What Can You Truly Call Your Own?

Near Jerusalem, an inscription once set above an ancient tomb made one blunt promise to anyone who might break in: there is nothing of value inside. This week’s seven Scriptures take that old warning and turn it gently towards us, asking what we have quietly been calling ours and what was only ever placed in our keeping. They travel through a forbidden boast, a key laid on a servant’s shoulder and a prisoner who stood with nothing, and they arrive at an answer few of us would think to look for.

RISE & INSPIRE | SUNDAY BIBLE SERIES Category: Wake-up Calls Sunday Series No. 13 — 8 November 2026 · Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time Scriptures of the week: 2 – 8 November 2026

What Can You Truly Call Your Own?

A royal steward’s empty tomb, a key held in trust, a prisoner who owned nothing, and a song that outlasts every inventory

An Inventory Cut in Stone

In 1870 a young French scholar named Charles Clermont-Ganneau was studying the ancient tombs of Silwan, the village that spills down the eastern slope of the Kidron Valley, facing the old city of Jerusalem. Many of those tombs had long since been absorbed into village life — turned into cisterns, storerooms, the back walls of houses. Above the doorway of one of them, cut into the limestone, he found a line of old Hebrew letters, and beside it a shorter inscription. He could not read them. Afraid they would be lost, he had both panels cut out of the rock. Within a year they were in the British Museum in London, where they remain. The tomb still bears the two rectangular scars where they were removed.

For more than eighty years nobody could read them. Then, in 1953, the Israeli scholar Nahman Avigad, working from photographs and a cast sent from London, deciphered the longer text. Rendered into English, it says something very close to this:

This is [the tomb of …]yahu, who is over the house. There is no silver and no gold here — only [his bones] and the bones of his ʾamah with him. Cursed be whoever opens this.

The word ʾamah usually means a female servant, and can also describe a wife of lower, dependent status; some scholars have wondered whether it might be a title for a woman of rank. The inscription does not say which.

The name has broken away exactly where we most want it. But the title survived. “Who is over the house” — in Hebrew ʾasher ʿal-habbayit — was the title of the royal steward, the highest official of the king’s household and one of the most powerful men in the kingdom of Judah. The shape of the letters resembles the famous inscription found nearby in King Hezekiah’s water tunnel, and points to a date around 700 BC.

Anyone who knows the Book of Isaiah feels a small shiver at this point. Isaiah 22 contains a fierce oracle against a royal steward of that very period — “Shebna, who is master of the household,” bearing that very title — and the charge against him is precisely that he has cut a tomb for himself in the rock. Could this be his? Clermont-Ganneau suspected so. Avigad thought the idea worth weighing but called it conjectural, and honest readers must leave it there. Names ending in -yahu could be shortened, so a Shebanyahu could become a Shebna; but the Bible never spells his name the longer way. We do not know whose bones lay behind that door.

Nor should we read the inscription as a confession of humility. On the sarcophagus of Tabnit, a king of Sidon, a similar assurance appears: there is no silver or gold inside. It was a practical warning to tomb robbers. Don’t bother. There is nothing here worth stealing.

And yet the stone tells a truer story than its author meant to tell. Whatever that steward possessed in life — the keys of a king’s house, the seal of office, the chariots, the robe and sash, the authority to open and to shut — none of it went into the rock with him. The inventory of what remained fits into one line: bones. Every grave in the world could carry the same sentence.

This week’s verses began at the graves. The first of them reached us on Monday, 2 November — All Souls’ Day, when Catholic families from Thiruvananthapuram to Toronto stood among the tombs of people they love, lighting candles over names cut in stone. The last of them arrives this morning. In between, Scripture kept circling one question, and it is the question Isaiah put to the proud steward in a phrase that translations render in different ways:

מַה־לְּךָ פֹה וּמִי לְךָ פֹה — mah-lekha poh u-mi lekha poh (Isaiah 22:16)

The NRSV renders it idiomatically: “What right do you have here? Who are your relatives here?” The King James Version stays closer to the Hebrew: “What hast thou here? and whom hast thou here?” Biblical Hebrew has no verb to have; it expresses possession by saying that something is to someone. So beneath the prophet’s indignant question lies, quite naturally, a question about what a person has and holds.

Read in that light — and this is the reading of this study, not a translation — it becomes a question a lawyer would recognise: a question of title. Not what do you hold? but what do you own? Not what is in your hands? but what is truly yours?

So this is the question the week sets before us:

What can you truly call your own?

How This Study Is Built

This Sunday we will not walk through the seven verses in the order they arrived. We will follow the question the tomb at Silwan raises, in three movements.

The Claim listens to the voices that say mine: the self-made man of Deuteronomy, the gods bought with gold in Babylon, and the steward who carved his own name into the rock.

The Trust turns to what is placed in our keeping: a key laid on a servant’s shoulder, a little that is better than much, and a wealthy widow who named God by the people with nothing.

The Song stands before a prisoner who owned nothing and claimed everything, and ends with a psalm that has outlived every empire that ever drew up an inventory.

Along the way, each verse will add one line to a new inventory — a very different list from the one carved over the door at Silwan.

Scripture is quoted from the New Revised Standard Version, the translation in which this week’s verses were given, unless otherwise stated.

Movement One · The Claim

1. The Sentence Moses Forbade

Wednesday, 4 November · Deuteronomy 8:17

“Do not say to yourself, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.'”

Last Sunday we stood in this same chapter, twelve verses earlier, where Moses looked back over forty years in the wilderness and called them a father’s schooling: hunger and manna, a long road and sandals that never wore out (8:2–5). Now he turns round and looks forward, across the Jordan, into the land Israel is about to enter.

What he sees there is not danger but abundance. “A land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey” (8:8). A land where they will eat bread “without scarcity” and mine copper from the hills (8:9). And then he sketches, in a single breathless sentence, the shape of a prosperous life: “When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied …” (8:12–13). Listen to the verb. In Hebrew, multiply comes round three times in a single verse, like a ledger whose columns keep lengthening.

Then the warning: “do not exalt yourself, forgetting the LORD your God” (8:14). And then our verse.

The whole chapter turns on two verbs. Remember (8:2, 18). Do not forget (8:11, 14, 19). The wilderness was dangerous because Israel might die. The land would be dangerous because Israel might forget.

A sentence spoken in the heart

The NRSV’s “Do not say to yourself” translates a Hebrew phrase that means, literally, “and you say in your heart” (וְאָמַרְתָּ בִּלְבָבֶךָ, wəʾāmartā bilvāvekhā). The sin Moses names is not a public boast. It is a sentence spoken where no one else can hear it — in the private room where each of us narrates our own life to ourselves.

Deuteronomy uses the device more than once, and the twin of our verse comes in the very next chapter:

“When the LORD your God thrusts them out before you, do not say to yourself, ‘It is because of my righteousness that the LORD has brought me in to occupy this land.'” (9:4)

Read the two together and you have the two great self-made sentences of the human heart. My strength earned me this wealth. My goodness earned me this blessing. One is economic, the other spiritual. Moses forbids both, and for the same reason: neither is true.

