Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl in your miseries, which shall come upon you.2 Your riches are corrupted: and your garments are motheaten.3 Your gold and silver is cankered: and the rust of them shall be for a testimony against you, and shall eat your flesh like fire. You have stored up to yourselves wrath against the last days.4 Behold the hire of the labourers, who have reaped down your fields, which by fraud has been kept back by you, crieth: and the cry of them hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.†5 You have feasted upon earth: and in riotousness you have nourished your hearts, in the day of slaughter.6 You have condemned and put to death the Just One, and he resisted you not.†
Let us go in by the narrow way. How long will luxury last? How long will there be licentiousness? Have not the heedless among us been warned? What about the mockers and the procrastinators? Will not their banquets and gluttony and self-satisfaction, not to mention their wealth, their possessions and their property all disappear? What reward have they got? Death. And what will their end be? Dust and ashes, urns and worms.
What then? Has luxury been condemned? It certainly has—so why do you continue to strive for it? A man has made bread, but the excess has been trimmed away. A man has made wine, but the excess has been cut off there also. God desires that we should pray not for impure food but for souls set free from excess. For everything that God has created is good, and nothing which has been received with thanks is to be despised.
This way of theirs is a stumblingblock to them: and afterwards they shall delight in their mouth.15 They are laid in hell like sheep: death shall feed upon them. And the just shall have dominion over them in the morning; and their help shall decay in hell from their glory.15 They are laid in hell like sheep: death shall feed upon them. And the just shall have dominion over them in the morning; and their help shall decay in hell from their glory.16 But God will redeem my soul from the hand of hell, when he shall receive me.17 Be not thou afraid, when a man shall be made rich, and when the glory of his house shall be increased.18 For when he shall die he shall take nothing away; nor shall his glory descend with him.19 For in his lifetime his soul will be blessed: and he will praise thee when thou shalt do well to him.20 He shall go in to the generations of his fathers: and he shall never see light.
When you see the unjust becoming rich and the just poor, do not fear for yourself; do not be dismayed in mind, as if the providence of God is nowhere looking on human affairs, or perhaps, somewhere there is a divine watchfulness, but it does not reach to places near the earth, so as to watch over our affairs; for, if there were a providence, it would be apportioning to each person what is proper to him, so that the just, who understand how to use wealth, would be rich, but the wicked, who have wealth as the instrument of their wickedness, would be poor.… Now, since there are many who have such notions and who, because of the apparent inconsistency of the distribution of the fortunes of life, assume that the world is not the work of providence, the Scripture addresses these to calm their uninstructed emotion.… Do not be faint about present affairs, but await that blessed and everlasting life. Then you will see that poverty and contempt and the lack of luxuries befall the just person for his good. And do not be troubled now about imagined good things, as though they were unjustly divided. You will hear how it will be said to a certain rich man, "You in your lifetime have received good things," but to the poor person that he receives evils in his life. As a consequence, therefore, the latter is consoled, but the former suffers pain.
The psalm's verse numbering differs between the modern lectionary and the Douay-Rheims this library hosts, so the text isn't matched verse-for-verse here yet.
About CSB. A personal translation of the New Testament, rendered directly from the public-domain Greek in a literary style — not a scholarly critical edition, and not for liturgical or doctrinal authority. It is one reader's work, offered for enjoyment; where it matters, weigh it against an established translation. (Placeholder text — final wording to come.)