A Sermon preached at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, CA
21ST SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, OCTOBER 14, 2018
Proper 23B: Job 23:1-9, 16-17; Psalm 22:1-15; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31

So, can anyone be saved? Whether we think of ourselves as rich or not—mostly not, I imagine—I suspect, from years of conversations about this text, that most of us were probably a little unsettled by today’s gospel reading. What does Jesus really demand of us? How much is enough? What am I required to do?
You know, we have a long tradition in the church—it goes way back to our ancient Roman forebears in the faith—to read everything in the Bible as if it were a law, a direct moral demand. And the next step beyond that—and this goes back to our almost-as-ancient Irish forebears—is to follow that up with a personal self-examination to calculate how well we’re doing. Well, sometimes that makes sense, but not always. And this story about Jesus and the rich man is actually much more interesting and subtle than that. So instead of jumping directly to guilty conclusions, I want us to take a closer look at the story itself this morning.

I try to picture the situation. And, first off, I notice that Jesus is talking to one particular individual here. This doesn’t start out as a speech to his disciples, much less to the general public. It starts with a particular rich man who is behaving very strangely. First, here he comes running up to Jesus. Very bad form! He’s a man of high status; in antiquity no man of high status ever ran for anything or anybody. (Come to think of it, I don’t suppose you’d see many rich people today making such a spectacle of themselves.) If the rich wanted to talk to someone, they sent for the person—or strolled up calmly, surrounded by their entourage of friends and retainers.
Worse yet, the rich man then kneels before Jesus. Kneeling was the posture of someone in deep distress and need, someone begging for a favor. Very inappropriate for a person of such standing! All his behavior expresses great agitation. And he’s doing it all right in front of a whole crowd of people. The loss of face is astonishing. But he has some question so important to him that he’s prepared to sacrifice all dignity to have Jesus’ answer.

And what, exactly, was the question? That’s a translation problem in its own right. The NRSV starts off this way: “What must I do?” What must I do? That feeds right into our rules fetish, doesn’t it? But it’s not really the best translation of the Greek. The KJV, for example, said “what shall I do?” as if it were a matter of free choice. Closer to the nuance of the Greek here (and the best translation I’ve found) comes from David Bentley Hart: “What may I do. . . .” (The New Testament [Yale UP, 2017]) This isn’t a question about rules; it’s a question about opportunities and choices.
And the goal he aims at? The familiar translation is “to inherit eternal life.” But that is likely to be misleading. It can suggest that he just wants to live for ever or that he’s concerned about going to heaven and escaping hell. But it’s not primarily extent of life that he’s talking about; it’s a kind of life. The Greek phrase has no easy English translation. It signifies a life of peace and joy, a life in communion with God, our neighbors, and our world, a life truly worth living. Sometimes we call it “the life of the Age to Come,” but we also experience it at least occasionally here and now. There are moments when it breaks in on us with beauty and peace and joy, disrupting the everyday failings of this world­—the falsehoods and cruelties that have become common currency in this present age.
Again, David Bentley Hart may offer the best translation, though it’s a bit cryptic: “What may I do to inherit the life of the Age?” “Age” with a capital A; the true and lasting human life in sharp contrast to what we so often have to settle for. Jesus’ rich visitor is asking how he can live a life that will satisfy the deepest possible spiritual longings.
And Jesus’ first response is “You already know the answer: it’s all laid out in the Ten Commandments.” And, yes, leading a decent, humane life already brings us a long step toward “the life of the Age.” But the rich man is looking for something more—because rules are never enough. They can shame us and make us feel guilty, but they don’t empower us. He wants more; he’s looking for a deeper communion with God. He wants a pathway that will take him into the life of the new age, into the presence of God and the kingdom of God. This person, defined by his wealth and public standing, is actually in love with God and the beauty and wonder of human life in this world that God has created, and he wants to live in it now.

And Jesus understands all this—understands what would prompt this unlikely person to run up and kneel before him. He’s come to Jesus because he senses that God and the age to come are alive and present in him and his ministry. And Jesus teases him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” He’s saying, “You sensed God at work here, didn’t you? You sensed the Age to come arriving in my ministry. You’re right. It is indeed here. And the direct way for you to satisfy your longing for God and your longing for the new life, is to offer yourself up completely to it. You are welcome to become one of us, but you’ll have to come stripped of your this-worldly entanglements.”
The rich man is torn. He wants so much to stay, but he’s in a terrible bind. Wealth, in Jesus’ time, wasn’t an individual possession. If you had wealth, it belonged to your household, your extended family. It carried with it responsibilities to them and for them. If Jesus had told him to give the wealth to the rest of the family, he could have done that. (Other people of the time sometimes did that if they wanted to withdraw into a simple, philosophical life.) But Jesus saw that this was not what the rich man wanted. What he wanted was God, the immediacy of God in his life, the love of God, the companionship of God. He wanted to be a St. Francis of Assisi before there was such a person. But, dutiful as he was, those riches and the family to which he and they belonged would always have a hold on him. His passion for God and his duty to his family could not readily coexist with each other.
Peter, who can be relied on to say something awkward, piped up to say, “We’ve left everything.” And they had, but not like what this person would have to doing. They weren’t wealthy to start with. They were working folk. Their families went on working things out in their absence. Peter, it seems, still had a house in Capernaum, where Jesus stayed when they were in town. The disciples could see that what Jesus asked of the rich man would be even harder than what they’d done. And Jesus’ response was, “Yes, virtually impossible. But God has ways.”

And, indeed, even if the rich man could not take that huge step and become a Saint Francis, that doesn’t mean that he was completely shut out of “the life of the Age,” only that his path would be less direct. As Jesus had already told him, being a good human being is the basic thing. And he knew how to do that. He was already doing it. No one is required to give up everything. Most of Jesus’ followers went on living where they were and working at their jobs and thronging to hear him speak and going to him for healing and hope. When he asked so much more of the rich man, it was because he saw in him a passion for God and the life of the Age to Come that could be fully satisfied in no other way.
And why would anyone long, like the rich man, to plunge so deeply into this risky love affair with God? Because there is no greater good, no greater beauty, no greater delight than to be loved by God and brought into that life of grace that God has always wanted for humanity, which we call “the life of the Age to come.”

There’s no one-size-fits-all spiritual garment, no one map for everybody. Each of us finds our own path. Some, like the rich man, want the direct one. Even so, we may not be able to take it up as we would wish. Most of us, like most of Jesus’ followers in every age, will follow more familiar paths, learning slowly to let the radiance of the Age to Come shine through us in this age. If our paths are less dramatic and direct, if we meander a lot and learn slowly, like Peter (thank God for Peter!), it is still the same goal and God has ways—ways to sustain us and draw us onward till we, too, inherit that Age of grace and peace and joy. If the highway to “the life of the Age” is not for you, there are lesser paths as well, paths of faithfulness and generosity and hope in a troubled world. Take those—with God’s blessing.