Mark 10:17-31
And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments; ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. And Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” And they were exceedingly astonished, and said to him, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God.” Peter began to say to him, “See, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father of children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”
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My father has been retired now for two years. About six months into his retirement he went back to work. His own father never took a day of vacation, never took a sick day, until he had two years or more accumulated at the end of his career working for the postal service. Granted, my grandfather was a first generation immigrant from Denmark and grew up on a Minnesota farm during the Great Depression. Or so the story goes. Work has been a matter of survival, pride, and good citizenship. Grandpa struggled a lot in his last years, though, with grief over having missed so much of his children’s and grandchildren’s lives because he was at work so much.
Then there was a tweet written this past week from mega-church Pastor Creflo Dollar, who said that Jesus bled and died so that we could have financial security. This is the same guy who told his congregation that God wanted him to have a personal jet.
And were still sort of hearing about the Syrian refugees, who are fleeing in droves and many arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Oh, and also, I got to spend an afternoon at Whittier with a community of people whose memories are slipping away, and another couple of hours with family and friends of a young man in a coma after a car accident.
I wonder how this morning’s Gospel speaks to people from these sorts of experiences, what it can mean to us here. We have a strange relationship to stuff, all the buying and selling and collecting and tag sales and all. I still don’t own any furniture, at 32 years old, though I’ve never wanted for comfort. I could probably build a table and a bed out of all my books, but desk and bed and chairs I’ve not yet acquired, and I like it that way. Traveling light is my preference. Except now it takes multiple car loads to move all of my books. So traveling light has kind of gone out the window, and I keep getting more books, and as roommates come and go they bring new kitchen supplies… I guess I’m sort of building a collection of “adult,” “responsible” stuff that I ought to have by now. So many kids my age have houses and spouses and kids and comfy chairs and kitchen tables of their own, many of us reflecting on how strange it is to have all these trappings of adulthood and not knowing where they came from.
This young man in today’s Gospel reading has many possessions. Whether he’s worked for home or inherited them or some combination of both, we don’t know. He’s a sincere fellow, it seems, wanting to please Jesus, to inherit eternal life from God, and he’s followed all the commandments about loving your neighbor. Can you see him, running up to Jesus, “Good teacher!” he says. Oh, he’s excited, all right. He’s finally going to meet the guy everybody’s talking about, the Rabbi who’s stirring up the hearts of people everywhere, the one who’s making the Pharisees squirm and really reminding folks about love. “Good teacher!” he says, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And the first thing Jesus does is burst his bubble, just a little bit: “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.” Maybe this guy has been rewarded for his behavior by doting parents, calling him a ‘good son’ when he’s done nice things, practicing that positive reinforcement so he continues his best behavior. Who knows? But this style of praise, a cycle of rewards for good behavior, only works sometimes. We don’t always do good, we don’t always feel good, we don’t always recognize good. Only God is good.
We spend a lot of time talking about good and bad, usually in relation to people, usually measured in how they dress or talk or what sort of money they have or how their children turned out. “Good” can often mean “useful,” or it did to my grandfather. Being a “good immigrant” he worked very hard for a very, very long time so he could contribute to society and help take care of his family. He passed that down to my father, who cannot stand being idle and needs to work, to be productive, to earn a paycheck even now that he’s a week away from sixty-eight years old. To Creflo Dollar, being a “good Christian” is shown in how much money God has given you, and if you have enough faith you will soon be blessed with abundant wealth, which you then have to show off in order to prove you’re faithful to God. Refugees need sanctuary and a good, honest welcome. Folks who are completely dependent on nurses and machines need good care.
