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Our New Testament text this morning is about a rich man in a hurry. We’re told that he “runs up” to Jesus. He doesn’t just happen to be near Jesus or bashfully approaches him. No, he “runs up,” he hurries to Jesus’ side to ask him a super-size question: “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” As the story unfolds, we gather that he is a well-regarded and seriously religious person. We know he is courteous and polite by the way he addresses Jesus: “Good teacher,” he begins. And we know he is a moral and religious man because he tells Jesus he has scrupulously followed not a few or just some but every one of the commandments of God.
But that’s not all. This man in a hurry is wealthy. He has, we are told at the end of the story, “many possessions.” We may conclude from that description that he has either been quite successful in business, or has inherited a lot of property, perhaps a large home and some servants from his father or mother or some other relative. So by now you should have gotten the picture: This man has it all. He’s respectable. He’s courteous. He’s articulate. He’s seriously religious. He’s really rich. What’s not to like about him? Look, he’s a good, honest, well-to-do guy, the kind you would want to be the leader of the Parent-Teachers Association of your local high school. Indeed, if he were among us today, he could easily qualify as a candidate for the office of president.
But as I have already said, he is a rich man in a hurry. After all, a man of his stature and wealth is an important man, and he’s not accustomed to wasting a lot of time. So he “runs up” to Jesus to help him acquire something he fears he is still missing. What doesn’t he have? Listen again to his question to Jesus: “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” It appears that, despite all his wealth and all his respectability and all his confidence that he has followed every law of God without missing a beat, he knows there is something about his life that eludes his getting the blue ribbon, a final seal of approval. He wants some transcendent guarantee of the worthwhileness of his life, something all his possessions and all his painstaking piety haven’t given him. He senses a kind of emptiness in his life. He wants that emptiness to be filled. He’s looking for a larger meaning for his existence than he’s experienced so far. Sure, he’s living a respectable and comfortable life, but he wants more; he wants the assurance that who he is and what he has will in some way go on forever. “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
And Jesus responds to the man in two ways. His first response is, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” With those words our seemingly simple story has suddenly gotten complicated. That’s often the way with the stories of the Bible; you think the meaning is quite obvious and then something is said or done in the story, and you are left scratching your head. What are we to make of Jesus saying to the man, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” What I think we are to understand by Jesus’ question is something like this: My friend, you call me good. But do you really know me? Do you know anything about my ministry? Have you seen or heard that I heal the sick, feed the hungry, and bless the poor, proclaiming to them the message of God’s love for all people, and especially for the poor and the outcasts of society? Is that why you call me good? Or do you call me good only because you think I can be of use to you as you seek to fill up the emptiness in your life?
And then Jesus goes on to say to the rich man: “No one is good but God alone.” Why did Jesus say that? I admit that I am reading between the lines, but I’m not engaging in wild speculation. When Jesus says, “God alone is good,” I don’t think Jesus is denying that he has a special relationship with God, indeed that he is the Son of God who proclaims and embodies the very goodness, the astonishing grace of God. No, I think Jesus is again challenging the man from the very start of their meeting to consider the way in which God is good. Has the rich man in a hurry stopped for a moment to ask himself: How is God good? Does he think of God as good because God has given him all the wealth, all the many possessions, all the property he has that enable him to live a comfortable life? And now does he want to know what Jesus would advise him to do to make sure that this goodness of God, as he understands it, will extend into all eternity?
So when Jesus says to the man, “Why do you call me good?” the subtext of the remark could be paraphrased: My friend, come and get to know me and my ministry better. Right now you are thinking of goodness only in terms of what is in your best interest and for your own welfare. You have no place in your life for a greater good than yourself.
And when Jesus says, “Only God is good,” the subtext is: Do you, my friend, let God’s goodness regulate and enlarge your understanding of goodness? Do you really know the goodness of God: the God who delivered the miserable Hebrew slaves from bondage in Egypt; the God who instructed his people to protect and care for the widow and the orphan, the God who told the farmers not to clean cut all the harvest of the fields but to leave a portion of it for the poor folk who have nothing to eat and whose very survival depends on being able to pick what is left over; the God who commanded his people to welcome the strangers in their land, the aliens from other lands, because, like these strangers, they too were once poor and homeless and had to start life anew in a strange land. When Jesus says, “God alone is good,” he confronts the rich man with the truth that God alone is the measure of what is good, God wants us to share in God’s way of being good.
So, to summarize, in these two opening remarks to the rich man’s address, “Why do you call me good? God alone is good,” Jesus is asking him, Do you call me good because you have really understood that goodness is embodied in my ministry to all needy people, and especially to what you may consider the losers of this world? And when I tell you that God alone is good, do you understand that the goodness of the God who sent me on my mission is a goodness that embraces the weary, the down and out, the poor, the stranger, the wretched of the earth? Are you seeking to have a part in that kind of goodness when you ask me what you must do to inherit eternal life?
And then Jesus speaks directly to the question the rich man has asked about inheriting eternal life. Well, Jesus replies, you know the commandments: honor your father and mother, don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, don’t bear false witness against anyone; don’t envy your neighbor’s fame or fortune. And the rich man quickly replies, “By all means, I know all these commandments well, and I have kept every one of them perfectly and to the letter.” Now here again, the story presents us with another puzzle. The new puzzle is not in what is said by either Jesus or the rich man. The puzzle is in what neither of them says. Neither Jesus nor the rich man says anything about the first part of the ten commandments--those commandments that speak about our relationship to God. Only the second part of the ten commandments—the part that have to do with our relationship to each other--is mentioned in the exchange between Jesus and the rich man.
