Today we’re continuing with our series of encounters (and conversations) in the Chapter 10 of Mark. If you remember from last week, we have seen that in this Chapter, people come to Jesus and ask “all the wrong questions”: those questions that seem to be seeking God’s glory, but in reality show what’s on the inquirers’ minds and what’s in their hearts. Mark shows us how those people who talk with Jesus, whether pharisees, strangers of even Jesus’s own disciples, by asking their questions express their own self centered preoccupations (Sex, money and pride!). They seem to be seeking God but in the end, they are only seeking themselves. So in each of these conversations, Jesus has to re-direct the people towards God’s will and towards the core of God’s law. Jesus does so not by answering the questions directly, but he offers tough reminders about what’s more fundamental and, as he does so, he reveals to people their own hardness of heart, their own incapacity to love as God has commanded. What we realize is that all those people asking questions to Jesus aren’t actually asking about God for the purpose of serving God, they are mostly trying to figure what’s in it for them, or what it is that they can get away with.
Now what could make it better (but actually makes it worse) is that all those people aren’t bad people. In a sense, they are really trying – trying to understand what God expects of them, how they can have an okay relationship with God – but of course, as Jesus shows them, the call of the Gospel is more radical than that.
So this week, Jesus meets with a man who seems like a great candidate for discipleship. He has a lot of respect and admiration for Jesus, and is eager to follow him. Mark tells us the man runs up to Jesus and falls on his knees. He calls Jesus “good” and by this manifests his own desire to be good. He has been following the commandments and wants to inherit eternity. And Jesus loves the man, actually. Mark tells us that, as the man confesses his striving to lead a godly, holy life and after life, Jesus “looked at him and loved him” – so much that Jesus wants him to follow him. But then something really sad happens. Although the man is very pious and eager, he won’t be able to renounce his “many possessions” Jesus asks him to sell for the sake of the poor. So it starts well, but it’s a sad story. The man leaves Jesus, sorrowful, realizing his own incapacity to answer the call.
Now this story has raised many questions – and many anxieties – throughout the centuries. It’s about money, of course. Is Jesus really asking us to be so radical and to sell all we have? Isn’t it possible to follow him while still enjoying the fruit of our labor, the comfort and safety of a good house, abundant food, and of course for us, many of the commodities scientific progress and technology have brought? Well, I am not sure I have an answer to this, but I would respond like I did last week when Jesus was addressing the question of divorce with the Pharisees: We cannot take what Jesus has said to one person or to one group of people at a certain time and place and concerning a specific situation, we cannot take this answer and make it a general rule. When Jesus talked about divorce with the Pharisees, he was talking about the sending away of wives who had stopped being pleasing to their husbands. He wasn’t talking about domestic abuse or even mutual consent to terminate a relationship. In our story today, Jesus asks a man to sell his possessions to follow him, but we know he didn’t ask that from all his disciples. The twelve left their home, but Mary, Martha and Lazarus didn’t. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus were considered “comfortable”, and we don’t see Jesus asking them to give it all away.
So what is Jesus doing? To me, there are three possibilities we may want to reflect a bit on today:
– First of all, we can acknowledge that Jesus never asked everybody to give it all away but he certainly didn’t encourage them to keep it all either. Jesus does not always condemn rich people for being rich, but he certainly never praises them and insist on how difficult it is for them to enter the kingdom of God. Throughout the Gospel, there is actually a conflict between “serving God” and “serving money”, and it looks like we often deceive ourselves when we think that money isn’t our Master. A good indicator in the Gospels whether money is our Master or not is found in our ability to share or to manifest hospitality. Martha and Mary were very hospitable, Joseph was generous (he gave his own tomb for Jesus to be buried in). It’s an important test for each one of us. Whether we have a money or not, the question is what is it that we do with it? Rather than “rich” or “poor”, maybe the criteria is more about whether we are “stingy” or “generous”: Do we use our money for our own benefit, for the benefit of our families, or are we aware of the needs of the poor and if so, how do we address them? Maybe we can have a look at our bank statements and see what it says about the way we live…We could also have a look at where our money comes from. Notice that Jesus replaces the commandment “Do not steal” by “Do not defraud”: How do we make our money? How do we invest it?
– Second point we can reflect on and that is related to what we’ve just said: To me, what Jesus is doing in our passage today is that he tries to redirect the man from his own self-centerdness to the care of others, from preoccupation with self back to relationships. Isn’t it interesting that the man asks how he could “inherit” eternal life, as if it was something else he could add to his possessions? By asking him to sell all he has, Jesus redirects the man to where eternal, real and abundant life is to be found. It reminds me of the letter of James we have studied last month, when James asks us to stop wondering if our faith is saving us and rather ask ourselves if our faith is saving anyone! Jesus invites the man to move from religious, legalistic preoccupations that end up being preoccupation with self to a life of self giving and relationships – what Peter reminds Jesus they all did. The problem with money and possessions is that they make “self sufficient” and unable to relate to others. Money will easily make us feel like we don’t need anyone beyond our family and we end up being unable to see anyone’s needs.
– Last observation: I think that in the end what Jesus does is to reveal to the man his own hardness of heart. By asking him to let go of his possessions, he makes the man realize how much he hold on to these things, how much his many possessions are possessing him. Well, maybe the man does not realize it, but the reader of Mark certainly does! Maybe it’s an example for us, a counter example and an invitation to think about what it is for us that gets in the way to start living the eternal, real, abundant life that God has promised us. What is it that we hold on to? It does not have necessarily to be materiel possessions, so we need to do some thinking: Maybe that’s a something we could focus our prayers on this week: What is it that gets in the way? As we do that, unlike the characters of the Gospels who ask “all the wrong questions”, maybe we can start realizing what a good and brave question to ask Jesus could look like!