of clock. 

Solomon, Qoheleth, knows his time is almost up. Death calls in all accounts no matter who we are, how much we’ve made, or how much we’ve loved, how much we’ve succeeded or failed. 

But there’s a difference, I think, between Solomon and ourselves. In Ecclesiastes there’s no consideration, no understanding, of a life with God after we die. There’s no understanding of the eternal soul. No hope of resurrection from the dead. No chance of heaven. 

So, for Qoheleth, death was the end. 

But, we know that in Christ, life doesn’t end in the grave. The path of God’s glory may lead into it, but it rises out the other side. And the path leads ever onward and upward to eternal life. 

And Christ, who is in all and with all, will gather us in.