Jesus, on the other hand, looks at this young man who has probably been called a good man all his life, and loves him. The young man wants to know what to do to inherit eternal life, as though being welcomed into God’s family, being saved, is something we earn. And with all of our talk of “good” and “bad,” we sure get stuck in that mindset no matter how our theology tells us it’s not how God works. The question of why bad things happen to good people is one of the oldest questions there is, as though we only have to earn and always deserve what happens to us. The young man has been rewarded in life with many possessions. He can point to those things, to his faithfulness to the law, as proof that he himself is a good man, perhaps. Or at least that he is well on his way to becoming good, to becoming good enough. But he still doesn’t know for certain that he’s part of God’s family, still doesn’t know if he’s missing something, still doesn’t know if maybe there’s anything else he needs to do to inherit eternal life.
Imagine you’re a parent with one child who is always double-checking that you love them. Who thinks you must certainly hate them if they got less than a 4.0 grade average in school, or keeps trying to stay up all night on multiple work projects so they can buy you a better car or pay off your mortgage so that you will love them. And how terribly worthless that kid would feel if they got sick and you had to take care of them but they didn’t trust that they had done enough for you to really love them? If every time you told them you loved them they said you were only following the rules of being a parent and it wasn’t really love? How heartbreaking would that be?
This young man with his many possessions and eagerness to inherit eternal life reminds me of my grandfather, of my father, of the refugees who have to prove they’re not a drain on society in order to find safe haven here. He reminds me of the kid on life support and the folks who will never get their memories back this side of heaven. He goes away sad when Jesus tells him to sell everything and give it to the poor, because who is he without his stuff and his proof of righteousness? He’s gotten all of these things because he’s been so good, how will he show that he’s so good once he has nothing to show for it? What good will he be to heaven if he can’t contribute anything to it? If he gives everything to the poor now, he will himself be poor, and what will he be able to do in the future that’s worth anything?
We know these questions, we wrestle with our own worth so often, we take refuge in entitlement or we end up in despair. But when this young man asks Jesus about inheriting eternal life, Jesus invites him to life eternal right now in the present moment. He’s always saying that the Kingdom of God has come near, isn’t he? Even when we’re not looking for it. But we forget, we cut each other off based on earnings. Simply put, the young man couldn’t point to his achievements as a golden ticket into eternal life. None of us can. We can not earn heaven. We can not build ourselves a resume’ worthy of eternal life. We never could.
And we’ve never had to. We are not our stuff, and we are not our achievements, we are simply and forever children of God. Saved by grace through faith apart from works for Christ’s sake. Jesus, looking at this guy, loved him not for his stuff but for his self. Just as Jesus, looking at us, loves us, not because we’ve earned it, not because we deserve it, not because we can prove he ought to, but just because that’s what Jesus does.
My grandfather’s grief at missing out on so much of our growing up is that same kind of hunger, that pull between needing to work to feed his family and needing to spend time with his family to know and to love them and to be loved by them. My father’s work ethic is admirable to a point and yet will no doubt be incredibly sad when they tell him he’s too old for the office work and will have to let him go. He had the hardest time getting hired at his age, and what’s a man to do who’s worked so hard for so long? Learning how to be loved regardless of station or “usefulness” might take some of us longer to learn than others, but it’s there, irregardless, for all of us.
Creflo Dollar’s got it all backwards about why Jesus bled and died. Yet Creflo Dollar has a mega church and millions of dollars, so it seems he’s doing something right, right? He’s preaching that God blesses us abundantly with wealth when we are faithful, but he’s measuring it out all wrong. Because the wealth that Jesus promises his disciples is not stored in mutual funds and bank accounts, is not shown in shiny gold watches and stretch limos, but in a family that stretches across time and around the world. Jesus tells his disciples “there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father of children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.” It’s not an easy road, but it’s full of love and relationships with so many people who are made in the Image of God, like Syrian refugees, and boys on life support, and people living with Alzheimer's, all part of one great family of God. One eternal family that just makes your heart break with love, that aches and groans with shared pain, that celebrates together the richness of eternity and rejoices at each new rebirth that comes, in reconciliation and forgiveness.
For we can never earn such love. Nor can we ever lose it. Because it does not depend on us. It never has, and it never will. It all depends on God, whose love will never fail.
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