Sermon for Sunday, October 13, 2024 || Proper 23B || Mark 10:17-31

Two weeks ago, we talked about clinging to the impediments that stand in our way of the abundant life that God yearns for us to live. Last week, we talked about Jesus’ desire for everyone to find deep, meaningful connections and build loving, mutual relationships. And today, we are going to tie those two ideas together as we talk about Jesus meeting someone on the road. Notice that I’ve just said that Jesus met “someone” on the road. I’m saying “someone” here for a specific reason. I know it’s not like me, but I’m being vague on purpose. 

Too often this person is called the “rich young ruler” when referring to this story. This characterization conjures in our minds a man in fine clothes, perhaps with a train of servants in tow – someone of much wealthier station than Jesus and his normal crowds. In my mind, the rich young ruler has always looked like Prince Ali in the Disney film Aladdin, when he parades through the streets of Agrabah on the back of an elephant with all his wealth and finery on display.

But this is one of those instances in the Gospel where what we think the Gospel says is not actually what it says. This person is not Prince Ali. Let’s look at how Mark describes this individual who runs up to Jesus. The English version we just read says that “a man ran up and knelt before” Jesus. The Greek doesn’t actually say this. It simply says, “one ran up to him.” The only way the person is given gender at all is through the gendered word endings in Greek. So this person could be anyone, not just a man. Furthermore, there’s nothing in the passage about the person being young. Further-furthermore, the person isn’t a ruler of anything.*

That leaves one final adjective: “rich.” The passage does not actually call the person rich; rather, it says that he goes away shocked and grieving “for he had many possessions.” So, the person that Jesus is talking to could be anyone, of any age, of any occupation, who has a lot of stuff. Calling the person the “rich young ruler” allows us to distance ourselves from Jesus’ invitation to divest himself of the possessions that weigh him down and to come follow Jesus.

But if this guy were transplanted into modern American society, I’d bet he’d be just like any one of us. Maybe he rushed the doors at Best Buy on Black Friday for a huge TV to replace the slightly less huge TV he bought there two years ago; or he accumulated a huge collection of DVDs he never watches; or he owns a garage so full of junk that the cars always sit in the driveway. Maybe he even has a self-storage unit for the rest of his stuff that doesn’t fit in the house. If any of this sounds familiar, it should. It’s a fairly standard American lifestyle. All this to say, the person who runs up to Jesus is you and me, plain and simple.

Okay, let’s step back for just a moment and talk about Mark’s Gospel as a whole. Mark’s is the shortest and snappiest of the four Gospel accounts. It is almost journalistic in its immediacy; it rarely wastes words, preferring instead to jump from one story to the next in rapid succession. So, when the writer of Mark does take a beat to elaborate on a certain scene, we need to sit up and take notice. And that happens in today’s passage. Before Jesus gives the person his invitation, Mark tells us this: “Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said…”

Another translation says, “Jesus looked at him carefully and loved him.” Because of his love, Jesus yearns for this person to unshackle himself from all the stuff that is weighing him down. Jesus discerns that his possessions are the impediments that are keeping him from embracing abundant life. He has material abundance, but material abundance so often turns people into misers, like Ebenezer Scrooge before the three spirits visit him. If the man could let those things go (and in the process provide for those in poverty), then he would be released to follow Jesus, to build new relationships free of the encumbrance of all that stuff.

In many video games, when a character has too much stuff in their inventory, they are considered encumbered. Until they get rid of some of their stuff, they will walk at a snail’s pace, unable to do anything. This is the way I imagine Jesus seeing this person – barely able to function because his possessions are weighing him down. In this way, Jesus sees him, looks at him carefully, and loves him.

Love is the key – love as the desire to weave him into a deep and transformative relationship.

Jesus loves this person enough to invite him into the abundant life of God and to provide a prescription for how to embrace that life. In effect, Jesus says, “Enter a deep and transformative relationship with me once your hands are free of the possessions that keep you from grabbing the hand I’m reaching out to you.”

When you put yourself in the place of this person, please feel the warmth and compassion of Jesus looking at you and loving you into new and lifegiving ways of being. Jesus may invite us to do something difficult in order to shed the impediments that keep us from embracing that life. And he will love us back to himself no matter how many times we walk away. Above all, Jesus yearns for us to form deep and abiding relationships with him for our own transformation and the transformation of the world. For those relationships to be real, we must be honest with ourselves about what stands in our way.

For some of us, what stands in our way might be clinging to our stuff like the person in the Gospel story. For others, it might be clutching at the myth of self-sufficiency, that very American myth of rugged individualism and the “self-made man.” For others, the caustic voices of inadequacy or worthlessness might keep us from responding to Jesus’ loving invitations. Or the opposite: the caustic voices of arrogance and narcissism might do the same. Whatever impediments stand in our way, Jesus will continue to look upon us with love, pouring that love into us like fuel, granting us the love-filled energy to confront what separates us from him.

For I don’t think Jesus stopped loving that person who went away grieving because of his many possessions. We never hear from him again in the Gospel story, but that silence gives us license to imagine. We can imagine the loving gaze of Jesus hovering behind his eyes every day after their encounter. We can imagine the invitation to unencumber himself working its way through his mind and down into his heart. We can imagine him one day, on a day of no particular importance, giving something away and realizing he felt a bit lighter, a bit less encumbered. The truth of Jesus’ prescription dawns on him, and he’s off to the races. And all because Jesus loves him – loves him patiently, loves him eternally – loves him enough to tell him what he needs to do to embrace life.

Jesus loves us patiently and eternally. Jesus loves us into deep and transformative relationships with him. No matter how many times we reject that relationship, no matter how many times we turn away shocked and grieving, no matter how long it takes to retrace our steps back to him, Jesus’ love for us remains. Thanks be to God.

---

* In Luke’s version of this story, the person is described as a “ruler,” but not in Mark.