The words in the sentence

Every word of the forbidden sentence repays a moment’s attention.

כֹּחִי וְעֹצֶם יָדִי עָשָׂה לִי אֶת־הַחַיִל הַזֶּה kōḥî wəʿōṣem yādî ʿāśāh lî ʾet-haḥayil hazzeh “My strength and the might of my hand has made for me this wealth.”

כֹּחַ (kōaḥ) means strength, power, ability — the capacity to do things. עֹצֶם יָד (ʿōṣem yād), the might of the hand, is a rare and emphatic phrase: muscle, grip, the force a person can exert. עָשָׂה לִי (ʿāśāh lî) means has made for me. And the object, חַיִל (ḥayil), is a word with a remarkable range. It can mean strength or ability; wealth; an army; valour. The gibbôr ḥayil is a mighty warrior. The ʾēšet ḥayil is the capable woman of Proverbs 31 and the worthy woman Boaz recognises in Ruth (Ruth 3:11). Ḥayil is wealth understood as strength — what you have because of what you can do.

Now read the very next verse:

“But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth.” (8:18)

The same two words come back — kōaḥ and ḥayil — but now they stand in their proper order. The power was given. The wealth was made with a gift.

Notice what Moses does not say. He does not say the Israelites will do no work. The phrase “to get wealth” — literally “to make ḥayil” — honours real effort: ploughing, herding, trading, building. He does not say wealth is evil; the land is good, and the chapter says so again and again. He does not even ask the people to feel guilty for eating well. On the contrary:

“You shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God for the good land that he has given you.” (8:10)

That verse became the scriptural foundation of the Jewish grace after meals, the Birkat ha-Mazon. It is the antidote to verse 17. The cure for “my hand has made me this” is not refusing the meal. It is blessing the Giver at the table.

What Moses denies is not effort. It is title. You may work; you may not claim to be the author of your own capacity to work.

The word to remember for Thursday

When Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated the Law of Moses into Greek, in the third century before Christ, they rendered the forbidden sentence like this:

ἡ ἰσχύς μου καὶ τὸ κράτος τῆς χειρός μου ἐποίησέν μοι τὴν δύναμιν τὴν μεγάλην ταύτην “My strength (ischys) and the might (kratos) of my hand made for me this great power (dynamis).”

The Greek translators chose δύναμις (dynamis) for ḥayil — power. In Greek, the self-made man does not merely say I made this money. He says I made this great power for myself. And in verse 18, God “gives you strength to make power.”

Keep that word in mind. On Thursday it will reappear in a courtroom at night, on the lips of a prisoner, as a name for God.

The idolatry nobody notices

The Catechism, explaining the first commandment, insists that idolatry is not only a matter of ancient statues. It “remains a constant temptation to faith,” and among the creatures a person may revere in God’s place it lists, without embarrassment, money (CCC 2113). Deuteronomy 8:17 shows how quietly that happens. Nobody bows down to a bank balance. They simply say, in the heart, I did this — and from then on, the thing they did becomes the thing they trust.

On Wednesday, the day this verse arrived, the Church remembered a man who had every reason to say Moses’ forbidden sentence. Charles Borromeo was born into one of the great noble families of Lombardy and made a cardinal while still in his early twenties. When plague struck Milan in 1576, he spent his fortune on the sick and the hungry, and went into debt to feed them. He had wealth. He did not mistake it for his own making.

For the new inventory: Wealth — made with a strength that was given. Mine to use; not mine to boast of.

2. Gods Bought with Gold

Tuesday, 3 November · Isaiah 46:13

“I bring near my deliverance; it is not far off, and my salvation will not tarry.”

Deuteronomy warned about a man who makes himself. Isaiah 46 mocks people who make their god. In both cases the raw material is the same: their own wealth.

The chapter belongs to the second great movement of the Book of Isaiah (chapters 40–55), addressed to Judeans in exile in Babylon in the sixth century before Christ, as the Persian king Cyrus rose in the east (44:28; 45:1). It opens with a picture of Babylon’s great gods on the move:

“Bel bows down, Nebo stoops, their idols are on beasts and cattle; these things you carry are loaded as burdens on weary animals. They stoop, they bow down together; they cannot save the burden, but themselves go into captivity.” (46:1–2)

Bel — Lord — was the title of Marduk, the patron god of Babylon. Nebo, or Nabu, was his son, the god of scribes and writing, patron of the nearby city of Borsippa. Each spring, at the great New Year festival, their statues were carried in solemn procession. Isaiah sees them carried differently: loaded on exhausted animals, lurching out of the city, going into exile with the people who made them. The image was not far-fetched. When Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BC, his own propaganda boasted of sending back to their shrines the divine statues that the previous king had gathered into the capital. In that world, gods could be freight.

Some weeks ago, in this series, we looked at the contrast that follows — a god you have to carry, or a God who carries you (46:3–4). This week, look instead at what Isaiah says the gods are made of:

“Those who lavish gold from the purse, and weigh out silver in the scales — they hire a goldsmith, who makes it into a god; then they fall down and worship! They lift it to their shoulders, they carry it, they set it in its place, and it stands there; it cannot move from its place. If one cries out to it, it does not answer or save anyone from trouble.” (46:6–7)

The god is purchased. It is, quite literally, the worshipper’s money in another shape. And notice the verbs of the last sentence. It stands there. It cannot move from its place. It does not answer. It does not save.

Now hear how the chapter ends:

“Listen to me, you stubborn of heart, you who are far from deliverance: I bring near my deliverance, it is not far off, and my salvation will not tarry; I will put salvation in Zion, for Israel my glory.” (46:12–13)

Everything the purchased god cannot do, the living God does. The idol cannot move; God’s salvation comes near. The idol stands where it is put; God’s deliverance will not tarry. You must go to the idol. The true God comes to you.

Two words worth weighing

The NRSV’s “deliverance” translates צְדָקָה (ṣədāqāh), the word usually rendered righteousness — as the King James Version has it: “I bring near my righteousness.” Both translations are defensible, and the difference matters. In these chapters of Isaiah, God’s righteousness is not first of all a standard by which people are measured and found wanting. It is God’s faithfulness to his promises in action — and so, very often, it means rescue. That is why it stands here in parallel with תְּשׁוּעָה (təšûʿāh), salvation, a word from the root y-š-ʿ, the same root that gives the name Yeshua, Jesus: “you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).

Now look at whom this is addressed to. אַבִּירֵי לֵב (ʾabbîrê lēv), “stubborn of heart,” is literally “mighty of heart” or “stout-hearted.” The word ʾabbîr is used of the strong — warriors, bulls, chieftains. These are people who are strong in themselves. And they are, the verse says, “far from deliverance.”

To them — not to the deserving, not to those already near — God says: I am bringing it near.

This is easy to miss and difficult to overstate. The salvation the idol could never provide is not offered as a prize to those who finally stop being stubborn. It is brought, on its own feet, towards those who are still far away. Deuteronomy’s self-made man and Babylon’s god-makers are not simply left with their claim. They are met by a gift.

