Mark 10:17 – 30
There was a little girl sitting in
church on Sunday. When you are little services seem to last forever.
She colored in her coloring book. She crawled around under the pew.
She tried to take a nap but it didn't work. Finally she tugged on
her mother's arm and in a loud whisper, asked, “Are you sure this
is the only way to get to heaven?” Today we hear Jesus answer that
question.
We've heard this story so often,
because Matthew and Luke tell it as well, almost in the same words.
And Matthew calls the man “young” and Luke calls him “rich”
and as you noticed, Mark just calls him “a man”. And if you are
like me, when you hear the story you see a rich young man. And only
in Mark do we hear the words, “Jesus looked at him and loved him.”
There is one more interesting bit. When Jesus talks to his
disciples about how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of
God, only in Mark does he address them as “children”. And I
think these little differences might be a clue as to how Mark wants
us to take the story.
First, in Mark he is just “a man”.
If we make him rich or make him young, well, most of us are not rich
or young, so it becomes a story about someone else, and we can sort
of sit in judgment. And that is even more obvious in the Greek,
because the one who runs up to Jesus is referred to as “one”, not
“a man. So Mark wants us to identify with this one, he's talking
about you and me. Mark makes sure we know that Jesus loved this one.
And I think that tells us something as well. This is a good person,
someone who not only keeps the commandments that Jesus lists, but
probably all the commandments. As you've probably heard, the rabbis
and pharisees eventually identified 630 commandments, and to a good
Jew, eating pork was not different than adultery; every commandment
of God was to be kept. And there were lots of commandments about
taking care of widows and orphans, and welcoming strangers into your
midst, and treating foreigners like natives before the law. Tithing
of course was a commandment. So Jesus is looking at this person, who
has been trying since he was a child to keep the commandments out of
love for God who gave them to Moses.
But the person's joy is short-lived.
Here he figured he had it made. He'd been doing everything right.
But Jesus says “You lack one thing; go, sell all you have and give
it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come,
follow me”. Now I have to pause and give you a little bible
history. You probably remember that Saint Jerome translated the
bible into Latin. In those days, the Gospel of Matthew was
considered the “real gospel” and Matthew was considered more
reliable because after all, he was there, he was an apostle, and Mark
and Luke weren't. Modern scholars, both Catholic and Protestant,
know now that the Apostle Matthew did not write the gospel, at least
what we have today. So Jerome left out some words in his translation
of Mark because they weren't in Matthew. Those words were “take up
the cross” and follow me. Many modern translations from the
original Greek include those words, but others don't. I think Mark
meant to include them because Jesus tells us in other passages that
we will have to take up the cross.
The person's face fell and he went
away because he had many possessions. He could not part with them;
Jesus is asking way too much.
Now if you were reading the gospel of
Mark in a continuous way, instead of only hearing a little bit on the
weekend you would remember than only a few verses ago the apostles
were trying to keep children from approaching Jesus, who told them,
“let the children come to me” and he added that you had to become
like a child to enter the kingdom. Now Jesus calls the apostles
children and he points out that people who trust in riches simply
cannot enter the kingdom that way.
That is why the apostles are
astonished. After all, as everyone knows, if you are rich, it's
either because you are dishonest or because God favors you. And God
would favor you if you keep all his commandments, right?
But Jesus goes on to say that even if
it's impossible for man, with God all things are possible.
And Peter picks up on this. We have
left everything to follow you, he says. And Jesus says, “You've
got it. The only way to heaven is to follow me, to take up the
cross.”
You know, we human beings spend the
first halves of our lives getting stuff. Almost everything we do is
rooted in that instinct. We get stuff; we work hard to get stuff,
most of us try to find someone to spend our lives with; we want
children, a car, a house, a flat panel TV set, and stuff leads to
more stuff. We may not be rich, but what we have we want to keep. I
visit a lot of people who are shut-in's and sometimes you see
evidence that they are hoarders. But being a hoarder is just an
exaggeration of our instinct for stuff. And stuff gets in the way of
a relationship with Jesus. Jesus wants to give us himself, and he
will not hold back his gift. Every time we receive His Body and
Blood in the Eucharist, we are reminded that he is always offering
himself to us. But we can't receive his gift without getting our
stuff out of the way. Do we have to sell all we have and give it to
the poor? If so, we are all in trouble, even the Franciscans over at
Saint Stan's, because they may not technically own anything, but they
have stuff – clothing, a bed to sleep in, a computer to use, a
television to watch.
The little girl finally went home and
got out her dolls and her stuffed animals and a little table and set
everything up for a tea party. Then her father walked through the
door and held out his hands and she dropped everything and ran over
and jumped into his arms, abandoning all her toys. That's what Jesus
wanted from the person in the story. And that's what he wants from
you and from me. Because that is what makes a little child different
from someone who is attached to stuff.
