“Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?”
This rich young man was a seeker, one who had tried to faithfully live out the commandments of Judaism and yet was still unsatisfied. He sensed that Jesus might have a unique perspective on this question, though he probably did not have a good sense of why this should be so.
He answered him, “Why do you ask me about the good?
There is only One who is good.
If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.”
In a sense this response from Jesus threw the young man back on what he knew and what he was already attempting. But it still left the door open. If the young man could come to understand why Jesus was qualified to explain the good and the way to eternal life he would by that fact be ready to receive it.
He asked him, “Which ones?”
He did not leave immediately, sensing that Jesus still did in fact have something to say about the good. Somewhere deep down he sensed the goodness inherent in Jesus but had not yet realized that what he was seeking was not merely an answer or an explanation but Jesus himself. In asking which commandments it was as though the man hoped that Jesus would mention something he had overlooked, something he could embrace more or do better in order to experience the fulfillment he desired. He was still looking for a formula for religious success, an idea, or a framework. But what he needed was a relationship.
The young man said to him,
“All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?”
Jesus did not offer anything new in his response about which commandments to keep. He did not provide the man with some distractingly novel perspective in which his invested effort would eventually yield only more disappointment. Instead Jesus insisted that what the man had already done thus far was in fact the way. But in what the man had been doing, though he was confident that he had in fact sincerely observed the commandments, he knew that there was still something missing. In this man we see the archetype of the person who is more or less good and morally upright, but realizes that his efforts are insufficient, that something is lacking, and that there must, in fact, be more.
Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go,
sell what you have and give to the poor,
and you will have treasure in heaven.
Then come, follow me.”
Perhaps in pursuing the commandments and even without selling his riches he might one day have come to eternal life. But even if so it would have been only after years of experiencing the fact that there was indeed still something he lacked. The commandments probably seemed to pull him at one time toward one thing and at another time toward something else. They all tended toward the good but in such different ways that they did make him feel as though he was heading in a single direction or that he was on one path toward eternal life. What he needed was to realize that Jesus himself was the One who is good, and to follow him, making him the unifying force in his life, the direction to all of the disparate goods he pursued.
If the man desired to pursue the true good and to follow Jesus himself there would be less leeway for riches in his life. After his call by Jesus the riches could no longer even provide the pretense of producing happiness. They could instead only serve to hold him back from investing fully in Jesus as the one alone in whom he could find what he sought. Those who most fully embody this call of Jesus are of course the professed religious. But his call to follow him and to rid ourselves of anything opposed to that goal is for us all. And the more we want lasting joy in God the less we can try to pursue it in lesser things. We must not be like ancient Israel under the judges, always ready to turn back to our idols the moment we sense that the judge is absent or not paying attention.
The children of Israel offended the LORD by serving the Baals.
Abandoning the LORD, the God of their fathers,
who led them out of the land of Egypt,
they followed the other gods of the various nations around them,
and by their worship of these gods provoked the LORD.
We have Baals in our own times as well, and we too naturally succumb to following them. They seem like answers when God is slow to answer. They make us raise temporary this-worldly solutions to the status of absolute paths that have every appearance of being religious. We can easily imagine how the good of combating climate change could easily transform into something cult like and quasi-religious as just one example. And we can easily imagine how such goods, severed from the source of goodness, quickly come into conflict with one another. Instead of seeking this or that good as absolute, or trying balance one against another, we must seek first the one who is good, the true judge of the living and the dead. In following him the lesser goods will not be neglected any more than following him means that we neglect the commandments he advised the young man to follow. Rather it means that they will all come into a harmonious whole as we make following Jesus our highest priority.
When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad,
for he had many possessions.
This, no doubt, is among the sader lines in the Gospels. He was so close, and yet his attachments held him back. He chose things of this world that could never truly satisfy the lack he felt over the one thing necessary, him who alone is good, and who could alone fill that void in his heart. But in this choice do we not often see ourselves as well, when Jesus calls us to follow him more closely? How many opportunities to draw near to Jesus have we neglected because of our own "many possessions", physical or metaphorical? We too, even we who follow Jesus somewhat and to some degree already, experience that something is still lacking. And it will always be so to some degree until we come fully into the Kingdom. But the invitation is that, in following Jesus, we can already experience life in the Kingdom even here and now to the degree that we take him up on this invitation, divest ourselves of this world, and follow him.
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