The rich young man

A word for the week

Everyone has one thing they could not imagine giving up. The thing you would fight hardest to keep, that you quietly build your security around, that you would feel naked without. For most of us it is not obviously bad; it may even be good. This story is about a good man who met Jesus and discovered what his one thing was, and could not let it go, and it is one of the few times in the Gospels that someone walks away from Jesus sad.

A man runs up to Jesus, kneels, and asks the great question: good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And notice, this is not a hostile trap like so many questions Jesus gets. This is sincere. Here is an earnest, moral, successful person who genuinely wants to know how to be right with God. Jesus points him to the commandments, and the man says, with what seems like real honesty, teacher, I have kept all these since I was young. And here is the detail Mark alone gives us, and it is everything: Jesus, looking at him, loved him. This is not a confrontation. Jesus looks at this good, striving, sincere man with love, and then, because he loves him, tells him the hard truth.

One thing you lack, Jesus says. Go, sell what you have, give it to the poor, and come, follow me. And the man's face falls, and he goes away grieving, because he had many possessions. There it is. His one thing was his wealth, and it turned out that his wealth had him more than he had it. He came looking for one more good deed to add to his collection, and Jesus put his finger on the exact place where the man's heart was actually anchored, and asked for that. Not because money is evil, but because that was the man's rival god, the thing he trusted instead of God, and you cannot follow with your hands full of the thing you will not release.

Do not rush past how personal this is. Jesus does not tell everyone to sell everything; he tells this man, because he loved him and saw precisely what stood between him and God. For you it might not be money. It might be your reputation, your control, your grievance, your career, your very goodness. The question the story asks is not what did Jesus tell that man to give up, but what is the one thing he would put his finger on in me? What am I holding so tightly that I would walk away sad rather than release it?

Then Jesus turns to the stunned disciples and says how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom, hard as a camel through the eye of a needle. And they are amazed, because in their world wealth was assumed to be a sign of God's favor; if the rich cannot make it, who can? Then who can be saved, they ask. And Jesus gives the answer that saves the whole story from despair: with men it is impossible, but not with God; for with God all things are possible. That is the hope. On our own, none of us can pry our fingers off our one thing. But what is impossible for us is possible for God, who can do in a heart what the heart cannot do for itself. The man walked away sad. He did not have to stay that way, and neither do we, because the God who asks for the one thing is also the God who can give us the strength to let it go.