The man who comes up to Jesus in today’s Gospel (Mark 10:17‑30) is a very good person, to be sure, but he has serious deficiencies where the Gospel is concerned. He is focused on what he must do, rather than on his relationship with other people. He thinks it is enough for him to be a morally good person, but the Gospel demands more than that.
Jesus at first replies by reminding him to observe the Ten Commandments. These commandments do involve relationships with other people, but in this case, and very often in our case too, the emphasis is on what we do for ourselves rather than what we do for others. That is revealed in the way we frequently make our Sacramental confessions: “I was not at Mass on Sunday…, I disobeyed my parents…, I stole money…, I had lustful thoughts…, or did ‘bad things’…, I gossiped…, I was jealous or envious…” These are a litany of personal failures, with no mention of faulty relationships with others—a failure to love. Love or compassion are never mentioned: I am sorry because I broke rules, and in doing so I have disappointed other people around me.
The young man, in all sincerity, tells Jesus that he has always obeyed these commandments. Maybe he was expecting to be told that that was all he needed to do. If that was the case, he was in for a disappointment.
Looking at the man, Jesus tells him: If you wish to be perfect, … you lack one thing: go sell what you own and give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” (Matthew 10:21)
Jesus, like any good confessor, was zeroing in on the young man’s weakest point. The man did not understand that wealth and religious perfection could conflict with each other. The man had asked for perfection and Jesus was asking him to give up the one thing that he thought was a clear sign of God’s approval and blessing. If you read on past today’s gospel, you will see that the disciples held the same belief.
Jesus was making it clear that personal moral perfection is not enough to follow the Gospel and be a member of the Kingdom. To be a follower of Christ, one must become a partner with God in the creative work of building the Kingdom, a complex of mutual relationships based on truth, love, respect, and justice.
The man is not told just to give alms (a percentage of his wealth) generously to the poor. He is told to sell ALL his property and give it to the poor. The Gospel is not about giving donations from one’s surplus; it is about sharing what one has with one’s brothers and sisters.
If I have $100 and I give $10, or even $20 dollars, to the needy, that is alms or ‘charity’. But if I give at least $50, that is sharing. The Gospel is only interested in sharing, not just in alms giving. In alms giving, poverty is temporarily alleviated, but not removed. In sharing, there is a solidarity.
This is the meaning of the story of the feeding of the 5,000 in the desert. It is the meaning of the Eucharist that we celebrate. In the Eucharist, we do not just ‘receive’ Jesus in ‘communion’. We also should be expressing a solidarity of sharing by eating together from one loaf, which represents all that we as a community have and are. Sadly, we would have to admit that most of our Eucharists are, strictly speaking, a form of sacrilege and blasphemy as many of us have no intention whatever of doing anything of that sort.
And this is the point that Jesus brings up with his disciples later. After the rich man had gone away, unable to part with his wealth, Jesus commented on how difficult it was for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God. Being rich, by definition, does not just mean having a lot. It means having a lot more than others where, among those others, there are many who do not have enough. Wealth and poverty are relative to each other. An ordinary middle class person in a modern city today enjoys amenities that would have been completely unknown, even to the very wealthy, of another age. A ‘peasant’ regarded as very wealthy in a rural area may not have as much as a factory worker in big city.
That said, the disciples are “greatly astounded” by Jesus’ words. They ask, “Then who can be saved?” To the disciples, and probably us too, wealth is a sign of God’s blessing and, as such, highly desirable.
Then the disciples begin to see the other side of the picture. They themselves, before joining Jesus, were far from being rich. Now they have gone further. They have given up everything to be with Jesus: their families, their profession and the instruments of their work. They have done what Jesus told the young man to do. They have found that to follow Jesus is not to enter into a kind of emptiness. On the contrary, by following his Way, they enjoy an abundance of blessings.
The followers of Jesus are to be bonded in a close fellowship founded on mutual love, care and compassion. They are to build a community where everything is shared, where each person’s main concern is to see that the needs of brothers and sisters are taken care of. When we all give, we all receive. This was what the rich man in the story—and those who cling to wealth in every age—did not understand. At its best, religious life is an attempt to put this Gospel vision into practice, but here too, legalism has often stifled the spirit.
Jesus wants his followers to understand what they need is not wealth, but the wisdom of which the First Reading speaks (Wisdom 7:7-11). It is wisdom which brings us a deep insight into the really important values in life. To have such wisdom is real wealth because it opens the key to happiness, inner peace, and security. Is not that which we all long for?
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!