For the new inventory: Salvation — never purchased, never carried home. Brought near, as a gift, to the far-off.

3. “What Have You Here?”

The steward who carved his own name — Isaiah 22:15–19

Saturday’s verse, as we shall see, is about a good steward. But it cannot be understood without the bad one who comes first, and he belongs to this movement.

Isaiah 22 opens with an oracle concerning “the valley of vision,” a picture of Jerusalem in a crisis — very probably a time of siege. The city’s leaders do everything a competent administration should do. They inspect the weapons in the royal armoury. They survey the breaches in the walls. They count the houses and pull some down to strengthen the fortifications. They build a new reservoir for the water supply (22:8–11). And then comes the sentence that judges the whole programme:

“But you did not look to him who did it, or have regard for him who planned it long ago.” (22:11)

It is Deuteronomy 8:17 on the scale of a city. The leaders’ competence is real. Their mistake is to trust it.

Immediately afterwards comes the oracle against one leader in particular:

“Thus says the Lord GOD of hosts: Come, go to this steward, to Shebna, who is master of the household, and say to him: What right do you have here? Who are your relatives here, that you have cut out a tomb here for yourself, cutting a tomb on the height, and carving a habitation for yourself in the rock?” (22:15–16)

Shebna was the king’s steward, and in a moment of national danger he was making arrangements for his own monument. Isaiah’s charge goes on: the LORD will hurl him away like a ball into a wide land, where “your splendid chariots shall lie, O you disgrace to your master’s house!” (22:18). Notice the phrase your master’s house. Shebna’s office existed for a house that was not his. He behaved as though it were.

The question God asks him — “What have you here, and whom have you here?” — is not only rhetorical. It is a question about belonging. Shebna had no ancestral claim to that hillside; no family of his lay in that rock. He was carving a permanent title out of a temporary office.

There is a quiet historical footnote. When the Assyrian army stood outside Jerusalem in 701 BC, the officials who went out to negotiate were “Eliakim son of Hilkiah, who was in charge of the palace, and Shebna the secretary” (Isaiah 36:3; compare 2 Kings 18:18). If the Shebna of chapter 36 is the same man — and most readers assume he is — then the oracle had already begun to take effect. The steward had become a secretary. Someone else now held the keys.

For the new inventory: Office — a robe that can be put on someone else. Never a monument to oneself.

Movement Two · The Trust

4. A Key on a Servant’s Shoulder

Saturday, 7 November · Isaiah 22:22

“I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David; he shall open, and no one shall shut; he shall shut, and no one shall open.”

Here is the oracle’s second half, and the contrast could hardly be sharper:

“On that day I will call my servant Eliakim son of Hilkiah, and will clothe him with your robe and bind your sash on him. I will commit your authority to his hand, and he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David …” (22:20–22)

Shebna had carved for himself. Eliakim is called עַבְדִּי (ʿavdî), “my servant.” Shebna’s robe and sash — the visible signs of office — are taken off him and put on another man. The office does not change. The holder does. That alone tells us what kind of thing authority is in Scripture: a garment, not a skin.

And the purpose of the office is named: “he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem.” The steward’s authority exists for the people of the house — for their protection and provision, as a father’s authority exists for his children.

The key and the shoulder

מַפְתֵּחַ (maftēaḥ), key, comes from the verb פָּתַח (pātaḥ), to open. A key is, by its very name, an opener. Its whole identity lies in what it does for a door and for the people who need to pass through it.

The key is laid עַל־שִׁכְמוֹ (ʿal-šikhmô), “on his shoulder.” Ancient keys could be large — wooden or bronze bars that worked the bolts inside a door — and some commentators picture one literally slung over the shoulder; others take the image as a symbol of office. We cannot be certain. But the same Hebrew phrase appears in one of the best-known prophecies of the same book:

“For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders.” (Isaiah 9:6)

Upon his shoulder — ʿal-šikhmô in both places. In Isaiah, authority is carried on the shoulder, the way a load is carried. It is a burden borne for others, not a jewel worn for oneself.

Then the decisive power: “he shall open, and no one shall shut; he shall shut, and no one shall open.” The steward’s decisions are real and binding within the house. But notice the first words of the verse: “I will place.” The authority is delegated. Eliakim does not seize the key. He is given it.

When the peg gives way

Isaiah does not end with a tidy happy ending, and neither should we. The oracle continues:

“I will fasten him like a peg in a secure place, and he will become a throne of honor to his ancestral house. And they will hang on him the whole weight of his ancestral house, the offspring and issue, every small vessel, from the cups to all the flagons. On that day, says the LORD of hosts, the peg that was fastened in a secure place will give way; it will be cut down and fall, and the load that was on it will perish.” (22:23–25)

Commentators have long debated these verses. Many think they come from a later moment, reflecting what eventually happened to Eliakim’s position; others read them as a warning built into the original oracle. Either way, the picture is unforgettable. The good steward’s relatives hang their whole family’s fortunes on him — every small vessel, from the cups to all the flagons — until the peg pulls out of the wall.

Shebna treated his office as private property. Eliakim’s family treated it as family property. Both ended the same way. The key of the house of David was for the house of David — not for the man who carried it, and not for his cousins.

Anyone who has served in public office, sat on a governing board, led a parish committee or managed a family business knows exactly what this looks like. It rarely begins with corruption. It begins with a cup — one small favour hung on the peg — and then the flagons follow.

The keys of the kingdom

Christians have never read Isaiah 22:22 as only a story about two officials in Hezekiah’s court. The Book of Revelation applies its words directly to the risen Christ: “the holy one, the true one, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens” (Revelation 3:7). And when Jesus says to Peter, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16:19), many interpreters, especially in the Catholic tradition, hear Isaiah’s steward in the background: a royal household, a king, and one servant entrusted with the keys. Matthew does not quote Isaiah directly, so the link is an inference rather than a citation — but it is an old and widely held one. The Catechism describes the power of the keys as “authority to govern the house of God, which is the Church” (CCC 553).

Every word of that sentence is a steward’s word. Authority — given. Govern — serve. The house of God — not Peter’s house. Since the time of Pope Gregory the Great, at the end of the sixth century, the Bishop of Rome has called himself servus servorum Dei, servant of the servants of God. The Church will celebrate the feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, the Pope’s own cathedral, on Monday, 9 November — a fitting occasion to remember that even the keys of Peter are held in trust.

And in a few weeks, as Advent draws towards Christmas, the Church will sing on 20 December the antiphon O Clavis David — O Key of David — praying to Christ as the One who opens what no one can shut. The key Eliakim carried for a palace, Christ carries for the world.

Title, possession and trust

Lawyers distinguish between possession and title. A tenant possesses a house; the owner holds title. A trustee may hold property, sometimes even in their own name, but holds it for the benefit of others. Roman law had a precise word for a related arrangement, inherited by many legal systems since: usufruct, the right to use and enjoy the fruits of something that belongs to someone else, provided its substance is not destroyed — a right that ended, in its classical form, with the death of the one who held it.

