Deeper Into Love

Twenty-Eighth Sunday of the Year. Fr Nicholas Crowe considers the challenge posed to the rich young man.

Last week Jesus had an uncompromising message on marriage: ‘what God has joined let no one separate’ (Matthew 10:9). This Sunday our Lord is equally uncompromising about money. We heard that:

A man ran up, knelt before [Jesus] and put this question to him, ‘Good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’

Jesus’ initial response is very simple: be obedient to God’s law, a law that he himself summarised in Matthew 22 as ‘love God and love your neighbour as yourself’.  And we heard the man reply:

‘Master, I have kept all these [commandments] from my earliest days’. Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him and he said ‘There is one thing you lack. Go and sell everything you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;  then come, follow me.’

Now it may well be true that this man has kept the commandments since his earliest days. At their most basic level the commandments separate good from evil, and this man may well have avoided any serious evil in his life. But the Christian life is more than just a negative injunction to keep the rules and avoid evil: at its heart it is a positive summons to love. The disciple is one who is ready to be led deeper and deeper by Jesus into love because God is love and God is infinite. There is always more to learn about love; we can always grow in love.

Like everyone else, the rich young man needs to grow in love. The proof is that he fails to recognise who Jesus really is. He addresses our Lord as ‘Good Master’ and Jesus with a heavy irony asks him: why do you call me good? Only God is good’. The man claims to love God but doesn’t recognise God in Jesus. And Jesus puts his finger on the source of this man’s blindness: his great wealth.

This is one of the few occasions in the Scriptures when someone is called by Jesus directly and they refuse to listen. Jesus is offering this young man an opportunity, a gift, that is more precious than anything in the world: he is offering this man the opportunity to live with him and to learn from him so that he might become like him in love. He is offering this man the opportunity to journey with him into the heart of the father’s love. But the man turned it down and ‘went away sad’, because his love of money had become a chain that bound him to mediocrity when it came to the things of God.

There is a warning and an encouragement in this Gospel. On the one hand we have to be careful that we, like this rich young man, do not become spiritually stunted by our relationship with money. It is often said that if you can’t manage money, money will manage you. Where the love of money and the things that money brings takes precedence over loving people and God, then the spiritual consequences can be devastating.

Yet on the other hand, we should be encouraged by the love with which our Lord gazes upon the rich young man. Money is a powerful tool: it can be used for great evil, but it can also be used for great good.  We can use our resources in such a way that we build up not only treasure in heaven but treasure on Earth: the true riches of loving relationships and strong community. We heard Jesus conclude:

Peter took this up. ‘What about us?’ he asked him. ‘We have left everything and followed you.’ Jesus said, ‘I tell you solemnly, there is no one who has left house, brothers, sisters, father, children or land for my sake and for the sake of the gospel who will not be repaid a hundred times over, houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and land – not without persecutions – now in this present time and, in the world to come, eternal life.’

Readings: Wisdom 7:7-11 | Hebrews 4:12-13 | Mark 10:17-30

Image: detail from Christ and the Rich Young Man by A.N. Mironov, CC BY-SA 4.0