Now here’s the point: you cannot really understand why we are to relate to one another as we are commanded to do by the second half of the ten commandments, if you don’t have in mind how we are to relate to the God who has so graciously has related to us, which is what the first half of the ten commandments is all about. If you don’t recall who this God is who commands us to worship God alone, to bow down to no idol, to use the name of the Lord with respect, to keep the Sabbath holy, how will you know the basis and purpose of relating to one another as we are commanded in the second half of the ten commandments?
When in the commandments we are told not to kill, that means positively, respect the life of others and help it to flourish; when we are told not to steal, that means positively, live a life of gratitude for what you have and be willing to share it with others, and so forth. It’s because we have to do with a good and just God that all the other commandments about our relationship with one another, with our neighbors, make sense. Only if we keep in mind the goodness of God who wills that there be justice and kindness and peace in our life together and throughout the world, will we know why we are to do joyfully what we are commanded to do in the second half of the ten commandments. I would summarize all the commandments of God this way: Remember the grace and goodness and mercy and compassion and justice of God when you relate to your neighbors, and especially in your relationship to the poor and the sick and the strangers in your midst. Jesus’ summary is far, far better than mine: Jesus said: Love one another as I have loved you.
Now I do not pretend to know why Jesus didn’t say to the rich man: Listen my friend, have you forgotten about the first commandments of the law, the commandments that speak of the God who liberates slaves, and whose prophets calls us to care for the widow and the orphan? The God we worship is the God who shows his goodness and mercy and justice to us and calls us to take part in it. It’s at least possible that Jesus hoped the man himself would recognize the inner contradiction he was living by thinking he could fulfill all the commandments of God relating to his fellow human beings without taking into account what the nature and will of the God is who has given us these commandments.
In any case, we know that Jesus wanted to help the man. Describing just how much he wanted to help him, the text says “Looking at the man, Jesus loved him.” It’s one of the tenderest statements in the Gospels. But the love of Jesus is a tough love. While he wanted the vacuum in the rich man’s life to be filled, Jesus had to tell him what was missing in what he considered his contented and comfortable life. He had to tell the rich man that he suffered from a kind of blindness. So he said to the man: “One thing you lack: sell all you have and give it to the poor and come and follow me.” And with that, the face of the rich man in a hurry fell, and he went away sorrowful, “for he had great possessions.” And if the comment, “looking at the man, Jesus loved him” is one of the tenderest statements in the Gospels, the last line of the story of the rich man, he went away sorrowful, “for had great possessions” is one of the saddest.
This is a story, brothers and sisters, with depths of meaning, and it is easily misunderstood because at first glance because it seems so simple. One misunderstanding is that we are to tempted to say, Whoa, If this story is supposed to address everyone, it seems totally implausible, totally unrealistic. Are you kidding? Are we all to become a St. Francis, give away everything we have--literally everything--and begin to beg in the streets for our daily bread? Now I do not wish to take anything away from St. Francis. I honor him and am frankly awed by the life-changing decision he made. But his decision cannot be made mandatory for everyone, any more than requiring that clergy persons must remain unmarried can be made mandatory for all. If celibacy is your calling from God, by all means freely obey it. But to force it on everyone who is called to ministry is a mistake, and its outcome may well be tragic.
Let’s agree then: What Jesus tells this rich man is said to a very particular person with a very particular problem. Jesus tells him that his wealth and self-righteousness have blinded him to the needs of the poor and to God’s call that we do justice and love mercy. Jesus is telling the man: Break free, my friend, from your egocentric way of life. Open your eyes! Recall the word of the prophet Micah: He has told you, O mortal, what is required of you: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. God calls us to do justice because God is just; God calls us to love mercy because God is merciful to us, God calls us to care for the poor and the sick because God cares for the poor and the sick, God calls us to walk humbly with God because God in Jesus Christ has walked humbly with us. This particular rich man on that day he encountered Jesus needed to hear that message, and the only way Jesus could get the message across to the man was to say: Sell all your possessions, give to the poor, and come and follow me.
But does the story also apply to us? That question brings us to the second way the story of the rich man is misunderstood. It’s all too easy for us to hear this story and think right away of lots of people we know who need to listen carefully to it because it applies to them; maybe even to a presidential candidate who tells us how incredibly rich he is, or to all those CEOs and Hedge Fund Managers who are making many hundreds of times more than their employees. Tell them to read this story, we may think. My friends, it’s dangerous to our spiritual health to read the Bible this way. We are always to read it and hear it as being spoken somehow to us, to you and to me.
Now it would be presumptuous for me to say I know just how this story applies to each of us here this morning, what challenges it makes of us, what it would mean to take it to heart in our own lives. I doubt that anyone here this morning is anywhere near as wealthy as the rich man of our story, and certainly not as rich as the CEO of a prosperous modern company. Nevertheless, are we not all incredibly wealthy in comparison with millions of people in our own country, and probably billions of people around the world, and wealthy not only in material things but more especially in possibilities and opportunities to make a difference for justice and peace, a difference in the treatment of the hungry, the depressed, and the sick, even as we await and pray for the coming of God’s kingdom?
So whatever the story means specifically to each of us here today, the common thread of its meaning for us all will surely be: we are all responsible in our own personal relationships, in our church’s life and mission, in whatever sort of influence we might have in our communities, and in whatever way we can act as citizens of our society and nation; we are all responsible, I say, to be speakers and doers of justice and mercy. Maybe we are not called by Jesus, as he once called the rich man, to sell all our possessions and give them to the poor. But we are all challenged, and challenged again and again, to make concrete our witness to the justice and mercy of God, so that the poor may live, the hopeless be given hope, reconciliation and peace be given a chance, and we may be true disciples of Jesus rather than walking away in sorrow from his call to follow him. Amen.
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