Several decades ago, at a time when I was thinking very deeply about God and money, I went to my then Presbyterian pastor and asked her what to do. “What’s the right amount to give to the church?” I wanted to know. Should it be a tithe, a tenth of my income? That seemed like a guideline for good Christians. It would have been a challenging pledge for our family, but not likely to break the household bank. And I, like the young man in Mark’s Gospel, was really committed to doing the right thing for God. I waited for my pastor’s affirmation.
She held her silence for a moment longer than was comfortable. Her gaze was warm, but unflinching. In hindsight, I recognize that hers was a look of love; the kind of love that could see more faithfulness in me than I could see in myself. After that penetrating pause, she spoke with measured compassion. “It’s not enough,” she said.
I might have laughed, but I didn’t. I might have argued, or excused myself as fast as possible. I might have been shocked, and gone away grieving. But instead, I matched her in reverent silence. I understood exactly what she meant to communicate. There is no fraction of my income that is proportionate to the generosity of God. There is no list of commandments I could follow that would make me good enough to merit the love of God. Because God’s goodness does not require anything of us. Instead, invites everything of us.
I love Jesus in the story we heard today. I love the one who promises a hundredfold to those of us who would risk our community and comfort to follow him. I love the one who upends the usual order of things, naming the first as last and the last as first. I love the one who pauses to love a conflicted man despite his apparent unwillingness give away his money and follow.
I love the man, too. In part because I see myself in him. And I also see in him my father, an alumnus of Harvard Day School—you Los Angelinos in the congregation will recognize that name— and eldest son of a manufacturing entrepreneur. I see Brett Kavanaugh at the top of his class at Georgetown Prep, striving for admission to Yale. What must I do, what more must I do, wonder the expectation-laden young men of the privileged classes, who publicly mask their youthful self-doubt with alcohol and aggression. At least the man in Mark’s Gospel—whom Luke calls a ruler and Matthew describes as young—at least this particular Hebrew prep school student had the courage to ask his anguished question out loud. No wonder Jesus loved him.
What must I do to inherit eternal life? That’s such a heartfelt question, although not one people around here ask a lot. I think there’s an analogous question, however, for contemporary people with wealth and power. Which in a global sense, is all of us, whether we feel like it or not. What must we do to not lose our capacity for empathy and love? That’s a question with direct bearing on our salvation because—however, we understand the saving grace of God—it’s not something any of us benefit from absent the full participation of the poor and vulnerable. There are no border walls keeping widows, orphans or refugees out of the kingdom of heaven.
Contemporary neuroscientists—who seem to have a remarkable capacity to empirically corroborate what sages have taught for centuries—warn us that privilege and power actually damage our brains. They make us more impulsive, less risk-aware, and less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view. They erode our capacity for “mirroring,” which is the neural architecture of empathy. So I wonder if Jesus wasn’t implicitly saying to the young man, “preserve your God-given capacity to love others.” Leave aside your money, follow me and my motley band of powerless people, and learn what it is to live a life of vulnerability and interdependence. Save your brain from thinking you are the center of the universe. Compassion is the way you will inherit eternal life.
This past Monday was the federal holiday of Columbus Day, named for a rich young man of the 15th century, who had a taste for adventure and a remarkable lack of empathy for the human beings he encountered in his travels. Of course we in Portland celebrated Indigenous People’s Day if we celebrated the holiday at all, which is a welcome correction. But I am equally intrigued by a recent popular movement to re-name it Bartolome Day, in remembrance of Bartolome de las Casas. He had been born in Spain barely a generation after Columbus, but was a direct beneficiary of his conquest. Bartolome was one of the first colonial settlers of what was called the new world, and his participation in ongoing military incursions against native peoples made him wealthy in land and slaves. He was indeed a rich young ruler.
He was also a priest; his military service had been as a chaplain. And according to his own diaries, it was his study of a passage from Ecclesiasticus 34 that led him to free his slaves and give away his land. “The eyes of the Lord are on those who love him,” It says. “[But] if one sacrifices ill-gotten goods, the offering is blemished; the gifts of the lawless are not acceptable” You might say that it was the loving eyes of the Lord in this text that caused Bartolome to abandoned his ill-gotten wealth. He passed the remainder of his life as an advocate for the rights of indigenous people, and his writing foreshadows contemporary Latin American Liberation Theology.
Christopher Columbus and Bartolome de las Casas; two men of relative privilege who became wealthy from the spoils of the European colonialism. One kept his spoils and got a national holiday named after him; one gave his wealth away and became a political target of the colonial class. It would be easy to see their examples as a binary choice, just as we might be tempted to look at the action of the man in Mark’s Gospel. Give it all away or keep it. Follow or turn away. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews is equally binary in describing the decisive encounter with the word of God: “sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
Does the story of the young man pierce your heart? It does mine, in different ways every time I read it. Let me encourage you to linger with any discomfort it raises for you, never losing sight of that look of love that Jesus offered the man. I can’t know how this challenging story will interact with the thoughts and intentions of your heart, but I hope you will be patient to learn it’s lessons for you. And if you listen carefully for what the story says—and equally for what it does not say—you’ll notice that it does not actually tell us what happened to the man.
The ambiguous ending is a favorite of Mark; he concludes his entire account of Jesus’ ministry with two woman running in fear from the empty tomb. But we know, and Mark’s original hearers knew, that uncertainty and fear was not the final word on Jesus’ ministry. The existence of their community was an ongoing manifestation of resurrection, just as ours is today. The ambiguity in the text finds its resolution in our response to it: we are the ongoing Gospel story. Which is why it matters so much that we make faithful choices about our money and our following of Jesus.
And I like to think that scriptural ambiguity also gives us an opportunity to make different choices over time. Just as the colonial impulse that made Columbus rich also converted Bartolome de las Casas, human beings—individually and collectively—have the capacity to respond to the same situation differently over time. On a personal level, I don’t give everything, but I give a lot more now than I did on the day of that fateful encounter with my former pastor. On a societal level, laws that protect the dignity of women have gotten stronger in our lifetimes. And trusting that we all have the capacity to make more faithful and just choices, I pray that the young men who graduate from our elite prep schools now will be advocates for their female peers. I pray that our newest supreme court justice will as well. Markan ambiguity allows for any number of outcomes, even within the same person. Because—as far as we know—the rich young man could well have returned to follow Jesus later.
So let’s we ourselves take the risk of returning to this story, time and again. Make the best choices we are able to, today, and—whether we give 10% or 100% or nothing at all right now—allow ourselves to rest in that unwavering gaze of love. Which—as long as we’re willing to return to it—will steadily transform us into people of greater compassion, justice, vulnerability and generosity.
