The Divan
„Do not suppose, nor let it enter your mind, that this worldly luck of theirs brings any true happiness. And neither that they will have any true and well-determined limit or period to their passing wealth.”
We do not believe in luck. That word belongs to the pagans. Isaiah places it beside idolatry: those who spread a table for „Fortune” (Isaiah 65:11, in the Septuagint Tyche, in Hebrew Gad) are those who forgot the Lord. For the Christian there is no blind chance, only Providence: „Not one sparrow falls to the ground without your Father” (Matthew 10:29). What the world calls luck is, in the eyes of faith, a divine permission or a trial. It is not a gift of fate but a balance held in the hand of God.
First: worldly wealth brings no happiness. Happiness is the state of the soul united with God, while luck changes only what surrounds the soul. The rich man of Luke 12 has fruitful land, new barns and long plans, but no soul to rejoice with. He tells his soul „take your ease,” and God answers: „Fool, this night your soul is required of you.” He was not rebuked for having, but because he stored his soul in a barn.
Asaph discovers the same in Psalm 72 (73): he stumbled seeing „the peace of sinners” until he entered „the sanctuary of God” and understood their end. The happiness of the world is seen only from outside; from inside, one sees the emptiness. The rich man of Luke 16, „clothed in purple and fine linen, feasting sumptuously every day,” is left unnamed by Scripture, while the poor man is named Lazarus, „God helps.” Heaven remembers the names of the poor, while the world remembers the names of the rich.
Then: luck has no boundary. True happiness has a stable face, but passing wealth gives no one even the certainty of its duration. „Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring” (Proverbs 27:1). James tells those who say „today or tomorrow we will go to such a city and make a profit” to say instead „If the Lord wills” (James 4:13–15). Of riches, Proverbs says they „make themselves wings like an eagle” (23:5), and the Psalmist: „If riches increase, do not set your heart on them” (Ps. 61:10 LXX). Job knew this most deeply: „The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away” (Job 1:21). Job did not have luck and then misfortune; he remained the same man before the same God, with wealth and without it.
The uncertainty of luck is also God’s mercy. If a person knew the hour of loss, he would make a treaty with death and live at ease in sin until then. The secret of the term keeps him awake. And perhaps the gift lies in this: that we may not rest in what perishes, but seek what remains. Saint Paul commands the rich „not to trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God” (1 Timothy 6:17).
What remains, then? What does not depend on the hour: repentance, prayer, almsgiving, humility, grace. Joseph went from the pit to prison and from prison to the throne of Egypt, and at the end he did not say „I was lucky,” but: „You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20). What is called luck or misfortune was God’s hand all along.
Apophthegm
A brother asked an elder: „Father, why do the worldly have so much luck, while we, who labor, have so much hardship?”
The elder said to him: „Brother, have you ever seen the one who leads the calf to slaughter, how he feeds it better than the rest?”
The brother was silent. And the elder added: „Do not envy the food, but take heed to whom it is given.”
