20th Sunday after Trinity
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Readings: Amos 5: 6-7, 10-15 and Mark 10: 17-31
Very seldom in my ministry has anyone approaching their death asked me to go and prepare them for that moment, for whatever reason. But once when it did happen, back in Kent, the gentleman concerned, who wasn’t a church-goer, wanted reassurance. He was anxious to tell me that he had been a good person, had really done nothing wrong in his life, and wanted me to say that he would ‘be alright’ after his death.
I didn’t actually give him that assurance, but urged him to make a confession. I didn’t exactly use that term, but I wanted him to see that none of us can really say that our lives are, or have been, faultless in God’s sight.
That incident came to mind as I read again the gospel passage for today. The young man who came to Jesus wanted to inherit eternal life. And when he asked Jesus what he had to do, the Lord mentioned six of the Ten Commandments. Yes, the young man had kept all these – perfectly, it seemed. But it wasn’t enough. And Jesus wouldn’t give the assurance that I was reluctant to give the dying man in Kent.
I wonder what prompted the question by the young man in the gospel reading. If he had kept the commandments, surely he had nothing to worry about? I wonder whether he actually knew within himself that something was missing; that merely observing the commandments wasn’t sufficient. Jesus quickly got to the heart of the problem. Here was a man with many possessions; this was proving to be his stumbling-block.
But for us it may be other things. A wise priest I once worked with pointed out that most people have a ‘blind spot’ – something less worthy about themselves or their character that they don’t always see or acknowledge, though others may see it in them. Or, it may be that we do know about this failing within us, but choose to do nothing about it.
For the young man in the story, it was his wealth that proved to be a hindrance to his otherwise righteous life. For us it may be our temper, our treatment of others, something sexual perhaps, or a love of power; a lack of social conscience; greed; or a falling-out with someone that we don’t put right and have no wish to. Perhaps a task for this week is to think about what might be our ‘blind-spot’; to own up to it before God, and to ask for change in our lives.
But the young man’s particular problem was with his wealth – or his ‘many possessions’ as today’s version puts it. Maybe no story in the New Testament brings us up with such a jolt as this one. Is Jesus asking every follower of his to renounce everything – to give away all possessions, because that is the only way to follow him? Some notable saints have done just that. Francis of Assisi, whose feast day we kept just last week, turned his back on his father’s wealth and lived in complete poverty. Anthony of Egypt, in the 4th-century, heard these words of Jesus one day in church, took them as a direct instruction to himself, gave away all he had, and lived as a hermit in the desert for the rest of his life. He drew many to follow his example.
So is this injunction of Jesus – ‘sell what you own and give the money to the poor’ – directed just to the very wealthy? Very few of us, I suppose, would not like to have more in the way of wealth, even if it was just enough to afford that home improvement; or to have a really special holiday next year, or to be more generous to grandchildren and not feel the pinch. This story has every one of us in its sights, because its message is one of renunciation – a readiness to abandon what we count dear. Some of us may not feel we have great possessions, but in contrast to many we see and hear about across the world, we know the truth only too well. Even if we ask just for enough to get us through a comfortable retirement, we know the spirit of the story, and Jesus’ demand is a challenge to us.
Sometimes the demands of Jesus seem really beyond us. We can be made to feel guilty by his requirements, and we have no way of discharging that guilt. The young man in the gospel was instructed to sell what we owned; to give to the poor, and follow Jesus. Of course, we don’t know the young man’s circumstances: whether he was married or not or had dependants. Maybe he was in a position to drop everything and sell-up. But for many people, with various responsibilities and family pressures, Jesus’ instruction seems unreasonable. But of course, as we’ve said, some people have done exactly what he says.
And it is just what Jesus did – or at least how Jesus lived. He abandoned himself to the will of God; lived much of his life as a homeless, moneyless person, relying utterly on the love and provision of his Father, and willingly submitting to all that his father had planned for him. Maybe this account of the young man ‘s encounter with Jesus haunts us because we know we have moved away from so much of the simplicity which seemed to characterize the faith in Jesus which so many of the early disciples had. And we recognize that, as a Church, here and world-wide and inter-denominationally, this injunction of Jesus has not been universally followed.
If this story faces us with the impossible, and we feel we cannot meet its demands, there are useful things it says to us. One is that we cannot make headway with God on the basis of our achievements – something I tried to explain to the man in Kent who asked me if he had ‘done enough.’
Secondly, although today’s story seems to deal with the personal relationship between the individual and God, it is also about the Kingdom of heaven, and how that kingdom should come about by the way people treat one another. We tend to think of eternal life as something stretching out into the future, which indeed it partly is; but Jesus stressed time and again that the reign of the Kingdom of Heaven begins now – with his coming among us on earth, and that we should do all we can to hasten its complete fulfilment.
In the Old Testament reading, Amos, living at a time of corruption and injustice, speaks out strongly against the evils of his time. He wasn’t concerned so much with the individual’s relationship with God, but with the way social justice was being ignored.
A third point from which we might take comfort is that when Jesus heard the young man recount how he had kept all the commandments, he looked at him and loved him. Despite everything, God loves us and will not abandon us because of our faults and failings, so long as we don’t abandon him.
Mark Oakley, Dean of Southwark Cathedral, recalls that when the actor Alec McCowen performed the whole Gospel of St Mark from memory around theatres in the 1970s and 1980s, it was during this story that the audience started to shift uncomfortably in their seats. Having had an ice-cream in the interval after the Transfiguration, they were now hearing that money, and our attitude to it, is a spiritual problem. They were hearing that following Christ is not about increasing but decreasing, and an acknowledgment that the best things in life are never things. Instead, they are values and truths that shape us rather than possess us.
We can often fail to notice the remark that when the man told Jesus that he had kept all the commandments, Jesus ‘loved him.’ In other words, he wasn’t out to have a go at him because he was rich; he wasn’t a self-righteous critic making himself feel better and hide his envy. It was because he loved him that he was asking him to reconsider his life and see whether he was able to walk away, for the sake of freedom and peace with God, from everything that gave him stability and power. The kingdom is a topsy-turvy place, where the first end up last, and where children, the poor and the overlooked, hold the key.