Sermon preached at Christ Church, Georgetown
Washington, D.C.
October 10, 2021 / Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31
In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Every few years, the Pew Research Center conducts what it calls the “Religious Landscape Study,” polling thousands of Americans on their religious and devotional commitments. The researchers regularly flesh out the results with more targeted studies, which investigate particular questions in detail. The most recent one of these such studies to catch my eye was released three years ago, when Pew asked a sample of several thousand adults their top reasons for attending religious services. The response was overwhelming. Eighty-one percent of respondents cited “becoming closer to God” as the major reason for going to church.[1]
This is an absolutely timeless impulse, so of course it trumps all of the other causes of religious devotion. Blaise Pascal famously described a hunger in every person to know God, deriving from a God-shaped hole at the center of every fallen human heart, and the gospels are littered with accounts of men and women, from many and varied backgrounds and experiences, seeking Jesus Christ, knowing him – even in sometimes inarticulate ways – to meet that need to become closer to God.[2]
That need is on vivid display in our second lesson this morning, and I know that I don’t need to summarize or repeat a single word of the story. Countless generations of Christians have known it by heart. Even in our secular age, we all still know about the rich young ruler, or (as I prefer) simply the rich young man. He appears in the gospels of Sts Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and he is always the fall guy, always the person who didn’t have what it took; Jesus told him the way to eternal life, gave him the roadmap of the way toward perfect intimacy with God in the clearest and most unmistakable terms, and he went away.
But I think we can rehabilitate this man, this interesting character who comes to Jesus, seeking to lead a life of meaning and purpose, and who goes away when he discovers what it is that our Lord asks. I think we should have some hope for him. Because his response is not anger, not the kind of argumentative disbelief that proceeds always from a guilty conscience. We can assume from his somewhat naïve-sounding obsequiousness, when he kneels before Jesus, that he was genuinely convinced that Jesus held the keys to eternal life. And so when he hears that the cost of eternal life will be high, he simply goes away, as St Mark tells us, and he goes away sorrowful.
We all remember this story because it bothers us. It challenges us.[3]
I am mindful that I am up here preaching during the season when Christ Church is in fundraising mode, and that is, in the Lord’s wisdom, not incidental. Now, it would be overly facile – but not incorrect – of me to draw a direct line from the rich young man to your financial commitment to this parish. I won’t say to do what the rich young man couldn’t, by giving generously to the work of God in this place. I’m not going to tell you that your relationship to your own resources has more impact on your well-being, on your ability to draw closer to God, than almost anything else.
I’m not going to tell you any of those things, because you already know them to be true. That’s why everyone knows the story of the rich young man; it sticks in our heads, it challenges us, it bothers us, especially if you – like me – are the kind of person who dearly loves his creature comforts. Sell all that I have? Surely Jesus can’t mean that!
We assume that the rich young man didn’t want to do what Jesus told him, but I think that he did! I think that’s why he went away sorrowful! Because he knew that there is a cost to discipleship, that there’s a cost to following our Lord faithfully, and he knew that he would have give things up to do it.
St Mark is silent on what happens to the rich young man next. We don’t know that he went home, looked at all that he had, took a deep breath, and decided to liquidate. But we don’t know that he didn’t, and I like to think that he could have. I like to think that he could have gone home, even if that looked like starting small.
It’s a tiny but significant part of this story that just before Jesus tells the rich young man to sell everything he owns, that he pauses. As St Mark tells us, he looked upon this man, and he loved him.[4] This news, that the way to eternal life, the way toward growth in the knowledge and love of God and of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, is costly, is news delivered with love.
That leads us to the final, and wonderfully ironic, turn to this story. At the end, Jesus is explaining things to the disciples, who as always don’t really understand what is happening, but they are boasting about how they did what they assume the rich young man won’t, that they have left everything and followed Jesus, that they should inherit eternal life.
And Jesus turns the tables on them. The disciples, who were last in human society, but have become first in their little band of followers of Jesus, when they fall into boasting and pride, are reminded that perhaps they shall be last in the kingdom of God, and that the rich young man, he who went away sorrowful, he who in this world was last to the party perhaps shall be made first.[5]
That is the kind of God we have, the God of grace and mercy who is made known to us in Jesus Christ. The kind of God who puts down the mighty from their seat, exalts the humble and meek, and delivers all of us, all of us who would follow our Lord’s command, delivers us from a present that never satisfies us, experience that deceives us and leads us one misfortune to another until death comes as the ultimate and eternal climax, as Paschal put the human catastrophe.[6] With humans, this is impossible, but with God, all things are indeed possible, even this, even now, even for you and me.
If you have come to church this morning seeking to draw closer to God, if you’ve come seeking a life of purpose, a life of devotion to the only one worth following, then I suspect that you already know that it’s something you can’t do in half measures. And my prayer for you this morning is that you would do in actuality what the rich young man did only in theory: that you would accept the freedom in Christ that is offered to every one of us, by giving into his service the fullness of what you are, and the fullness of what you have, and all of it to the honor and glory of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
AMEN.
[1] Pew Research Center, August 1, 2018, “Why Americans Go (and Don’t Go) to Religious Services,” https://www.pewforum.org/2018/08/01/why-americans-go-to-religious-services/
[2] “… this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées (New York: Penguin Books, 1966), 75.
[3] Hebrews 4:12
[4] Mark 10:21
[5] I don’t think it unreasonable to speculate that Nicodemus is doing the work of the rich young man in St John’s gospel.
[6] Pascal, Pensées, 75.