Sermon Blog
Temporal Advantages
July 25, 2025
The oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, one of the richest men in history, was once asked, “how much is enough?” He replied: “A little bit more.” Getty was born two years after St. John Henry Newman died, but Getty’s reply is an example of the avarice Newman said was a characteristic sin of the age. In his homily, “Temporal Advantages,” Newman shows how worldly wealth, power and influence are actually disadvantages because they do not make man happy, and can even turn him away from God.
The sin of Newman’s age, a “desire of a greater portion of worldly goods than God has given us,—ambition and covetousness in one shape or another,” grew out of the “opportunity of rising in life.” According to Newman, man’s ability to change stations, to go from rags to riches, fostered in him a greater uneasiness with the life he was given.
The problem has grown exponentially since Newman’s time. Today, more and more products are available to people of every class and can be delivered to them on the same day they place their orders. Medical technologies paired with progressive ideology have given parents the ability to select the sex of their children, and empowered boys and girls the potential to change their sex hormones in their quest to alter their sexual identity. There is little left about our way of life that must be accepted as unchangeable. Anxiety and impatience abound.
How contrary this is to the life of Christ! God was born man in poverty. He who created everything was content with nothing. When it came time, Jesus did not resist the cross—he submitted to it. He embraced it and so transformed it into the instrument of our salvation. He urged his followers to imitate him. Newman says:
“And our Lord would have us ‘take no thought for the morrow;’ which surely is a dissuasion from aggrandizing ourselves, accumulating wealth, or aiming at distinction. And He has taught us when we pray to say, ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Yet a great number of persons, I may say, nearly all men, are not content with enough, they are not satisfied with sufficiency; they wish for something more than simplicity, and plainness, and gravity, and modesty, in their mode of living; they like show and splendour, and admiration from the many, and obsequiousness on the part of those who have to do with them, and the ability to do as they will.”
Jesus does not pull any punches. On one occasion he tells his disciples ““Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” What does he mean by rich? Abundance in any and all temporal advantages: rich in possessions, rich in praise, rich in friends and relatives, rich in physical strength, rich in beauty, rich in charisma.
A man does not need to be a Christian to observe “that as a person has more wealth, or more power, or more distinction, his cares generally increase, and his time is less his own: thus, in the words of the preacher, ‘the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep.”’ Newman also notes that the one who receives worldy praise knows all too well how vain it is.
But while worldy goods have no ability to satisfy us, they do have the ability to corrupt us. Newman mentions three different dangers riches present. First, they take up time that might be given to prayer, spiritual growth, charity, etc. Second, they lead us away from our Lord: they “lead us to love the world, so again they lead us to trust in the world: we not only become worldly-minded, but unbelieving; our wills becoming corrupt, our understandings also become dark, and disliking the truth, we gradually learn to maintain and defend error.” Third, they encourage us to be self-reliant and self-confident, rather than trusting in the Lord.
We were not made for this world. This takes us to the Scripture verse with which Newman began his homily: “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content.”* In Christ we have the pearl of great price—we don’t need “a little bit more” because nothing more can be added to these riches. Being content, we can then be free to love those whom God gives us to love. Let’s invoke Our Lady, who was just a poor and humble virgin when the angel Gabriel visited her. She knows what it’s like to be rich in grace and poor in this life. O Virigin of Humility, pray for us!
*1 Tim. 6: 7,8
