Faith | Cats | Hope | Grace

Woof. There are some days that Jesus’s words are hard. Love God. Easy. Don’t be an impediment to others coming to God. Check. Sell all my worldly goods and follow Jesus. About that…

That is one of the many gifts of our Scripture. We are given stories and examples of the variety of human behavior in the face of demonstrating their faith. Examples that we might want to emulate and others, not so much. A particular favorite when I was a kid the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego who were unwilling to renounce their faith in God and bow down to King Nebachadnezzer and were thrown into a fiery oven. As a kid, I thought I’d would definitely be like that trio, willing to stand firmly in my faith no matter the consequences. Who doesn’t want to be the hero of the story. The model of faith in the face of death. Then there are other stories, like Peter in the hours leading up to the crucifixion where he denied Christ three times. In the face of possible persecution, possible crucifixion, Peter runs scared. Both are stories of faith tested. Both are stories of the accurate and realistic human response.

I think the wealthy young man believes himself to be a person of faith doing all the right things to inherit eternal life. No murder? Check. No adultery? Check. Honoring his mother and father? Check. Then comes the stumbling box. Jesus tells the young man to sell everything he owned and give it to the poor. Scripture describes the man as shocked and going away grieving. Not just sad. Not just resigned. He goes away grieving.

I wonder if the man’s grief was two-fold. There is the difficulty of giving up something he held dear and the difficulty of the realization that he isn’t the person he thought he was.

The young man is suddenly confronted with the realization that he wasn’t as fervent a believer as he’d thought. I can image that he had come to Jesus, perhaps in an unexamined part of his heart, thinking he was going to be lauded by Jesus as a model of faith. There was nothing else he needed to worry about doing. He most certainly was going to inherit eternal life. And then he encounters a mirror that shows his failings. Where he is falling short of his own ideals. And that realization can cause grief that can deeply shake a sense of self. What happens if it turns out we aren’t as good as we felt ourselves to be. What happens if it turns out we aren’t who we thought we were. And how do we recover from that mismatch. Do we take the opportunity to examine why who we want to be and who we are aren’t matching up? Do we let that moment of heartbreak break us open for the possibility for a new way of seeing or a new way of being. Or do we deny what’s been shown to us and hold on fiercely and perhaps dangerously to who we think we are?

The other reason that the young man, and we in our own times, are brought up short is the recognition that there are things that we are holding onto more closely than love and service to God. Again, the young man is able to proudly note the commandments that he is following. But I have to say, he should have known something was up. Jesus skips over asking him about the first five commandments and goes to the second half. These are the commandments about how we are to be community together. And these are incredibly important commandments. But they are second to the commandments about our commitments to God. That love of God feeds and fuels how we are community. And this is where our friend trips. Jesus is able to see that while the man may be a good member of the community there is something he is putting in front of his love for God. His love for his wealth and his material goods. Everything was going great until Jesus asked him to let go of his wealth. 

This is a hard passage to hear. Letting go of the security blanket of money and wealth and the very real security that brings is daunting. It just seems so impossible that we choose to ignore it. “Jesus must be using hyperbole. He can’t actually have meant for us to sell all we own and follow him?!” So in the face of the challenge we claim Jesus really didn’t mean it and at least he didn’t mean us.

I wonder if Jesus was speaking less to the problems and evils of wealth and more to its place in the young man’s and in our own lives. We are holding on so tightly to this one thing that it keeps us from having a hand available, the space available, the openness of heart available to let God do a new thing. We can love things to death. 

What Jesus might have seen in that young man is that money and wealth had moved from being tools to being an idol. I think that is the heart of what Jesus is pointing out, that first half of the Ten Commandments, having no one or no thing before our relationship with God.

And this is where we start to try and give ourselves out. We say to ourselves “I’m not wealthy. I have just enough to take care of my needs. This doesn’t apply to me.” And while that might be true by the letter of the statement, what else in our lives have we perhaps turned into idols for ourselves? Does our sense of our status within our community keep us from being willing to be servants of others. Or our busyness. “I don’t have time to nurture a relationship with God because I’m so busy doing every other thing.” Or a concern about what others will think about us—whether relating to our faith life or just life in general. A love of money is not the only thing that can keep us from loving God with all our being. What in your life has become an idol?

In my neighborhood there was a trapeze school. Under careful supervision, students learn to swing from the trapeze bar and catch or be caught by another person. The image of flying through the air just looks so fun. I have wanted to take one of these classes for years. But what I’m afraid will happen is that I’ll get on the bar and swing and swing and never let go. I can imagine being so comfortable, and to be honest, too scared to let go. But sometimes that is the only way to live into a fuller relationship with God. Letting go is the only way to embrace where God is taking us. Our relationship with God can be exciting, exhilarating, mundane, terrifying. It will require sacrifice, sometimes of something that seems so important, something that seems utterly essential to our being. So sometimes you have to let go of that security, that sense of security that may not be as safe as we think it is. And with open hands, we are able to grab onto something new. Something necessary to our relationship with God. So I say to us, fly my friends. Fly!