Scripture’s account of human ownership sounds very much like that. “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity,” God says in Leviticus, “for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Leviticus 25:23). The Catechism puts it in a single sentence: “The ownership of any property makes its holder a steward of Providence” (CCC 2404). And Pope Francis, preaching on the seventh commandment, drew the conclusion in words worth memorising: “What I truly own is what I am able to give.” Whatever we cannot give, he went on to say, has begun to own us (General Audience, 7 November 2018).

Shebna had possession and mistook it for title. Eliakim was given possession and called to hold it as a father holds a house for his children.

For the new inventory: Authority — a key carried on the shoulder for the sake of the house. Kept only for yourself, a key stops being a key and becomes a trophy.

5. Better a Little

Monday, 2 November · All Souls’ Day · Psalm 37:16

“Better is a little that the righteous person has than the abundance of many wicked.”

The week’s first verse came to us on the day of the graves, and it comes from the mouth of an old man. “I have been young, and now am old,” the psalmist says, “yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread” (37:25). Psalm 37 is not the cry of someone in the middle of a crisis. It is the counsel of someone who has watched a great many lives from beginning to end.

It is a wisdom psalm, closer in spirit to Proverbs than to the hymns and laments around it, and it is an acrostic: its stanzas begin with the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet, roughly one letter for every two verses. Our verse opens the stanza of the letter ṭet, and the word that opens it is טוֹב (ṭôv), “better” — in its broadest sense, simply good.

The psalm has one pastoral problem in view, and it is a very modern one: the prosperity of people who do wrong. Three times it says, “Do not fret” (37:1, 7, 8). The Hebrew verb, תִּתְחַר (titḥar), comes from a root meaning to burn; it describes heating yourself up, letting the comparison smoulder. Anyone who has watched a dishonest colleague promoted, a ruthless competitor thrive, or a careless neighbour’s fortunes multiply knows the feeling exactly.

The psalm’s answer is not that the wicked are secretly miserable. It is a comparison between two kinds of abundance.

A little, and a roar

The word translated “abundance” is הָמוֹן (hāmôn), and its range is revealing. It can mean wealth or plenty. But at its root it is a word of noise: the roar of the sea, the tumult of a crowd, the din of a marching army. Set against it is מְעַט (məʿaṭ), a little.

So the line can be heard as a contrast between a little and a roar. The wealth of the wicked is loud. The Book of Proverbs makes the same comparison in its own better-sayings: “Better is a little with the fear of the LORD than great treasure and trouble with it” (Proverbs 15:16), where trouble is a word for turmoil and confusion; and Ecclesiastes adds, “Better is a handful with quiet than two handfuls with toil, and a chasing after wind” (Ecclesiastes 4:6).

And notice what the meek receive in the same psalm: “the meek shall inherit the land, and delight themselves in abundant prosperity” (37:11). The Hebrew for “abundant prosperity” is rōv šālôm — literally abundance of peace. The psalm does not say the righteous will have nothing in abundance. It says they will have an abundance of a different kind. The wicked have plenty of noise. The meek have plenty of peace.

What the psalm does not say

It would be easy to read this verse as a praise of poverty, or as a promise that the righteous will always be poor and the wicked always rich. It says neither.

It does not praise having little. It praises the little that belongs to the righteous — and the psalm tells us what kind of little that is: “the righteous are generous and keep giving” (37:21); “They are ever giving liberally and lending, and their children become a blessing” (37:26). The little in Psalm 37:16 is a little that keeps leaving the hand. It is enough, held open.

Nor does the psalm deny that the righteous may hold land. On the contrary, five times it promises that they will inherit it (37:9, 11, 22, 29, 34). The verb is יָרַשׁ (yāraš), and it matters. In Israel’s theology, nobody earned the land. It was received as an inheritance from God, who remained its owner. The only secure title in this psalm is title by gift. Jesus would take up its eleventh verse in the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5).

On All Souls’ Day the Church prays for those who have gone ahead of us, every one of whom left the land behind. The psalm of the old man reminds us that inheritance was always the right word. We received; we pass on.

For the new inventory: Enough — a little, held open, is better than much held tight.

6. The God of the Underdogs

Friday, 6 November · Judith 9:11

“For your strength does not depend on numbers, nor your might on the powerful. But you are the God of the lowly, helper of the oppressed, upholder of the weak, protector of the forsaken, savior of those without hope.”

The verse given to us on Friday was the second half of this sentence. The first half belongs with it, and it turns out to hold a key to the whole week.

A widow’s prayer before a battle

The Book of Judith belongs to the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament, received by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches and placed among the Apocrypha in Protestant Bibles. Its earliest surviving text is in Greek; its author and date are unknown, though many scholars place it in the second century before Christ. It opens with what seems a deliberate historical scramble — “Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled over the Assyrians in the great city of Nineveh” (1:1), when the historical Nebuchadnezzar was king of Babylon and Nineveh had already fallen. Many interpreters take this as the author’s signal: this is a story told to teach, a theological drama rather than a chronicle. Its question is the one that has run through our whole week. Where does real power lie?

The Assyrian general Holofernes has besieged the Israelite town of Bethulia and cut off its water. The people are dying of thirst, and the town’s leaders promise to surrender if God has not rescued them within five days (7:30–31). Then Judith appears: a widow, devout, and — the book is explicit — very wealthy. Her husband Manasseh had left her “gold and silver, men and women slaves, livestock, and fields; and she maintained this estate” (8:7).

She rebukes the leaders for presuming to set God a deadline (8:11–17). And then she prays. She puts on sackcloth and ashes, and she times her prayer to the hour when the evening incense is being offered in the Temple in Jerusalem, far away (9:1) — joining her lone voice in a besieged hill town to the worship of the whole people.

The vocabulary of power, set right

Now read the first half of verse 11 in Greek:

οὐ γὰρ ἐν πλήθει τὸ κράτος σου, οὐδὲ ἡ δυναστεία σου ἐν ἰσχύουσιν “For your might (kratos) is not in numbers, nor your sovereignty (dynasteia) in the strong (ischyontes).”

These are the words of Deuteronomy 8:17. The Greek Deuteronomy had the self-made man say: my strength (ischys) and the might (kratos) of my hand made me this power (dynamis). Judith takes the same vocabulary and turns it the right way up. Kratos does not belong to the strong. It belongs to God, who does not need them. Three verses later she names him “the God of all power (dynamis) and might (kratos)” (9:14).

And notice what she asks for. Two verses earlier she has prayed, in the Greek, “give into my hand — a widow’s hand — the might (kratos) that I have planned” (9:9). Deuteronomy’s man claimed the might of his hand as his own. Judith, with an entire estate behind her, asks for it as a gift.

