Wealth, Watchfulness, and the Word Made Flesh: A Reflection on 1 Timothy 6:17-21 and Luke 21:28-33, in light of John 1:1-10 for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
Paul’s warning to the wealthy in 1 Timothy 6:17-21 and Christ’s apocalyptic vision in Luke 21:28-33 converge in a single pattern: the call to hold material reality rightly, neither despising it nor clinging to it, because matter itself is becoming the dwelling place of God. On the Fourth Sunday of Advent, with the Nativity days away, we stand at the threshold of the Incarnation—the moment when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The One through whom all things were made, the Light that shines in the darkness, is about to enter creation as a vulnerable infant. This changes everything about how we relate to the material world.
Paul doesn’t tell the rich to despise their wealth—he tells them to stop trusting it. As for the rich in this world, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on uncertain riches but on God who richly furnishes us with everything to enjoy. Notice what’s happening here: God furnishes us with everything to enjoy. The material world isn’t a trap or a distraction from spiritual life. It’s the arena where divine generosity meets human receptivity. The danger isn’t wealth itself—it’s misplaced hope. When you trust riches to secure your life, you’re asking matter to do what only communion with God can do. You’re treating creation as ultimate when it’s meant to be sacramental—a portal to the Creator, not a substitute for Him.
This is the inner work at the heart of Paul’s instruction: What are you actually trusting to hold your life together? Not what you say you trust—what does your anxiety reveal? Where does your mind go when you can’t sleep? What would genuinely terrify you to lose? For the wealthy, the wound often isn’t greed (that’s too simple). It’s the childhood terror of instability, the fear of being abandoned or exposed or helpless. Wealth becomes the adult strategy to ensure that never happens again. You’re not consciously choosing mammon over God—you’re white-knuckling your way through life, using money as the tool to keep the terror at bay.
Paul’s remedy is participation, not renunciation. They are to do good, to be rich in good deeds, liberal and generous, thus laying up for themselves a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life which is life indeed. Don’t reject material reality—transfigure your relationship to it. Use wealth to connect, to serve, to weave yourself into the fabric of human communion. Generosity isn’t a tax you pay to feel virtuous. It’s the practice of participating in divine life through matter. When you give freely, you’re enacting the fundamental pattern of reality: God gives Himself, creation gives itself back, love circulates. You’re learning to hold things with open hands, enjoying them without needing to control them, trusting that the God who furnishes all things will continue to provide.
This is where the Incarnation becomes essential. The Word through whom all things were made is about to become one of the things He made. John’s prologue is cosmic and intimate simultaneously: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him. Every atom, every galaxy, every material reality exists because the Logos speaks it into being. And now this same Logos will take flesh—will enter the material order not as visitor but as participant. God doesn’t despise matter. God becomes matter.
The rich are tempted to trust creation instead of the Creator. The ascetic is tempted to despise creation as obstacle to the Creator. Both miss the Incarnation. Matter isn’t ultimate, but it isn’t illusion either. It’s the place where divine and human meet. Paul’s instruction to the wealthy is implicitly incarnational: enjoy what God furnishes, but hold it sacramentally. Let your use of material things reflect the pattern of the Incarnation—God entering matter to transfigure it, not to escape it.
Now turn to Luke’s apocalyptic vision. Christ describes cosmic upheaval—distress of nations in perplexity, people fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world, the powers of the heavens will be shaken—and then gives the counterintuitive command: Now when these things begin to take place, look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near. Most apocalyptic rhetoric says: “When things fall apart, despair.” Christ says: “When things fall apart, lift your head. This is when redemption comes closest.”
The inner work here is facing your terror of instability. What if the structures you’ve built your life on—wealth, status, institutional security, even your carefully constructed self-image—what if they’re shaken? What if the ground beneath your feet proves uncertain? Paul warns the rich: don’t set your hope on uncertain riches. Luke shows why they’re uncertain: Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. Every material structure is provisional. Not meaningless—provisional. Creation itself is being transfigured, and that transfiguration requires things to be shaken loose from their false ultimacy.
