28th Sunday in Ordinary Time
(Sunday 14th October 2018)
The path to true happiness – (Mark 10:17-30)
Our Gospel this week is very powerful and it is a difficult one too. It is the story about the rich young man. It says, ‘As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up, knelt before him and put this question to him, ‘Good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus basically responds by challenging him with the ten commandments to which the man responds he has been following since his youth. Then Jesus does something surprising. He says, ‘You are lacking one thing. Go, sell what you have and give to the poor and you will have treasure in Heaven. Then come, follow Me’. Imagine that! Jesus asked him to give up everything that he has. This is probably not the spiritual advice that this man was looking for that day. Mark tells us that the man went away sad because he had many possessions.
The story really is not one about money. It is about the challenge of responding to Jesus no matter what He asks of you. God has a challenge for each of us and something that He wants us to sacrifice. But it is very different for everyone. This is a story of vocation. Jesus is trying to show this man his path to God, his path to true happiness. But the man is saying no to that. That is what to gold and the jewels and the riches of the first reading in the Book of Wisdom are describing. It is not really about money. It is about the humility and the ability to allow God to give us the things that we really need. Wisdom and prudence in this instance is about allowing God’s grace to do in our lives what seems impossible. To allow Him to cleanse us, to purify us of the things that hold us back from Him, whatever those things are. For the man in the Gospel, it was his wealth. For some of us it might be a relationship or an addiction or prestige or an image that we have made of ourselves. It could be anything. But God wants all of it and that is the point. One of the most striking lines in the Gospel reading is that Jesus looked at the rich young man and loved him. It is tempting to read this passage and to think of Jesus as angry or judgemental or harsh. But that is not how Mark describes it. Jesus loves this young man, He wants his happiness. Jesus just knows that it is going to hurt a little bit to get there.
I encourage you to reflect on this question in your lives – what are the things that you are afraid of Jesus asking you to leave behind? What if you were in this man’s shoes? Is there something that you would walk away sad with because you knew that you could not give it up? Jesus is offering this man a choice and really He is offering him the gift of his personal vocation. Well if the man must give something up to get there then the rewards will be exponentially more. The offering of wisdom in the first reading is a choice and in the end it is also a gift. The question is will we choose to accept it?