21st Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 10:17-31

So we are taking a bit of a break from our Season of Women this week.  There’s no women in our lectionary this week and a whole lot of us are going to be at Crossroads this week so we are are taking a couple of weeks off.  But don’t worry, the women will be back at the end of the month and there are some bangers coming.  But alas, I apparently didn’t plan this well because we return to Mark this week with a humdinger of a text (Maybe I should have just found a woman to talk about).  But that’s okay, we can work with this, because you know what, I like this passage.  Quite a lot actually.  And it contains a lot more good news that one might think at first glance.

Our story opens with a man who approaches Jesus on the road asking for guidance.  He is a religious man and he wants to know what he must do to inherit eternal life.  And so after questioning him and discovering that he is already a devout man who knows and keeps the basic commandments, Jesus tells him to “Go, Sell what you own, and then come follow me.” And the man is shocked and sad and goes on his way.

Now what surprises me is that so many modern commentaries and interpretations of this passage assume that this man leaves the encounter and never comes back.  They assume probably like many of you when you heard this passage read a moment ago, that as a rich man and clearly a rather arrogant one at that, he had too much to sell, would never give it up and therefore rejected Jesus’ teaching.  Maybe this is a reflection of our modern emphasis on wealth and our obsession with materialism that we can’t even imagine the possibility that this man would obey Jesus’ command and actually do what he says.

Older commentaries on the other hand often see just the opposite, they place this man in midst of a long line of holy people from old testament prophets, to Jesus’s other disciples, to the early dessert fathers, to great Christian saints like Francis of Assisi who all gave up their wealth and station in the world to follow the will of God.  They assume that he went away grieving not because he would not be able to follow Jesus, but because he intended to follow Jesus’s request and he knew it would be hard and probably painful to give up the comforts he had in search of a better life.

Now I have to say that I personally come down on the side of the ancients here.  Because those who assume man left forever overlook one key verse.  That Jesus looked and him and loved him before ever speaking his command.  Jesus knew and loved this man.  Now ask yourself, is there anything, anywhere in the gospels that would indicate that Jesus would ever look at someone he loved and reject them out of hand simply because of who they are?  That Jesus who touched lepers and dined with tax collectors, who called women and outcasts his friends, who comforted the criminals hung at his side and forgave even his betrayers and captors, would reject this particular man and only this man?

Or maybe, just maybe, Jesus did exactly what he always does, he looked this man in the eye, knew the depth of his soul, loved him as only God can love and told him exactly what he needed to hear.  Maybe this man had been searching for this truth, maybe despite his pious life he had been searching for a deeper connection to God that drove him to seek out Jesus, maybe he already knew on some level that his wealth and his devotion to material things was holding him back, maybe he already wanted to take this step and had been too afraid until now.  Or maybe not, maybe it did come as a complete shock, but no matter what, Jesus told him what he needed to hear for himself, that sometimes we must give something up, sometimes something that seems very important to us to make space to reap the blessings that God has set out for us. 

What Jesus told this man to do was not some kind of impossible task or punishment for being wealthy, it was a kindness.  Sometimes we need to let go of the things that are holding us back, even if those things seem critical or important to us in order to fulfill the true purpose God has set before us.

But the real good news of this story comes in what Jesus tells his disciples after the man leaves.  In his odd little parable about the camel and the eye of the needle.  Now in the northern wall of Jerusalem where the main road reaches the city, archeologists have found two gates.  One huge main gate where all the big caravans and trade goods enter, and a little pedestrian gate called the “Eye of the Needle”, which pilgrims and people like Jesus and his disciples who weren’t carrying very much with them would have used.  You see The Eye of the Needle gate was very small, only about 6ft tall and 3ft wide.  A Big loaded caravan camel would never fit.  In order to fit through the gate, it would have to unload all its baggage.

So here is astonishing news, when it’s time to enter the kingdom of God you have to unload all your stuff.  You get rid of all your baggage.  All this stuff from your life on earth no longer matters.  Wealth, achievements, prestige, success, guess what you leave that here.   Even all your good works, your kindness, your charitable acts, it gets left here too.  But along with that you also leave behind all the bad stuff, your mistakes, failures, sins and misdeeds.  That’s why Jesus tells us it is impossible for mortals to be saved on their own, all our stuff doesn’t matter.  We have nothing left to barter with and we don’t need to because it is God who does it, he is the one who carries us through the gate and all our baggage stays firmly on the other side.

Today we are reminded of the one truest axioms in life that ‘You can’t take it with you’ and none of it was really ours to begin with.  So instead Jesus invites us today to take all our baggage real physical, emotional or historical and set it down.  To let it go in order to make space for the true gifts that God is giving you.

Now this is no easy task, because we tend to like our baggage, in fact we often love it, it is comforting, safe and darn it we worked hard on it.  It represents the symbolic distillation of our values, our memories, our life’s work and accomplishments.  Even all our emotional baggage, sometimes that can be even harder than the physical stuff to let go of, our anger and mistrust protect us, they keep us from being vulnerable and risking getting hurt again, and they along with our nostalgia can prevent us from feeling other scarier things and facing deeper issues or a frightening or uncertain future.  But guess what, Jesus wants all that baggage too. 

God wants to bless us, he wants to give us new life and life in abundance, the great impossible gifts that are we can never achieve on our own because for God nothing is impossible.  So he invites us today to set down our burdens, to lay all that baggage down at the foot of the cross, all that hurts us, distracts us, drives us away because in the end, we can’t take it with us anyway, but the one thing we can count on, the one thing we will always have is the all-embracing love of Christ, who will always tell us the truth.  Amen.