This is not nihilism. Christ doesn’t say, “Nothing matters because it’s all passing away.” He says, “Everything that can be shaken will be shaken so that what cannot be shaken—the Word made flesh, divine love incarnate—will be revealed as what it always was: the ground of all being.” When you lose your wealth, when institutions collapse, when your health fails, when your reputation crumbles—these aren’t punishments. They’re invitations to discover what holds you when everything else lets go.
The fig tree parable clarifies the timeline. Look at the fig tree, and all the trees; as soon as they come out in leaf, you see for yourselves and know that the summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. What looks like endings are actually beginnings. The tree losing its leaves in winter looks like death—but it’s preparation for spring. The shaking of the powers isn’t the end of the story. It’s the labor pain before birth. Redemption doesn’t come after the crisis passes. Redemption comes through the crisis, in the crisis, as the crisis.
Here the Nativity illuminates everything. God enters creation at its most vulnerable point: infancy. Not as conquering emperor, not as angel descending in glory—as a baby born to a peasant girl in an occupied territory, laid in an animal’s feeding trough because there was no room in the inn. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. The Light shining in darkness doesn’t obliterate the darkness with overwhelming force. It enters the darkness as a flickering candle flame that can be snuffed out—except that this particular flame is unquenchable.
The Incarnation is God’s apocalypse—His unveiling of how divine power actually works. Not through domination but through vulnerability. Not by preserving Himself from suffering but by entering suffering completely and transfiguring it from within. When the rich cling to wealth, they’re trying to protect themselves from vulnerability. When Christ is born in a stable, He embraces vulnerability as the path to resurrection. The rich man’s riches are uncertain because they promise to shield him from what Christ voluntarily accepts.
Paul’s instruction and Christ’s apocalyptic vision converge in a single call: Stop trying to secure your life through material control, and start participating in the divine life that created matter in the first place. This doesn’t mean renouncing the material—it means holding it rightly. God richly furnishes us with everything to enjoy. The Logos made all things and called them good. The same Logos is about to take flesh. Matter is being transfigured, not destroyed.
But the transfiguration requires letting go of false ultimacy. You cannot cling to uncertain riches and simultaneously receive the life which is life indeed. You cannot white-knuckle your way through existence, demanding that creation provide the security only God can give, and still raise your head when redemption draws near. The shaking of the powers isn’t the problem—it’s the necessary stripping away of what you’ve been trusting instead of God.
This is the Advent posture: watchful expectancy combined with open-handed trust. Watch at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of man. Watching doesn’t mean anxious monitoring. It means awake presence to reality as it actually is, not as you wish it were. Praying doesn’t mean begging God to spare you from upheaval. It means invoking divine presence into the upheaval, standing consciously in the place where heaven and earth meet—which is precisely where the Incarnation happens.
St. Maximus the Confessor teaches that Christ has two wills: the natural will of His human nature, which is always oriented toward God and Good and Being, and no gnomic will—no deliberative, distorted mode of choosing where sin enters. Paul is calling the rich to align their gnomic will (their distorted mode of choosing security through wealth) with their natural will (their nature’s orientation toward God). Christ is announcing that the shaking of all things is creation’s gnomic will being stripped away, so that its natural will—its orientation toward God from the beginning—can be revealed.
The Word made flesh is the pattern. Divine and human united in one Person. God enters matter completely, takes it into Himself, and shows that matter’s true nature is to be temple. Your wealth, your body, your relationships, your ordinary life—all of it is matter that the Logos spoke into being. None of it can secure you ultimately, because it wasn’t created for that. It was created to be sacrament—the place where you encounter divine presence.
When Paul tells the rich to take hold of the life which is life indeed, he’s not offering an abstraction. He’s pointing to Christ, who is both the eternal Word and the infant about to be born. The life which is life indeed is communion with God through matter, participation in divine nature while fully inhabiting human nature, becoming by grace what God is by nature. This is theosis. And it begins when you stop trusting uncertain riches to hold your life together and start trusting the Word who holds all things together—including you.
Keywords (ordered by relevance): Incarnation, wealth, theosis, vulnerability, trust, Advent, apocalyptic, material-reality, Maximos-the-Confessor, natural-will
The Greater Horizon 