TWENTY-EIGHTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME – B
Wisdom 7:7-11
Hebrews 4:12-13
Mark 10:17-30
In preaching school they taught us that there should be one central theme that the sermon should shape around. Envision, the teacher said, a teenager who comes home from church and his mother asks him, What did the priest talk about? He should be able to answer with one sentence. So, today’s theme: all you need is love. Pretty original, huh? The theme arises because during the dialogue between Jesus and the rich young man. St. Mark reports “Jesus, looking at him, loved him.” The gospels of Matthew and Luke report on the same incident but they don’t add that particular observation. St. Mark thought it was important for us know that Jesus was acting out of love toward this young man. We understand the entire scene in light of the love of Jesus.
The passage opens with Jesus objecting to being called good. “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus answered him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. (We know this is a big deal in Mark’s gospel because when St. Matthew gives his account of this scene the rich man does not call Jesus “good.”) Doesn’t it seem odd that Jesus wouldn’t want to be known as good? In the new movie, Inside Out II, the heroine finds her true self by insisting “I am a good person.” What Jesus wants the young man, and us, to understand is that goodness is not an accomplishment. The way we usually think: keep the commandments, you are a good person. But the young man doesn’t feel that is working for him. He has been keeping the commandments which he imagined would make him feel like a good person. He thinks, “I must be doing it wrong. There must be something else I should be doing which will make me a good person. Jesus seems to have his act together so he must be a good person.” Jesus says, no to all that. Goodness is not an accomplishment but a gift. Nothing that we do earns us God’s loving goodness. God gives love freely and that makes us good since we share the very life of God. Old timers might remember the commercial with John Houseman, “We make money the old-fashioned way. We earn it.” Jesus says that is not how God works. We receive God’s goodness in an even more old-fashioned way, a way woven into creation from the beginning, as a gift. Goodness is ours as a gift of love. Jesus was really suggesting to the young man in answer to his question, “What must I do?” simply let God love you.
All of which lies behind Jesus telling the young man to “Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor.” This is not another chore to do, another commandment to keep. There are not two stages to Christianity – the good people who keep the commandments and the really good people who sell what they have and give to the poor. Rather, Jesus is inviting the young man to trust completely in God’s goodness and God’s love. Give away what you are relying on to make you feel good about yourself and instead throw yourself into the arms of God. Jesus loved the rich young man because he was trying to figure it out. He challenged him to make the love of God the foundation of his life by giving away the things that up until then had been where he was placing his efforts. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor imprisoned and then killed by the Nazis in 1945, Di wrote a letter from prison. He talked about a conversation he had with another pastor where his companion said he would like to become a saint. Bonhoeffer disagreed. He said, “I should like to have faith” which meant abandoning any attempt to make something of oneself and instead throwing “ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings but those of God in the world.” Once we feel how much God loves us, we are able to arrive at the faith which trusts completely on the blessings God bestows upon us.
The young man didn’t get it. The disciples of Jesus didn’t get it either. “Then who can be saved?” they asked. They had presumed that those who were successful, those who were healthy, those who had lots of stuff were the ones blessed by God. Think of the times when you see someone on TV after they have won the lottery. “I just want to thank the Lord for blessing me.” What about the people who didn’t win the lottery? Isn’t the Lord blessing them as well? The reason that the young man is instructed to give to the poor is that he will discover that we’re all in the same boat. He might have possessions and the poor don’t but everyone of us, the haves and the have nots, all need to empty ourselves so that God can fill us. We are so preoccupied with getting – getting an education, getting healthy, getting into a good relationship, getting a car, a nice place to live, new clothes, whatever it is – that we miss what we are being given. We are given the best of all possible things, the love of God and the blessed assurance that all will be well. Peter saying, “We have given up everything and followed you” is simply the echo of what every cliched love song says. I would climb the highest mountain for you, swim the ocean of blue, oh my darling for you. The point of those songs is that love is so wonderful that it is worth everything. How much more the love of God! Jesus wanted the young man, the disciples, and us today to understand that all we need is love, the love God gives us freely, and we will possess a hundred-fold of life, happiness and joy.
