Today at mass, we had a visiting priest from Minnesota, Father Michael Schmitz, come and give the homily. He started his homily by talking about our coffee table and how we put things on our coffee table that we want people to think or know about us. We put things like sports, jobs, friends, relationships, family, and Jesus all on our coffee table each having their own part of the table. All of these things are good things and they all make up who we are and our personalities. Yes, Jesus is on our coffee table, he has a place there, but he only has one part of the table and sometimes he ends up being thrown in with all the rest of the stuff on our table instead of receiving priority. We start to put all these other things before him and don't give God the proper amount of time he truly deserves in our busy and hectic lives.
He then asked us to think about what one thing could we live with if everything else was taken away from us. What one thing could you have in your life that when everything else was gone you would still be okay with this ONE thing? He said maybe it is your job, if you had only your job left and were able to be successful and make a change in your work that you would be okay. Maybe its relationships, if you got striped of everything but your spouse you would still be okay. Or maybe it's your health, that even if everything else was taken away, your house or your family, that you would still manage to be okay because you were alive. But, he said, that if Jesus isn't the one thing that would leave you okay, that if he wasn't the only thing that could get you through when everything else was gone, that you truly wouldn't be okay even if you had your friends or your health. We must make him the center of our coffee table, so that when people look at us they see Jesus inside us and all the other things on the side of him rather than the other way around. Because Jesus, he said, is the only thing that will never go away. He is the only thing that will remain forever until the day that we die and even then he is with us in eternity. The only thing that can satisfy our hungry hearts.
You see, all these things can point back toward our desire for money, success, and the need to be loved and are all idols in our lives that try to cover up the deep love Christ has for us. They turn into the center of our lives and we get into the routine of living solely to make money enough so that we can have more and more things that in the end will only leave us more empty than we were before. Because you see, these idols are sent to distract us from following the one who simply wants to be with us. When looking at your coffee table all these things seem good and harmless however, a good thing turns into a bad thing when it becomes the ultimate thing. When we allow all these temporary things to fill up our coffee table we are blocking ourselves off from the only thing that is permanent in our lives, Jesus.
