As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud. Honor your father and mother.'” He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions. Mark 10:17-22
Everything has a price! So we are told from early youth and from the bottle to the grave we discover that it costs money to bear children into this world and it costs a tidy sum again to burn or to bury the remains of our departed loved ones. And over the course of an entire lifetime, we reckon the averages on our actuarial tables for the total expense of a life lived out comfortably from sunup to sunset. I don’t know about you, but I am reluctant to know just how much has been expended to keep me above the sod over the course of my seventy-five years. But I am certain that all things considered, food, water, clothing, housing, education, courting and marriage and the raising of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren too that a sizable fortune has been amassed, exchanged and depleted in the effort.
Please, do not tell me the final tally for I have outstanding expenditures that have yet to be satisfied. Still, I can boast that my consumption of material goods has been moderate and frugal. My appetites are not so burdensome that I seek to hoard what I can. My natural desires do not bedevil me so grievously that I sacrifice my conscience for a trip to outer space, the better to view the Milky Way. I might dream of it, but I do not shove my neighbors’ needs beneath my feet to make it real.
I think it was the shock of poetry that first inclined me as a boy/man to shake the grip of acquisitiveness, the lure of wealth. I was in my first or second year of college I cannot recall which. But I distinctly remember my professor of English literature setting before my classmates and me a poem so simple but provocative and discomfiting, a poem about a fellow named Richard Cory. Some of you may have read this poem too at the urging of some jaundiced friend or a prickly professor. It goes like this:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
I shuddered when I read that last line because I had been sold by the poem’s
description of the fine favor that seemed to have blessed Richard Cory’s life. Why
would such a man so well disposed with the gift of wealth and the readiness to
hand of all the fruits of this good earth, why would he decide to put a bullet
through his head? So, I asked and so I struggled to make sense of the rich man’s
disdain for all his advantage. Was he deranged, subject to madness, overwhelmed
by some acute malady of brain or blood? What could have moved such a man to
throw his life away when it seemed he had everything anyone could ever desire or
need?
Enter Jesus underway on an unspecified journey, poor Jesus, with that one
tunic and shod with a dusty pair of sandals stopping along the way to sup with
childless cat ladies and despised tax collectors. A well-appointed gentleman with exquisite manners and a taste for purple robes rushes up to Jesus and refers to him
ingratiatingly as “good teacher.” He wants earnestly to know how to inherit eternal
life as though there might be some resemblance in the manner he received his
wealth and the way one might receive eternal life.
But here’s the rub. What could he possibly mean by eternal life? Does he
even know what it is he is asking? Is eternal life just more of the same, the same as
our working for moldy bread and rancid meat, our slacking of thirst with filthy
water and bitter wine, the buying and selling of homes that are torn away by
tempest and hurricane? Surely, he thinks eternal life to be some exalted degree of
what he knows now, in the moment as he considers his promethean privilege, his
good luck to have been born high rather than low. But disturb yourselves now with
this; no one deserves random graces, nor do they deserve the short end of the straw
to have been born to poverty or worse still, to slavery.
So, what does he have in mind this fellow who enjoys the false security of
possessing more when so, so many possess so little? Does he think that eternal life
is the uninterrupted extension of inequality, that is, his position of favor above and
over the obscene need of his neighbors? Does he think that eternal life is the lock
on inequity raised to the far horizon of immortality? To be fair, I don’t think he
thinks of his wealth in those terms. In fact, I would hazard our harried seeker has not thought about it at all. But can I hasten to add that he has asked the right person
about so consequential a matter as eternal life.
Jesus suspects what you and I have already surmised. This man has not
engaged in introspection or sustained reflection; his wit is impoverished on this
score. He has not bothered himself with questions concerning the sources, the
reasons, the wherefores of his plenty. He has not examined what needed to happen,
what other people must have endured for him to have so much. And just there
Jesus attempts to prompt him. “You know the commandments,” says he. “Do
these,” says he again. And just so there may be no doubt, Jesus runs off a list of
commandments as interesting for what that list does not include as for what it does.
Astonishingly, Jesus’ table of commandments does not mention God at all.
He underscores instead how we ought to comport ourselves in relation to others.
