You would have to excuse the rich man who just walked away from Jesus in today’s gospel if the lesson that he really took away from this encounter was not “Sell what you have and follow me” but “If you don’t want to know, don’t ask.” The young man is asking what he has to do to gain eternal life, and he is told to do something that goes far beyond anything he expected. I think the way we would probably phrase it today cuts even closer to the bone: Not, what must we do to have eternal life, but, does God love us and accept us the way we are, or not? After today’s reading, with the rich, good-hearted man literally walking away from Jesus sad, you’d be forgiven for thinking the answer is, probably not.
Here’s the challenge for today: God likes us to be able to believe two things at once, sometimes two contradictory things. Because on the one hand, we know we want to believe that God loves us unconditionally, as we are, with all our imperfections and past failures, that we are saved from our sins, and accepted, and held in the palm of God’s hand. That is the message of Jesus, hard as it is to believe, and we want to live our lives that way, and feel that way, and some days, we can. But we’re asked today to believe another message of the gospel. It’s that God is as determined and sometimes as frightening as a two-edged sword, as that second reading from the letter to the Hebrews says, always cutting away, literally desiring to do surgery on us and change us, especially when we put our trust in things that are hard to leave behind. That love of God, it seems, can get so strong that it’s frightening.
This reading may not seem to have much to do with prayer, but in fact, it has a lot. Why is prayer so hard? Prayer can be hard because we find it hard to believe that God does love us and accept us and treasure us, individually, and we find it hard to ask in prayer for the ability to feel that. In prayer we run into our own sense of inadequacy and imperfection and distraction and so we figure that God can’t possibly be anywhere in that. But prayer is hard because we are fighting God on the other front, too, because we have other things that we turn to to give ourselves a sense of security and accomplishment and acceptance. Prayer isn’t hard because God isn’t there, it’s because we are, and all the things we bring with us.
What we run into when we pray is us, the things we have built that we think are important, the possessions that make us feel good about ourselves, the things we want and don’t have yet, the job that helps us feel needed and valued, the plans we have for ourselves and our families. Everything we have that convinces us that something else besides God is worth our life, even the good projects we have already undertaken, like all the rich young man’s good works, all that is in there fighting God’s desire to come close. So maybe we don’t want to ask the question the rich man asked, to be closer to God, because God will ask us to cut more away, all the time, so that God can be even closer. It’s no wonder that’s not something we ask for.
It makes a difference in this story that the rich man was rich, because rich people, satisfied people, have it harder, have it harder in forming a relationship with God that is uncomplicated by all the other things we have to help us feel firmly established. They, or I guess I should say we, have very complicated systems in place, systems of identity that we believe in. People with wealth may have already decided on a reward system that works for us, even a system of generosity that helps us feel a sense of accomplishment. And the more complex the system, the more painful it is to peel all that away, all those things that we have thought were an integral part of our lives, and recognize that all that is not us. And it’s us that God wants to talk with. Not because God’s going to ask us, all of us, to go and sell everything, that’s not the goal, God’s goal is to be with us directly, to divide soul from spirit, joints from marrow, as the letter to the Hebrews says today, and get down to who we really are, underneath who we would like to think that we have become, underneath all the rewards that we have become so close to.
So does God accept us as we are? The question really is, given the sometimes frightening love that God has for us, do we accept God for who God is? How close does God want to be to us? If you don’t want to know, then don’t ask. But if you do want to know, there is only one solution for us all: Do what the rich man did and ask.