“Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time…and in the age to come eternal life.” (Mark 10:29-30)Security comes from two Latin words which, when you put them together, mean “free from care.” We all want to be free from care. We don’t want to have to care about where our next meal is coming from, or where we will sleep with our family tomorrow night. Because we are a church, we frequently get people coming off the street asking for money, to get their lights and heat turned back on, to avoid eviction from their home, to feed their children this week. I have noticed that often they don’t look as “well-kept,” as we do. But of course, if you have to spend your days thinking and caring about the basics of life – food, shelter – you probably won’t have as much time or energy to care about your appearance.
The two main characters facing Jesus today are both full of care and feel insecure. Representing the disciples, Peter knows what they all have given up. He has given up a moderately successful fishing business. He has given up his wife’s company, all to follow a man who said that foxes have holes and birds have nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head, much less his followers. His insecurity is obvious.
But the rich young man? He was quite secure in his home, surrounded by his possessions, lacking none of the comforts of his life. Except that runs up to Jesus, kneels before him and begs, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” What a shock that must have seemed to the people around him and Jesus, who had always assumed a direct connection between God’s love and prosperity. But this man, far richer than most if not all of Jesus’s disciples, is learning what they can’t: that all the riches of the world don’t answer the most important question, what will my earthly life have meant when I am dead? Jesus knows this too, which is why he “loved” this man enough to tell him the truth, however much it actually adds to his insecurity.
Many scholars have noted that Jesus's testing of the rich man involves the 2nd half of the Decalogue, that which guides our relationships with our fellow human beings. Murder, adultery, stealing, perjury, all are covered in The Ten Commandments. Fraud is the act which results from coveting that which belongs to your neighbor. Honoring your parents is also an action. Many scholars have wondered about Jesus's silence on the first commandments, the ones of the heart, the ones about our relationship with God.
But Jesus's follow-up with the rich man can only be fully understood in the light of the first two commandments. Sell everything you have, and give the money to the poor, Jesus says to him. What he is telling him is this: Let go of your idols, those “things” on which you have bet your security, those “things” you have used to reassure yourself that God is beside you. All your money and all your possessions can't make you feel secure or reassure you of God’s presence. If they could, would you be here now asking how to inherit eternal life?
The 2nd commandment: You shall not make an image of God and worship it as though it was God. Any of the concrete things of this world on which we bet our security other than the God we can't see is an idol. Jesus isn't adding to this man's to-do list. He isn't giving him an outreach program to execute. He's trying to get him to see where he has fallen short of the 2nd commandment. Then come, Jesus concludes, and follow me. Yes, only God is good. But as God made visible, I am your way to him, and I am the fulfillment of the 1st commandment to worship only the one God.
To be fair, all we know is that the rich man went away grieving. Perhaps he was resolved to do what Jesus said. Giving up that much of our earthly security would be a grievous process for any of us. More to the point is the reaction of his disciples, who prove that they're no better off than the rich man. They haven't placed their bets on prosperity. As Peter rightly says, they have left their occupations and their families -- as much business partners as companions -- to follow Jesus. So what's in it for them?
As we have seen and will see next week, they have bet their security on power, more specifically Jesus’s power and their access to that power. And power has become their idol. So at the end of today's Gospel, Jesus spells it out for them. Are you concerned that you have lost the extra hands to help feed you and clothe you and shelter you? You're going to have thousands of extra hands: mothers and children, brothers and sisters. But no fathers, because you have the only Father you'll ever need, in your living and your dying. And that Father guarantees your security, not to be free from earthly cares, but to never drown in those cares if you let go of your idols and walk in the way of Jesus. Your security is now and always will be in your relationships, those that are given you and those you build.
What must I do to inherit eternal life, was the question with which we began, even though the rich man treated salvation as something to be earned and then stored securely away more than given as an inheritance. Yours and my security is not something that any of us can earn and insure against loss. What must you and I do to inherit eternal life, and to be secure in that life? Open our doors to those mothers, those sons and daughters, those brothers and sisters whom we could never imagine: and open our hearts to the Father of us all.
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