This is always called the gospel of the rich young man, but I think just as good a name for it would be the gospel of the stuck young man. He’s at a point in his life where something is working inside him, something about his current life is not fulfilling, isn’t right, and he is looking for where to turn. So he asks Jesus what he thinks he should do next. He gets an answer that’s not at all what he was expecting: Jesus says, turn your life upside down completely, give it all up, start again. And as a result, here he is, stuck, Jesus has given him an idea that maybe in his heart he wants to act on, but he also has a real fear of what might happen to him if he did act on it. On the surface, it’s not a great advertisement for coming to God with your problems. Sometimes, God gives us an idea that is more than we think we can handle.
There’s a Lutheran pastor who says she is frequently asked what she does in her prayer life to get closer to God, and her answer is, why would anyone want to do that? In fact most times she says, she’d prefer to get away, that it’s God who seems to be the one doing the pursuing of us. She says every time she encounters God, God asks her to do something else with her money, or tries to remind her to change some flaw in the way she is with people, or turn her life towards something she doesn’t think can possibly do. In that second reading it says the word of God is a two-edged sword, and this is what that means, the word of God, the message of the gospel, it is a sharp tool, can cut away at us, poke us, make us uncomfortable, and if we don’t feel it that way, at least sometimes, we’re not listening carefully enough.
To protect ourselves from that sword, we all hold things back from God, not just this rich and stuck young man, and we all have different ways of doing that. We have parts of our life that we have declared zones that we think operate on different rules, private rooms we really don’t want God going inside. Let’s take success, for example. Success is a good thing, we think, and of course there’s nothing wrong with it – except when what we come to realize, and there are times in our lives when this really starts to become something we notice, that what Jesus is calling us to maybe doesn’t look a lot like what we’ve worked so hard to get, and that there’s other work for our hands that is now what we should be doing.
And of course since this is the gospel of the rich young man, not just any young man, we have to admit that it’s especially hard for people of privilege to respond to these stirrings of the heart that God sometimes afflicts us with. We have more ropes holding us back or holding us down, we have more things and resources and status that it’s hard to picture saying goodbye to or living our lives without. It seems to mean giving up the things that until now have made us who we are. So we too can get stuck in our present, not allowing ourselves to think of what it would be like to make a really big change in how we live.
I have an excellent friend who gives terrific advice. And whenever she is talking with someone who is struggling with a life-changing turning point, something that is going to send them off somewhere that will be a challenge or something that involves turning the page on the past, she usually ends up saying, “Really, after all, what have you got to lose?” Maybe the young man in this reading needed someone to say that to him, maybe it’s what Jesus in a way was trying to tell him. That man had a lot to lose, a lot of things in his life that Jesus wanted him to sell off, but really, what he had to gain, building a kingdom with his own hands, free from his past, that was much better than what he was used to. He had a lot less to lose than he imagined.
Nevertheless, he turned away. There’s a wonderful thing we should realize about God from this reading. There are times in our life when we will turn away from something we feel is the direction God is pulling us. We will. Sometimes it’s just not the time. The rich man turns away, and, and guess what? God loves him anyway. The way God works is not that God keeps trying to think of impossible things to ask us to do that we don’t want to do, and then loves us less or walks away when we can’t take it on. That’s the way overbearing human parents are with their children, not the way God is with us. So we can fail, and we will fail, and it doesn’t separate us from the love of God.
But there are times in our life, not all the time, but there are times that are like the time this young man in the gospel is encountering, when we’re bothered, there’s something more that somehow we want to be or to do, some word of God that you hear or some cry of the world that you hear and it changes you. And the call we hear inside even if we can’t put it into words, seems to be, take a huge step now, this is the time, you have heard an invitation. And no matter how hard it looks, God will be there to work with you. So really. At times, like that, what have you got to lose?