Five names for God

Then come the five titles of our verse. Each is worth hearing in the original:

• θεὸς ταπεινῶν (theos tapeinōn), God of the lowly — people of low station, without standing, helpless before the powerful.
• ἐλαττόνων βοηθός (elattonōn boēthos), helper of the “oppressed” — but the Greek literally means the lesser ones, the smaller, those ranked beneath others. One commentator on the Greek suggests the underdogs. They are the ones who always come off worse.
• ἀντιλήμπτωρ ἀσθενούντων (antilēmptōr asthenountōn), upholder of the weak. The noun comes from a verb meaning to take hold of, to lay hold in order to support. God is the one who grips the weak and holds them up. And the weak here are not so much the physically frail as those who cannot defend themselves.
• ἀπεγνωσμένων σκεπαστής (apegnōsmenōn skepastēs), protector of the forsaken. A skepastēs is one who covers, shelters, puts a roof over someone. The forsaken are those who have been given up on — written off by others, or by themselves.
• ἀπηλπισμένων σωτήρ (apēlpismenōn sōtēr), savior of those without hope — literally, of those who have despaired, who have stopped expecting anything at all.

Three of those titles — helper, protector, saviour — appear in the same order in the Greek of the Song of Moses after the crossing of the Red Sea: “The Lord became my helper and protector, for salvation” (Exodus 15:2, Greek version). Judith is praying in the language of the Exodus. And the biblical scholar Toni Craven noticed something more: in verses 11 and 12, Judith’s divine titles are arranged with care, five on either side of her plea, “hear my prayer.” On one side: God of the lowly, helper of the lesser ones, upholder of the weak, protector of the forsaken, saviour of the hopeless. On the other: God of my father, God of the heritage of Israel, Lord of heaven and earth, Creator of the waters, King of all your creation (9:12).

The same God is named from the bottom of the world and from the top. The King of all creation chooses to be called the God of the underdogs.

What is easy to miss

The woman who prays this prayer is not poor. She is one of the wealthiest people in Bethulia. And she names God by his relation to the people with nothing — and places herself among them, in sackcloth, as a widow. Her estate did not tell her who she was.

The end of her story confirms it. Judith lived to the age of one hundred and five. She set her maid free. And before she died, she distributed her property among her husband’s relatives and her own (16:23–24). She held her wealth the way Psalm 37 asks: open.

Honesty requires one further word. Judith asks God to bless “the deceit of my lips” (9:10; compare 9:13), and she brings down Holofernes by guile. Readers have long found this troubling, and they are right to think about it carefully. The Church reads the Book of Judith as a story of faith and courage in a desperate hour, not as a manual of tactics. Her prayer is its heart, and it is her prayer that has entered the Church’s memory.

Where this prayer leads

The vocabulary of Judith 9:11 runs straight into the New Testament. Mary sings that God “has lifted up the lowly” and “has helped his servant Israel” (Luke 1:52, 54) — and the Greek verb for helped, antelabeto, belongs to the same family as Judith’s antilēmptōr, the one who takes hold. When Paul begs to be relieved of a weakness, the Lord answers him: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Power there is dynamis; weakness is astheneia, from the same family as Judith’s asthenountes, the weak.

Power belongs to God, and he does not need the strong to exercise it. That was Judith’s faith. In a courtroom in Jerusalem, on a night we are about to enter, it would be put to its ultimate test.

For the new inventory: Power — God’s might does not depend on the strong. It takes hold of the weak.

Movement Three · The One Who Owned Nothing

7. “I Am”

Thursday, 5 November · Mark 14:62

“Jesus said, ‘I am; and “you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power,” and “coming with the clouds of heaven.”‘”

Every voice we have heard so far has been speaking about what people own. Now we stand in a room with someone who owns nothing at all.

An inventory taken by night

Mark’s Gospel, which most scholars regard as the earliest of the four and which early tradition links with the preaching of Peter, tells the story of Jesus’ last night with stark economy. Read chapter 14 and watch how much is stripped away in a few hours.

His friends: “All of them deserted him and fled” (14:50).

The last possession of one follower: “A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked” (14:51–52). It is one of the strangest details in the Gospels, and its meaning has been debated for centuries. At the very least, it shows us a man who saved himself by letting go of the last thing he had.

His freedom: “Then they laid hands on him and arrested him” (14:46).

His right to a fair hearing. He is taken by night to the high priest’s house, where the council looks for testimony against him and cannot find any that agrees (14:55–59). The Law of Moses required that a charge be established “on the evidence of two or three witnesses” (Deuteronomy 19:15). This court cannot even make its evidence agree.

And outside, in the courtyard, his most prominent disciple. Peter has followed at a distance and is sitting with the guards, “warming himself at the fire” (14:54). Mark’s Greek says, literally, that he warmed himself at the light — pros to phōs.

Mark arranges these scenes with deliberate art. The story of Peter begins (14:54), the trial is told (14:55–65), and then the story of Peter resumes (14:66–72), so that each scene frames the other. Inside, in the dark house, Jesus will be asked who he is. Outside, at the light, Peter will be asked who he is.

The answer

For most of the trial Jesus says nothing (14:61), like the Servant of Isaiah, who “did not open his mouth” before his shearers (Isaiah 53:7). Then the high priest asks him directly:

“Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” (14:61)

The Blessed One is a reverent way of avoiding the divine name. And Jesus replies:

Ἐγώ εἰμι — Egō eimi — “I am.”

It is the plainest answer to that question in any of the Gospels. In Matthew he says, “You have said so” (Matthew 26:64); in Luke, “You say that I am” (Luke 22:70). Mark’s version has no veil at all. Throughout his Gospel Jesus has silenced those who announced who he was (for example, 8:29–30). Now, bound, accused and alone, he says it outright.

Does Egō eimi mean more than “Yes, I am he”? In its immediate setting, it is first of all a clear affirmative answer to the high priest’s question. But Mark has used the same words once before, when Jesus came walking across the sea to his terrified disciples: “Take heart, it is I [egō eimi]; do not be afraid” (6:50) — a scene full of echoes of the God who “trampled the waves of the Sea” (Job 9:8). In the Greek Old Testament, egō eimi is also how God speaks of himself (for example, Isaiah 43:10). Many interpreters believe Mark wants us to hear that further resonance here; others caution against reading too much into a simple reply. It is wise to hold both: the answer is a plain yes, and it is a yes spoken by the Son of the God whose name is I am.

“The Power”

Then Jesus goes further, joining two passages of Scripture. “Sit at my right hand” comes from Psalm 110:1, where the LORD invites the king to share his throne. “Coming with the clouds of heaven” comes from Daniel 7:13, where “one like a human being” — literally, one like a son of man — comes before the Ancient of Days.

And Jesus calls God ἡ δύναμις (hē dynamis), “the Power.” It is another reverent substitute for the divine name, as the Blessed One was. Later rabbinic texts use the Hebrew equivalent, ha-Gevurah, in the same way; the Talmud speaks of Israel hearing the first commandments “from the mouth of the Power” (Babylonian Talmud, Makkot 24a).

Do you remember Wednesday’s verse in its Greek dress? “My strength and the might of my hand made for me this great dynamis.” Here, at the far end of the week, the word has found its true owner. The self-made man called his wealth dynamis. Jesus, stripped of everything, calls God the Dynamis — and claims a place at his right hand.

