Sermon: The Hard Kingdom
Mark 10:17-31
This passage in Mark 10 is often referred to as the “story of the rich young ruler.” It has close parallels in Matthew and Luke. All three gospels make it plain that he’s not just any man: he is a very wealthy man. Luke describes him as “a ruler” or an official of some sort. Matthew mentions that he’s a young man. Put them all together and you get the “rich young ruler.”
The man obviously respects Jesus greatly. He kneels down. He calls Jesus “Good Teacher.” He asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus throws the question back at him: “You know the commandments…” The young man knows the commandments by heart, and he tells Jesus that he has kept them all since he was old enough to understand them. But there’s still something missing. Something deep down is not complete. No one else has been able to guide him, to help him figure out what is missing.
I suspect this man was feeling what a lot of us in the church experience. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, put his finger on it when he wrote about the first and second halves of life. In the first half, we build our sense of ourselves. It’s the time when we learn the rules and how to obey them. It’s the child learning not to touch the hot stove. It’s the teen or young adult learning how to get along with others and making decisions about the future. It’s building skills and identity in a career.
The first half of life is important. It’s when we build the structure of who and what we are. It gives us a sense of place in the universe and a sense of what to expect. It’s learning where the boundaries are. There’s a reason that eight of the ten commandments are “Thou shalt nots.” They provide important “first half of life” boundaries for our behavior. I wouldn’t want to live in a society where people routinely stole, lied, and murdered.
Those things still happen, of course, but where those things do happen, it’s often because the perpetrators didn’t get grounded well in the first half of life.
In Louisiana I knew three brothers who were born to a mother who failed spectacularly to provide a stable home life for her sons. Each brother had a different father. They would come by my office looking for help, and I got to know them over several years’ time. I did what I could to help, but unfortunately, they were utterly lost. They rotated in and out of jail; they fathered children with multiple women. They spent a lot of time being homeless. I found a job with a construction company for one of them, and he was fired on the first day for trying to sell drugs. He and another brother died of drug overdoses last year.
These young men were textbook examples of what happens when we get the first half of life wrong. That’s why a parent’s job is so important. As much as children push back against the boundaries and discipline parents impose, those boundaries and the discipline give us a sense of stability as we grow. Without boundaries, children never find their limits. A good Sunday School and worship experience are so important in a child’s life – they help form a spiritual foundation for a successful life.
This rich young ruler had a strong first half of life. He had stayed inside the lines, obeyed the commandments, and became a model citizen. He would have been a great church member!
But he had reached the point where staying inside the lines wasn’t enough. He had built a model container with his life, but that container was empty. He knew instinctively that there had to be something more, something worth living for, beyond the rules. I think that’s why Mark tells us that Jesus looked at him and loved him. This man was a genuine Seeker after truth, and he could tell that what Jesus taught and lived was worth learning. He was ready to move into the second half of life, but he didn’t know how.
Not everyone reaches that point. Some people are content to live with rules and never go beyond them. You know, I think the Pharisees get a bad rap in the New Testament. During and after the Babylonian exile, the rabbis were heroic. They formed synagogues and a system for everyday life. They provided a means for Jews as the people of God to stay together so that some of them could return together to their homeland. Even those who stayed behind in Babylon built a strong community, in part because of the rabbinic movement that later developed into the party of the Pharisees.
Some Pharisees, however, like some of us in the church, got so focused on the rules and regulations for the good of the nation that they forgot about compassion for individuals. Compassion, the ability to care about others and the world outside of yourself, is a second half of life quality. The wisdom that Jesus taught was another quality of the second half of life. Jesus didn’t teach rules; in fact, he sometimes violated them. He could weigh two opposing truths – such as keeping the Sabbath on the one hand and showing compassion on the other – and come out with a Third Way that incorporated both.
When Jesus encountered a man with a deformed arm one Sabbath, some of the more legalistic Pharisees objected, because healing was work, and you weren’t supposed to work on the Sabbath. But Jesus responded, “Which is more lawful, to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath?” He healed the man’s arm.
Jesus focused, not on the container, but on the life that fills the container. The kingdom of God that he taught was characterized by second half of life qualities: humility, meekness, and the ability to mourn, because only those who love are able to mourn.
Jesus taught that the Kingdom of God was upon us here and now. He invited people to respond to the Kingdom where they were, in the present. Put differently, he invited them into the second half of life.
The rich young ruler sensed an answer in Jesus’ teaching. He felt keenly the lack of something important in his life, and he came to Jesus looking for something to fill the void.
To help this man move beyond the place where he was stuck, Jesus told him, “There is one thing you still lack. Go and sell all that you own and give the money to the poor; then you will have treasure in heaven, and you can come follow me.”
There may not be another verse in all of scripture that makes us so uncomfortable. Does Jesus expect all of his followers to sell their possessions and wander the roads with him? If not, why does he ask that of this man?
I think the answer lies in the man’s identity. He has done everything he knows to do according to his religion, kept all the commandments, but it’s not enough. He’s standing in the doorway between his old life and the next stage, but he can’t see what lies ahead. He needs guidance.
Jesus diagnoses his problem: the young man is too wrapped up in his wealth. There’s an old saying that we need enough stuff to get by, but after a certain point, your stuff owns you. Our stuff can dominate our lives. If we’re not careful, we can even define ourselves by our stuff.
Jesus saw that this man’s stuff weighed him down. He was so close to the freedom of the kingdom that Jesus loved him and said, “There’s just one thing more. Get rid of your stuff! It’s not bad stuff. Sell it to others and give the money to people who need it. Then you’ll be free enough to come and follow me.”
The young man stared at Jesus in shock. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t even imagine it. The problem wasn’t his stuff; it was how he saw himself. He defined himself by his stuff.
When Jesus calls for us to enter the kingdom of heaven, he’s calling for us to be transformed. Not to transform ourselves, but to be transformed by God’s power. Transformation is hard precisely because in order to be transformed, we have to let go of the image in our heads of who we are. Put another way, we have to let go of those egos we’ve spent so much time building up! And for some people, their stuff, their wealth, forms a crucial part of their egos. The very idea of letting them go seems absurd.
The more successful we are, the more difficult it is to let go. The masks we hide behind are working for us. Why would we let them go? That’s why Jesus said that it’s “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” That’s hyperbole, of course; Jesus went on to say that “With God, all things are possible.”
The churches where I grew up talked a lot about “getting saved,” by which they meant going to heaven when we die. But Jesus focused on entering the kingdom of God here and now. If we do that, the afterlife takes care of itself. Jesus defined salvation as transformation in this life, and he described the result in his parables and the Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus calls on us to move beyond the first half of life, beyond the preoccupation with ourselves. He calls on us to follow him, to die to ourselves, to our egos, and to be transformed by God’s Spirit. He didn’t tell us to worship him; he told us to follow him, to take up our crosses. That’s a hard first step, but it leads us to a life that we couldn’t have imagined before.
It doesn’t matter whether we’ve broken every rule in the book. It doesn’t matter if we’ve kept every rule in the book. Like in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, God not only stands ready to receive us, he comes running to embrace us in the road. The only question is whether we are ready to accept that embrace, to lay down our egos and open ourselves to a life of love.
I like to think that after he walked away, the rich young ruler kept thinking about what Jesus told him. I like to think that later in life he might have come to grips with his wealth obsession, let go, and followed Jesus. The door was always open; he only had to walk through.
Just like us.
Let’s pray.
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