“Do not murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not bear false witness; do
not defraud.” Frankly, I admit I do not recall that last one as specific to the
original ten I learned as a child. It seems Jesus formulated it to provoke self-
examination in this well to do gentleman. Finally, Jesus adds one more
commandment that differs from all the rest in one respect. The ones that Jesus first
unscrolled are negatively expressed; do not do this, do not do that. The last one, to
honor one’s father and mother, is an affirmation. Be that as it may, these
imperatives require we look to the good of others, to affirm them as our resources allow. Jesus seems to say to this man that personal wealth is not for him, not for us.
We have it so that we might bless others.
We know this man who has just encountered Jesus has a soul because he
readily admits the value of the commandments for living in the world. He assures
Jesus he has kept all of the holy ordinances since his youth. He is well practiced in
them and yet he thinks they are not enough, not quite. Is Jesus holding back on him
or does Jesus think this man a sorrowful hypocrite? Perhaps Jesus discerns in this
man a lack of comprehension for the deep meaning of God’s holy law. It is as
though you could feel the tension that grips the crowd. Is keeping God’s law
enough to merit eternal life, whatever that is?
Jesus accepts the man’s answer but shines a light on the one dark place the
wealthy man has not dared to look. “You lack one thing,” says Jesus. When I hear
Jesus say this, I feel a lump in my throat in anticipation of what comes next. I try to
catch my breath. To the man that has everything Jesus says he lacks one thing, and
it appears to you and me as we listen in that that one thing swallows up all wealth,
all substance, whole mansions and estates. Jesus urges the man to give away to the
poor all he has. “Come then and follow me.” When he hears Jesus, we cannot be
surprised that this man forgot his question about eternal life because he leaves
Jesus there. He is crushed by his failure to relinquish his earthly goods.
Jesus has tied eternal life to the service we do for others, service unto the
distressed, the defamed, the demonized, the unwashed, the halt, the lame, the deaf,
the blind, the woman, the colored, the foreigner, the vermin, the criminally insane.
What is a fortune against all the pain of this broken world? That rich man left Jesus
but he must have realized just how poverty stricken he was. His lack of character,
his emptiness of heart, his shallowness of soul must have screamed out at him that
for all his drachma and coin of silver and gold that he was but a hollow husk of a
man.
But still in another way, that pathetic Silas Marner from Galilee had one
great advantage he had not accounted for against all his treasure. Did you catch it?
The scripture grants us a crucial clue, a clue that may be the key to the answer to
how any of us may inherit eternal life. None of what we do to heal the world may
ever be enough to make us worthy of eternal life. The most beneficent effort to
marshal vast empires of fortunes swelled to sums beyond all calculation would
never qualify us for eternal life, for blessedness, for divine, sacred bliss.
But Jesus loved the rich man, loved him in spite of him, loved him just
because he was so dispossessed of life and the joy of life as a child of God. For my
part, I follow the rich man after scripture is done with him. I watch him as he
considers his bank account, his many holdings in land and homes and I sense that
Jesus planted a seed that gnaws at the loamy soil of his heart. He sheds bit by bit portions of his property. He clothes the naked, starts a feeding program at his local
temple, provides tuition for children for whom the Hillel academy was a distant
dream
.His philanthropy does not end there. He begins to build a shelter for
homeless folks huddled under spindly trees on the side of the sunbaked road. He
contributes to the international effort to supply clean water for the children covered
in smoke and grime from the choke of war. He interests himself in the needs of
people whose names he will never know. Suddenly, he comes to himself. He looks
at his reflection in a cooling pool and notices the wrinkle about his eye, the upward
curve of his lips, the baring of his teeth in a smile.
Meanwhile, Jesus comes to the end of his journey. He writhes beneath the
weight of his cross. His tormentors pin him on that gruesome tree to raise him high
above the blood-streaked hill. I survey this scene, and I espy one man, his purple
robe now frayed from wear. He weeps to see how Jesus has finally answered his
question about how any of us deserves to inherit eternal life. Jesus loved him, he
loves thee, and he loves me. It is an impossible love that does not seek for return.
Love is the coin of soul. Give it all away.
Sermon by The Rev. Dr. Edward Scott at Trinity Episcopal Church, Staunton, Virginia, on October 13, 2024.