Notice, too, that the place is given. In Psalm 110 the king sits because he is invited: “The LORD says to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand.'” In Daniel, the son of man does not seize the kingdom: “To him was given dominion and glory and kingship” (Daniel 7:14). The Catechism, explaining what it means that Christ is seated at the Father’s right hand, makes the connection explicit: it signifies “the inauguration of the Messiah’s kingdom,” the fulfilment of Daniel’s vision (CCC 664). Even the kingship Jesus claims on the night of his arrest is received, not grasped.

And the verb is plural: “you will see.” The judges will one day look upon the prisoner enthroned. The court sitting in judgment is itself under judgment.

The robe and the light

The high priest’s response is immediate: “Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, ‘Why do we still need witnesses? You have heard his blasphemy!'” (14:63–64). What exactly made Jesus’ answer blasphemous in their eyes is debated. Later Jewish law, recorded in the Mishnah, required the actual pronouncing of the divine name — which Jesus had carefully avoided. Many scholars therefore think the offence lay in the claim itself: to share God’s throne, and to come as the judge of his judges.

The man with the house, the office and the robe tears his robe. The man with nothing keeps the one thing that cannot be taken from him. He knows who he is before God, and he says so.

Outside, at the light, a servant-girl says to Peter, “You also were with Jesus.” And Peter, three times, refuses his own identity: “I do not know this man you are talking about” (14:67–71). Jesus, losing everything, kept his name. Peter, keeping warm, nearly gave his away.

Mark does not leave him there. On Easter morning the young man at the empty tomb tells the women: “go, tell his disciples and Peter” (16:7). The one who denied his identity is singled out by name.

What he would not grasp

Paul, writing perhaps a decade or so before Mark, had already put the meaning of this night into a hymn:

“Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.” (Philippians 2:5–7)

The Greek word translated “something to be exploited,” ἁρπαγμός (harpagmos), comes from a verb meaning to seize, to snatch, to grasp. Set it beside Deuteronomy 8:17. The self-made man had nothing he had not been given, and grasped it as his own. The Son had everything by right, and did not grasp. “Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9).

For the new inventory: Identity — the one possession no court can confiscate: who you are before God.

The Song

“While I Have Being”

Sunday, 8 November · Psalm 104:33

“I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being.”

After the tomb, the claim, the key and the courtroom, the week ends with music.

A walk through God’s property

Psalm 104 is one of the great creation hymns of the Bible, and it forms a pair with the psalm before it: both begin and end with the same words, “Bless the LORD, O my soul.” Psalm 103 blesses God for his mercy to sinners. Psalm 104 blesses him for the world.

It moves through creation almost like a guided walk. God is “wrapped in light as with a garment” (104:2). The waters are set within their bounds; springs run in the valleys; birds sing among the branches; the cattle graze; there is “wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine, and bread to strengthen the human heart” (104:15). There are cedars and storks, wild goats on the high mountains and small creatures sheltering in the rocks. The moon marks the seasons; the sun “knows its time for setting” (104:19). Lions roar at night; people go out to their work “until the evening” (104:23). There is the sea, “great and wide,” with its ships, and Leviathan, “that you formed to sport in it” (104:25–26).

Many scholars have noticed resemblances between parts of this psalm and the Great Hymn to the Aten, an Egyptian hymn to the sun-disc composed in the fourteenth century before Christ, under the pharaoh Akhenaten. Whether there is any direct connection is debated. But the comparison throws one difference into sharp relief. Near its close, the Egyptian hymn declares that no one truly knows the god except the king, his son. Knowledge of the divine belongs to the palace. In Psalm 104, the sun is not a god but a servant that knows when to set; every creature looks to the Creator; and the one who sings at the end is not a pharaoh but an ordinary worshipper. No one holds a monopoly on God.

Then comes the line that, for this week, matters most in the whole psalm:

“O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.” (104:24)

The Hebrew word translated “creatures” is קִנְיָנֶךָ (qinyānekhā). Creatures is the usual and entirely sound rendering here. But the noun קִנְיָן (qinyān) belongs to the vocabulary of acquisition and possession: Genesis uses it of the livestock and goods Jacob had acquired (Genesis 31:18); Proverbs uses it of everything a person gets (Proverbs 4:7). The King James Version translated our verse, “the earth is full of thy riches.” The root קָנָה (qānāh) can mean both to acquire and to create — Melchizedek blesses Abram by “God Most High, maker of heaven and earth” (Genesis 14:19), where older translations say possessor.

So the word carries a resonance that no single English word can hold. Without forcing the translation, we may hear in it, at the end of the walk through the whole created order, a verdict spoken in the language of ownership: the earth is full of what is yours. The cattle and the cedars, the ships and the sea, the wine and the oil and the bread — and the human beings who work until evening and call these things theirs — all belong to Someone else.

Breath on loan

And then the psalm shows what that means for the creatures:

“These all look to you to give them their food in due season; when you give to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things. When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.” (104:27–30)

Even breath is on loan. The Hebrew uses the same word, רוּחַ (rûaḥ), for the creatures’ breath that God takes away and the spirit that God sends forth. Life is not a possession we carry about. It is a gift we are continually receiving — and one day, like a Roman usufruct, it returns to its Owner. The Church prays verse 30 at Pentecost and in the familiar prayer to the Holy Spirit: “Send forth your Spirit, and they shall be created; and you shall renew the face of the earth.”

The only “my”

Only now does the psalmist speak of himself:

אָשִׁירָה לַיהוָה בְּחַיָּי אֲזַמְּרָה לֵאלֹהַי בְּעוֹדִי ʾāšîrāh laYHWH bəḥayyāy, ʾăzammərāh lēʾlōhay bəʿôdî

בְּחַיָּי (bəḥayyāy), “in my life” — as long as I live. And בְּעוֹדִי (bəʿôdî), “while I have being,” built on the little word ʿôd, which means still, yet, more. Literally: “while I am still.” The psalmist does not measure his life by its possessions, or even by its years. He measures it by the length of a song. As long as I am still here, I will be singing.

Now look at the possessives in the last verses of this enormous psalm — after the oceans, the mountains, the vineyards and the stars. “My God” (104:33). “My meditation” (104:34). “My soul” (104:35). After surveying everything God owns, the psalmist lays claim to exactly one thing in all creation: the God who made it. My God.

This is the answer the whole week has been walking towards.

Three psalms, one word

Psalm 104:33 has a twin. Psalm 146 opens with almost the same words — “I will praise the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praises to my God all my life long” (146:2) — and then, at once, warns: “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish” (146:3–4). Princes, like stewards, are breathing on loan. The same psalm describes the God who “upholds the orphan and the widow” (146:9) — Judith’s God.

And this morning, at Mass, the responsorial psalm is Psalm 63: “Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live” (63:3–4). “As long as I live” is בְחַיָּי (bəḥayyāy), the very word of this week’s verse. And “better than life” begins, in Hebrew, with טוֹב (ṭôv), the very word with which Psalm 37:16 began the week. Psalm 37 said that a little is better than much. Psalm 63 says that God’s love is better than life itself. The week that started at the graves with one better ends at the altar with a greater one.

