Servant of God Dorothy Day once said, “To me, the priest is the one who gives the hard saying.” In today’s gospel, Jesus, the eternal High Priest, gives us another of his many hard sayings.

Christ knows we are great at spending much time, effort, and energy in pursuing material comforts. Our universities boast how much money their graduates will make; advisors tell us that success is a robust investment portfolio; our culture says a worthwhile job allows us to retire early. We should all expect to be healthy, wealthy, and amused!

Granted, Catholic social teaching is clear that a minimum standard of living is necessary to live a virtuous life. All members of society should enjoy sufficiency for the present, security for the future, and status through participation in a community based on justice and charity.

Yet, is it not also all too easy to justify ourselves in this pursuit of wealth and sneer like the Pharisees at the implication of Jesus’s saying? A culture focused on material comfort entices us to make an idol out of the pursuit of riches. It’s not even about having and possessing them; it’s about always chasing after the new and better thing. Jesus calls out this attitude as an abomination—the original Greek meaning of the term in this passage means “the worship of idols.”

Today Jesus is inviting us to a holy indifference, an ambivalence concerning material goods. How is this manifested in our day-to-day decisions? Yes, we need to be prudent stewards of our goods, but only to the extent that they are conducive to the life of discipleship.

For the Notre Dame family, we should remember that not all that glitters is gold. The only gold that shines brightly is our Lady, the Lady of poverty who preferred not mammon but serving God with faith and trust, seeing all earthly realities in light of her first yes to God’s will.