October 12, 2003
Wisdom 7: 7-11 + Hebrews 4:12-13 + Mark 10:17-30
The man in this Gospel wants insurance, not assurance. He wants to do something to guarantee his reward. The response of Jesus in this poor translation missed the mark. The scholars insist that what Jesus says is: “You lack one thing.” It is not as though there is a list of things you have to do – the truth is, there is something you must become. It is not a matter of doing something. It is a matter of being something.
The rich young man gets the point, and he goes sadly away. The challenge of Jesus is finally not a matter or wealth or poverty, but a matter of confidence and trust, a matter of priorities and security.
This Gospel text is serious business for you and me. I can’t imagine how this Gospel is heard in the third world, and I could not begin to think of what someone would hear in these verses who goes to be hungry tonight. This Gospel is about us – it is about church-going people, who, in the sense of being here today, have come running up to Jesus. Our piety is largely a matter of keeping the rules, just like the man in the Gospel, and we most often think of salvation as being the result of something we do. Keep the rules: get to heaven.
A hard look at the Gospel of Mark today does not give us the comfort of that kind of thinking. We are not going to have a place in the Kingdom of Heaven because of something we do. Our place will be there because of something we are, and no one is closer to the Kingdom of God than a faithful steward. Stewardship is a lifestyle, a way of seeing oneself in relationship to everything else, a way of perceiving what we have what it is for, and where it came from.
What happens in this Gospel today changes the question. It is no longer for us a matter of what we must do to be saved. It is now a matter of what we must become: radically dependent upon God.
For the disciples of Jesus this is news comes as a surprise. Always before they thought that they had to do something to be saved
Jesus puts before them a thoroughly new idea and proposes a whole new way of living in relation to things and others. It takes some imagination to get this right, and then some desire. I have always thought that this is exactly what was lacking in the rich young man: imagination and real desire. He could not imagine life without his stuff, his property and the prestige it afforded him.
And for all we can tell, he did not desire what Jesus proposed as necessary: at least he did not desire it enough to risk what was suggested by Jesus.
Yet, he was good, and Jesus looked on him with love: details of this Gospel story we cannot ignore. This is about us, good people loved by God. It is about our desires, our relationship with all things, about where we place our trust, and how much we really trust God to care for us and have a place for us. It is about assurance for good stewards, not about insurance for people afraid of losing it all. and maybe after today, it is about asking the right question: “What must I be to be saved?”