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The Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Almighty and everlasting God, who in Christ hast revealed thy glory among the nations: Preserve the works of thy mercy, that thy Church throughout the world may persevere with steadfast faith in the confession of thy Name; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Proper 24)
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The Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Mark 10:17-31
A Sermon by
Fr. Mead
on
Mark 10:17-31
✛
The Love of Money
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“Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen
There is a saying, Don’t ask a question if you are not ready to receive the answer. In today’s story from Saint Mark’s Gospel a rich man [Matthew says he was young; Luke says he was a ruler] runs up to Jesus, kneels before him, and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life.
He gets his answer. You know the commandments, says Jesus, Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother. The law of Moses says if you do the works of the law, you will live. Both Jesus and the man know this. “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.”
We may imagine now a moment between the man and Jesus. There still seems to be a question hanging in the air. Since the man kept the law, why did he need to ask the question? Yet he asked it, and there is something touching in the way he asked it – his running up to Jesus, his kneeling down, his deferential address, “Good Teacher…” (about which Jesus cautions him, that there is none good but God alone). It is as though there is something else, and it is that something else that Jesus understands; the problem of our relationship with our possessions.
Jesus, looking upon him, loved him, says Saint Mark. He loved him enough to tell the man the truth he was asking for; the truth that answered the question that remained after the keeping of the commandments. That question that nags at you, said Jesus, that makes you run up and kneel down even after you have observed the law, shows that you lack one thing that you cannot have until you let go of what you have. “Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Follow me to Jerusalem.
“At that saying the man’s countenance fell, and he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions.”
“Such, O my soul, are the miseries that attend on riches,” commented Saint Augustine, who knew. “They are gained with toil and kept with fear. They are enjoyed with danger and lost with grief. It is hard to be saved if we have them; and impossible if we love them; and scarcely can we have them, but we love them inordinately. Teach us, O Lord, this difficult lesson: to manage conscientiously the goods we possess, and not covetously desire more than you give to us.”¹
Commenting on the departure of the rich man, Jesus said it is very hard for a rich person to enter into the kingdom of heaven; that it takes an act of God. There were some rich men and women among Jesus’ disciples. There were women who supported Jesus and his disciples’ itinerant ministry by providing substance, food and shelter. There were rich men in the ruling Jewish council, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who were disciples, but they had to be careful. Peter, James and John were fishermen, not rich, but who left behind a decent livelihood to follow Jesus and become fishers of men. There was a rich tax collector, Zacchaeus, who, when Jesus invited himself to dinner, announced he was giving half of his goods to the poor. There was a Roman centurion and a servant in the court of Herod. There was Saul of Tarsus, who left behind his family inheritance and Barnabas, who sold land and gave the proceeds to the apostles [who gave him his name, which means Son of Encouragement].
It is possible that the rich man in today’s Gospel, as he went away, carried home the burden of his attachment to his possessions and thought about the answer he had received from Jesus to the question that drove him, a law-abiding son of the old covenant, still to ask about eternal life. Perhaps the longer he thought about it the more he recognized himself in what Jesus said.
The mystique of money is not to be underestimated. When young Pip, the chief character of Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations, unexpectedly came into a great inheritance, everyone’s bearing towards him was strangely transformed! Thus, wrote Dickens, was Pip introduced to the “stupendous power of money.”
Money is not intrinsically evil. It is the secular sacrament of value and honesty. “Follow the money,” is a reliable saying. Nevertheless, as Saint Paul warns, the love of money is the root of all evil (I Tim 6:10), a disease which is universal. If it is not in the form of greedy grasping, then it is in the form of insecure anxiety, or of envy of those who have more than we. Bondage to possessions can take the form not only of greed to gain but of fear of loss. “Beware,” said Jesus, “of all covetousness.”
Think about the human hand. When it is grasping for something, or clutching onto a possession that is “mine,” the hand is not open to give or to receive. Greed or anxiety about money are often connected to fear, symbolized by the tight fist. All these are overcome by love and generosity. A hand which opens to give is also able to receive. There is no fear in love; perfect love casts out fear. We worship a Lord who, though he was in the form of God, did not count his equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a servant, even to death on a cross.
Today’s Gospel leaves us with a warning and an encouragement. The warning is, Beware of the love of money, the grip of covetousness, the bondage to possessions. It is a love for something that we cannot take with us. Stupendously powerful as money is, it is not a substitute for love or life. The encouragement is, It is in giving that we receive. Those who love find they are loved abundantly in return. Those who give and are generous discover that the bread they have cast upon the waters has returned in good measure, in forms never imagined. Generous people are happy people.
One last word. It’s Every Member Canvass time. Make a pledge to Saint Thomas for 2007. You can’t buy love or your way into heaven, but what a good way to get some immediate exercise in generosity.
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
__________
¹Ancient Christian Commentary of Scripture, Mark, p. 145.
