Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve
The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 23 B, October 13, 2024
“Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “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.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”
Christ has come to inaugurate the way of life, which he calls the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. He inaugurates through power. His power is the power of love. He expresses love in the way he invites and liberates; in his surrendering and suffering love. He does not inaugurate by domination and never uses power over to impose, coerce, or control. The way of life comes in freedom, or it does not come at all. His freedom in inviting meets our freedom in responding. Each of us chooses to enter or we do not enter at all. He calls forth the desire in every human heart for meaning, hope, community, purpose, and promise and reveals that this very desire has its source and end in God. Being created by God and for God, we discover our true identity, our true home in responding to the invitation to follow the way of life and receive the gift of life, real life. We bear the divine image and no substitute identity will ever satisfy. Jesus appeals to our goodness, enlivens our longings, and illuminates the obstacles within and around us on the path to life. The gates are always open to any who will hear the call to repent, be liberated, be unburdened from the weight of attachment to the transitory and the temporal, and come.
Christ welcomes so-called “sinners” into the way of life. In the gospels, they almost always know their need, seek him out. Many in the out groups seek out Jesus, touch him, call to him, cry to him, interrupt him, get in his way as they discover in him the power to restore their dignity and their hope. He relieves their pain, reconciles them from their status as outcasts, as unclean and sends them joyfully back into community and connection. For those of us who in some way or at some time have been outsiders or the victims of prejudice and judgment and met by a Christ who loved and accepted us, we know that the power that brought life to the lepers and demon possessed, the prostitutes and tax collectors, can and does bring power today in the hearts of so many who experience harm.
The gospels also include another kind of conversion story. The so-called “insiders” are invited into the way of life as well. In the religious culture of Jesus’ day, the religious elites, the rich, those with positions of power thought of themselves and were believed to be blessed by God - they had arrived into the realm of the “converted” because they were not “sinners” or “unclean”. These are often, but not always, those who are scandalized, confused, or, because he represents a threat, oppose Jesus. For Jesus, “no” is an answer. Today’s gospel is a story from this second group. This man sees the world through the lens of his status and wealth. Eternal life is a possession like all my other possessions and I can obtain it like I have obtained all my other possessions - by some act, or price, some access to improving my insider status. He is not in need of the same kind of compassionate, healing touch that the leper or demon-possessed need. His pain is more in his heart than on his skin. His isolation is more spiritual than social. His sense of emptiness hidden and buried under the illusions that his possessions can satisfy. Yet, even if the awareness is only a glimmer, the ache of dissatisfaction only a faint echo that appears in the silence of the night, he still desires real life. The desire is inescapable, relentless, haunting the edges of his storehouses and treasure chests, refusing to leave him alone. He is in need. He has money. He will satisfy his need like he has satisfied every other need. Jesus surprises him. Jesus’ response is about to send him away in shock and grief.
Entrance to life costs. The kingdom exacts a price. In our myriad delusions about our identities and our own programs for individual happiness, we keep ourselves outside, resist life. We may believe we desire life, but not act in ways that lead to life. Jesus presents no utopian vision of instant bliss. The way to the kingdom is a narrow, difficult, and winding way. We may seek to avoid the difficulty and search for an easy road, for cheap grace. We may desire entry through power or status, money or education. We may rely on seeking moral goodness or conformity to social norms of purity for special access. These are dead ends that seduce us into believing we have capacities we do not actually have, means to negotiate what we want at a sale price. But Christ in his grace brokers no shortcuts, no exceptions, no earning or deserving our way in by what we have or do. The way to life is not a philosophy, an ethic, or the accumulation of good deeds. It is surrender, emptying, death and resurrection. Whatever I bring with me to the entrance to life to get me in are the very things I must leave in order to be made ready for entrance. Entry is a continual process. I am always only beginning to enter the kingdom - never arriving, never possessing its fullness in this age. Therefore the way to life is a scandal, a crisis, and a gift. The crisis is to surrender whatever appears as essential to meaning in order to receive the true gift which is the actual fulfillment of meaning. We are all too eager to fixate on the instant, the easy. Jesus warns that these are illusions which in fact are obstacles to the most valuable way of being, obstacles to real life.
As modern listeners the temptation is often to hear the text in order to get an answer or to follow an instruction - bridge the meaning into our world by reducing the story into mere moralisms, yet more performing and achieving and being good. Such a response misses the deeper truth. Life is discovered not in having, but in belonging. And we cannot be attached to anything and receive the gift of belonging at the same time. Jesus says, “It is you I want for myself, not anything you may accomplish. I will not rest until all of you is enlivened by love and grace and you abide in the fullness of your glory as beloved sons and daughters made in God’s image.” We enter life by allowing the burning away of all that cannot enter, until we walk through with empty hands, claiming no rights, hiding nothing. It is precisely by owning up to and inhabiting our void that we are offering ourselves up to God’s mercy. The invitation to this man and to us is what Eugene Peterson calls a centered, submissive way of life. He writes,
“Americans in general have little tolerance for a centering way of life that is submissive to the conditions in which growth takes place: quiet, obscure, patient, not subject to human control and management. The church is uneasy in these conditions. Typically it adapts itself to the prevailing American culture and is soon indistinguishable from that culture: talkative, noisy, busy, controlling, image-conscious.”
So this other kind of conversion, the conversion of those of us who enjoy some level of possession and status and goodness, is to be utterly stripped, dispossessed, emptied, made void, plunged into the terrifying emptiness, consumed by God’s love, offered up to God’s mercy, and then given away. Self-sufficiency, the impulse to dominate, hoard, defend, control all die on the cross with Christ. Then the seeds of life - searching for good, receptive soil in which to root - will appear green and full. We will become generous, free, receptive people so that we might enjoy the riches of God’s goodness in God’s good world more abundantly. Then we will receive good things as gifts to be shared.
“Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age…and in the age to come eternal life.” Amen.