Simply because he is

The Catechism describes praise as the form of prayer that most directly acknowledges God as God, honouring him not only for what he does but “simply because HE IS” (CCC 2639).

Set that beside Thursday’s verse. Before the high priest, the Son said, I am. Here the psalmist says he will sing while I am still. Our still depends entirely on his am. We have being on loan, for a while. He is. And the best use of borrowed being is to sing to the One who simply is.

A word of honesty here, too. The psalmist’s “as long as I live” was probably written before Israel had a developed hope of resurrection; for him, the song may have seemed to end with the breath. Christians read it in the light of Easter and of the vision in the Book of Revelation, where “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea” sings to God and to the Lamb (Revelation 5:13). The song, it turns out, outlasts the singer’s breath.

For the new inventory: Breath — on loan, and best spent on praise. And one true possession: “my God.”

The Inventory, Rewritten

The tomb at Silwan offered an inventory of one line: no silver, no gold — only bones. This week’s Scriptures have drawn up another. Gather its lines together and they read:

• Wealth — made with a strength that was given. Mine to use; not mine to boast of. (Deuteronomy 8:17)
• Salvation — never purchased, never carried home. Brought near, as a gift, to the far-off. (Isaiah 46:13)
• Office — a robe that can be put on someone else. Never a monument to oneself. (Isaiah 22:15–21)
• Authority — a key carried on the shoulder for the sake of the house. (Isaiah 22:22)
• Enough — a little, held open, is better than much held tight. (Psalm 37:16)
• Power — God’s might does not depend on the strong. It takes hold of the weak. (Judith 9:11)
• Identity — the one possession no court can confiscate: who you are before God. (Mark 14:62)
• Breath — on loan, and best spent on praise. And one true possession: my God. (Psalm 104:33)

Read as a whole, the week seems to teach three things that are easily missed.

First, Scripture is not against having. It is against claiming. Deuteronomy calls the land good and commands a feast. Psalm 37 promises an inheritance. Judith keeps an estate. Isaiah gives Eliakim real authority. What every one of these texts resists is the sentence in the heart that turns a gift into a title: my hand made this.

Second, the opposite of grasping is not merely giving things away. It is possessing the right Thing. We tend to think the cure for greed is simply to own less. The Bible’s deepest answer is stranger and more generous. The priests of Israel were given no land, because, God said, “I am your share and your possession” (Numbers 18:20). “The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup,” sings Psalm 16:5. And the psalmist of Psalm 104, surveying the whole of God’s property, claims only “my God.” The one thing Scripture lets us call our own, without qualification, is not a thing at all. It is God, who gives himself to be ours.

Third, the God who owns everything chooses to be named by those who own nothing. God of the lowly. Helper of the lesser ones. And in Mark’s courtroom, the Son who could have claimed everything stands with nothing — and, in that poverty, names God the Power and speaks of his throne. Paul’s question to the Corinthians becomes the question of the whole week: “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” (1 Corinthians 4:7).

Where interpreters differ

Honesty about the texts belongs to faithfulness to them, and several questions raised this week remain open. Whether the tomb at Silwan belonged to the Shebna of Isaiah 22 is possible but unproven. Scholars debate whether Isaiah 22:24–25 belongs to the original oracle or reflects a later moment, and whether Eliakim’s key was literal or symbolic. The link between Isaiah 22:22 and Matthew 16:19 is widely held but rests on allusion rather than quotation. The date, setting and genre of Judith are uncertain, and its use of deception raises real moral questions. Interpreters weigh differently how much divine resonance Mark intends in Jesus’ “I am,” and what precisely the council judged to be blasphemy. And the relationship between Psalm 104 and the Egyptian hymn to the Aten — borrowing, shared tradition or independent creation — is still discussed. None of these questions changes what the week’s verses say together.

The Question Beneath the Week

Every one of this week’s verses stands at the meeting point of two ways of holding a life.

One way says mine. It says it quietly, in the heart, in the language of competence and achievement. It buys its gods and then has to carry them. It carves its name into the rock. It hangs its family’s cups on the peg of its office. It is loud — hāmôn, a roar of many things — and it is always slightly anxious, because whatever is truly mine can be truly lost.

The other way says entrusted. It works hard, and blesses God at the table. It carries a key, and uses it to open doors for others. It holds a little, and keeps giving. It calls God by the names of the poor, and finds itself among them. When everything is stripped away, it still knows its name. And it sings, while it has being.

So the tension at the heart of this week is not between wealth and poverty. It is between title and trust:

We claim to own what we were only lent — and we hold at arm’s length the One who has offered himself to be ours.

That is what this week asks each of us to confront. Not how much do I have? but:

Am I living as an owner or as a steward — and whose am I?

Living as Stewards

What does the week’s answer look like on an ordinary Monday?

At the table. Deuteronomy’s antidote to the self-made heart was a blessing at meals: “You shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God” (8:10). Grace at table is not a pious decoration. It is a small, daily act of handing the title back to its Owner. A family that blesses God for its food is teaching its children, several times a day, that nothing on the table was simply made by anyone’s hand.

In work and achievement. Our age loves the word self-made. Deuteronomy 8:17 is the original self-made speech, and it is forbidden not because effort is wrong but because the story is false. No one is self-made. Behind every degree stand teachers; behind every promotion, colleagues who covered for us; behind every business, roads we did not build, laws we did not draft, and a body and mind we did not design. A Christian may be proud of hard work. A Christian may not forget the credits.

In office and authority. For anyone who holds a key — a public official, a manager, a headteacher, a member of a governing body, a priest, the office-bearer of a residents’ association, a parent — Isaiah 22 is a searching text. The key belongs to the house. Its purpose is to open doors for those who need them, as a father does for his household. Shebna’s temptation was to build a monument; the temptation of Eliakim’s household was to hang their cups on him. Both are with us still. The test is simple and severe: in whose interest am I using this key today?

In families and inheritance. Anyone who has worked near the courts knows how many family relationships founder on property, and how often a lifetime of affection ends in a partition suit. Psalm 37 calls what we pass on an inheritance — something received and handed on. Judith set her affairs in order and distributed her property before she died. Putting one’s own house in order — a clear will, settled papers, honest conversations with those who will come after — can be an act of love, and a quiet confession that we were only ever stewards.

In ageing and retirement. Psalm 37 is the counsel of an old man; Psalm 104 vows to sing as long as I live. Retirement can strip away titles that once seemed part of who we were. That loss can be frightening — or freeing. When the office is gone and the robe has been handed on, what remains is what Jesus kept in the high priest’s house: who we are before God. And praise, unlike employment, has no retirement age.

Among the lowly. Judith’s God is the God of the underdogs. Every household, office and parish has its lesser ones — the domestic worker, the contract labourer, the junior clerk, the elderly relative no one consults, the child with no one to speak for them. If God’s name is helper of the lesser ones, then one way to call on that name is to become, this week, the hand by which he takes hold of one of them.

