This is a gospel story that inevitably starts by making us all a little uncomfortable whether we are rich or not. Because I think all of us have a great tendency to imagine that if we were ever to have a conversation with Jesus about what we should do with our lives, it would go a little like this conversation in the gospel does. We think we would be told that we would have to do something that would seem to us impossible, or something that really, deep down, we just don’t want to do. You know, we’d be asked to be a missionary saint, living in complete poverty, whether we’d be good at it or not. And so we end up feeling like God probably looks at most of us as underachievers, and we decide that the best policy is the one that we all adopt when we’re in a system we think is stacked against us, and the policy is: “If you don’t want to know, don’t ask.” And so we don’t ask, because we don’t want the answer the rich man got to the question of God, what do you really want from me?
But let’s leave aside the rich man just for a minute, we’ll get back to him and to us. Let’s go just a little off topic: What is this “kingdom of God” that the rich man is trying to get into and can’t? It’s a phrase we hear almost every week here in this church, and yet we would all be hard pressed to describe that kingdom or even say where it is. Throughout the gospels from the very first moment Jesus appears, we’re told that the kingdom of God is here, is at hand, but then it doesn’t appear to be something that we can actually see, and over and over people don’t understand what Jesus means when he says it is here.
What confuses us is that we assume this kingdom must be off in the future, a vision of the end of time when all human imperfection has been wiped away, maybe it’s the kingdom we see in life after death. But Jesus said the kingdom of God was at hand, available. What he seems to want us to understand is that there is a kingdom of God at hand right now, but we fail to see it, a kingdom that we can see and touch and live in if we want to. Jesus spends much of his public life trying to explain this kingdom of God and what it looks like. Read through the Sermon on the Mount and you see this kingdom, it’s literally a world turned upside down, where people give away more than they have, where everything stops because one poor person is at a disadvantage, where people forgive anything, where you don’t need to worry about money or possessions because people in the kingdom will all find a way to take care of one another somehow. The kingdom is about a network of completely new relationships between everyone, between the rich and the poor, now on an equal footing. We could all live there now, but it is a kingdom that exists alongside a false kingdom, and that kingdom is one that entraps us, without our even knowing it.
That’s the position this rich man is in — he’s being offered the chance to step from one kingdom into the other, and it’s a step he just can’t take. What he’s being offered in a way, too simple; instead of a complicated system of rules to follow, instead of a world where you can feel good about yourself simply because of your stability and your relative success in avoiding evil, instead of that system, he’s being asked to follow a person wherever that person goes. He’s used to a model of success, but instead, there is a hidden and humbled shape to the kingdom of God; it demands letting go and self-surrender; it demands giving up all the barriers we have placed between ourselves and other people, it pushes us to our limits of how much we’re willing to trust in God.
That’s why this is a tough gospel for all of us, rich or not. We know that God loves us unconditionally, just as we are, and it’s obvious that Jesus loves this rich man just as he is, it says so right in the gospel. But it’s also obvious that we’re being invited and maybe even pushed to be a citizen of this other kingdom. And moving into that kingdom turns our world upside down every time we take a step closer to it.
That second reading from Paul says the word of God is a double-edged sword, and it is a great image for this gospel story, because the word of God is trying to do surgery on us, perhaps minor surgery or something more major, something that will open us up and take out whatever it is that is keeping us from this kingdom that is so close to us. Whether it is our money, and money does do invisible things to all of us, or maybe it’s our distrust of other people, our feeling of superiority to people who are different, or maybe it’s our fear that we are not good enough to live in this kingdom. These are all hard things to put aside. But somehow that is work that God can do on us, if we put down whatever it is we are grasping so tightly, all those things that have seemed like they were working for us. We don’t earn salvation, but we do have to allow God in to give it to us.
Sometimes in all of our lives we have turning points and transitions, where we have the chance to change something significant about the way we live, try some work that we are not sure we are ready for, embrace some new priority, change our minds about who is to blame for the shape the world is in, maybe even to change how much we decide to place our trust in God. These changes don’t always involve selling everything or moving to a new country. But they do always involve finding a way to get free, free from whatever is holding us back from asking God for direction and believing God’s answer.
Today, the rich man had a turning point like that. He was being asked to move away from thinking that his faith was a checklist of things he needed to do or not do, and to embrace simply following Jesus, watching where Jesus went, the way he was with people, the kingdom being built, one person at a time, by self-emptying love.
God wants to cut away whatever is keeping is from real freedom, hearing what Jesus is trying to give us. If you want to know what it is that you’re being offered, do what the rich man did, and ask God for what you really desire.