In what we buy. Isaiah’s goldsmith is not out of business. A great deal of modern advertising is an invitation to purchase a small god — something that promises security, identity, belonging or rescue. Isaiah’s test still works: Can it move towards you? Can it answer when you call? Can it save you from trouble? If not, it is something to use, not something to trust.

A Rise & Inspire Moment

In many older households — in Kerala as in Lisbon or Lagos — there was one person who carried the keys. Often it was the grandmother: a heavy ring of iron and brass at her waist, keys to the storeroom, the rice bin, the cupboard where the good plates and the land documents were kept. Nothing in that house moved without her.

And yet everyone who watched her closely understood something. The keys were never hers. They belonged to the household. She carried them for everyone who ate at that table — for the children who would one day marry, for the workers who needed their rice, for the guest who arrived without warning. And on the day she grew too frail, the keys passed, sometimes with ceremony and sometimes in silence, to another pair of hands. The house remained. The keys moved on.

That is Isaiah 22:22 in a single domestic image. And it is the whole difference between Shebna and Eliakim.

Shebna — or whoever lay behind that door at Silwan — carved: There is no silver and no gold here. He meant, do not bother robbing me. Scripture reads his stone and quietly adds the lines he left out:

The silver and the gold were never yours. The key was only lent. The breath was only borrowed. But the song was yours to give — and you may give it while you have being.

A key kept only for yourself stops being a key and becomes a trophy. Hold everything you have the way a steward holds a key: for opening.

Five Ways to Hold Things Open This Week

1. Bless the table (Deuteronomy 8:10). At one meal every day this week, before or after eating, name aloud one thing on the table and where it came from — the farmer, the cook, the shop, the rain — and then bless God for it. If you live alone, do it anyway. It is the simplest way to say, daily, my hand did not make this.

2. Write the credits (Deuteronomy 8:18). Choose one achievement you are proud of — a degree, a position, a business, a home, a book, a family. On paper, list every person who made it possible, including the ones you never thanked. Then, before Friday, thank two of them by name: a call, a letter, a message they can keep.

3. Use your key to open one door (Isaiah 22:22; Judith 9:11). If you hold any authority — in an office, an institution, a committee, a profession, a family — use it once this week to open a door for someone with no influence: a recommendation written, a pending file cleared, a fair hearing granted, a young person introduced to someone who can help. And decline one small privilege of your position that you have come to take for granted.

4. Put your house in order (Isaiah 22:24; Judith 16:24). Check whether your will, nominations and important papers are clear enough that what you leave will never become your family’s quarrel. If that is already done, choose one thing you intend to give away one day — and consider giving it while you can still see it received.

5. Sing before you ask (Psalm 104:33; CCC 2639). Each morning this week, before you ask God for anything, praise him for one thing about who he is — not for what he has done for you, but simply because he is. Once this week, read Psalm 104 slowly from beginning to end, aloud if you can, and notice every creature in it. And if you are at Mass today, listen for this week’s word in the responsorial psalm: “I will bless you as long as I live.”

Questions to Sit With

1. In Deuteronomy 8:17–18, what exactly does Moses deny, and what does he deliberately not deny? Why does the difference matter?

2. If a stranger examined the inventory of my life — my bank statements, my calendar, my phone, the way I speak about my achievements — what would they conclude I believe I own?

3. Where might I be behaving like Shebna — carving my own name into something entrusted to me for the sake of others? And where have I let others hang their cups on a peg that was never meant to bear them?

4. Who are “the lesser ones” in my world — at home, at work, in my parish or neighbourhood — and what would it mean for God to take hold of one of them through me this week?

5. Before this week is over, what is one thing I will hold open, one door I will unlock, and one moment I will set aside simply to praise God because he is?

A Steward’s Prayer

God of the lowly and King of all creation, the earth is full of what is yours, and so am I.

Forgive me the sentence I speak in my heart when no one else is listening: my strength, my skill, my hand. Every strength I have, you gave; every good thing I have made, I made with your gift.

When I am tempted to buy a god I can carry, remind me that you come near on your own, even to the stubborn, even to me.

You have laid some keys on my shoulder. Teach me to carry them for the house and not for myself — to open doors, as a father opens them for his children, and to hand them on gladly when my time is done.

Make me content with a little held open, generous with what I cannot keep, and quick to take hold of the weak, as you take hold of me.

Lord Jesus, who stood with nothing before your judges and did not grasp at what was yours, keep me on the night when everything is taken. Let me know who I am before you, and never deny your name to keep myself warm.

Breath of God, I have my being on loan. While I am still here, let me sing — not only for what you give, but because you are.

You are my God. Let that be the one thing I call my own. Amen.

What to Carry

Everything else you hold in trust; only God gives himself to be called your own.

Lamps, Oil and Entrusted Gold

This morning, across India and far beyond it, our Hindu friends and neighbours are celebrating Deepavali, the festival of lights. Many of our streets will glow tonight with rows of lamps. Rise & Inspire offers them warm greetings, as the Holy See does each year; the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue’s message for this year’s festival invites Hindus and Christians to forge pathways of peace together, recalling the fortieth anniversary of Pope Saint John Paul II’s day of prayer for peace at Assisi in 1986. Christians walking past those lamps tonight might remember this morning’s psalm, which pictures God “wrapped in light as with a garment” (Psalm 104:2) — a light no one owns, which falls on every doorstep.

Lamps are in this Sunday’s Gospel too. In the parable of the ten bridesmaids (Matthew 25:1–13), the foolish ones run short of oil and ask to borrow from the wise. The answer sounds harsh: “No! there will not be enough for you and for us” (25:9). But perhaps it says something this week has been teaching all along. Almost everything we have can be shared, lent, given away, handed on. One thing cannot. No one can lend you their readiness, their faith, their yes to God. That oil must be your own.

And next Sunday, the readings will carry this week’s question one step further. The first reading will be the portrait of the ʾēšet ḥayil, the “capable wife” of Proverbs 31 — that same word ḥayil that Moses feared would make Israel proud. Her ḥayil shows itself in this: “She opens her hand to the poor, and reaches out her hands to the needy” (Proverbs 31:20). And the Gospel will be the parable of the talents, in which a man going on a journey “summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them” (Matthew 25:14). Entrusted. Not given away, not sold — entrusted, to be used well until the master returns.

So this Sunday’s question does not close tonight. It walks with us, like a key on the shoulder, into the week ahead.

What can you truly call your own?

Everything you hold, you hold for a while. The One who holds you is yours for ever.

Which passage of Scripture would you like us to open together in a future Sunday Series? Share it in the comments. The verse you cannot stop thinking about may be the very one another reader needs.

Rise & Inspire — Sunday Bible Series Depth over speed. Understanding over volume. Formation over information.

Written by John Britto Kurusumuthu

Each morning, His Excellency, Rt. Rev. Dr. Selvister Ponnumuthan, Bishop of the Diocese of Punalur, shares a verse from the Bible. The seven verses received over the course of each week are brought together and serve as the scriptural foundation for that week’s Sunday Bible Series.

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