Mark 10:17-31
“Tough Acts to Follow”
October 14, 2018
Maybe the man with lots of stuff wouldn’t have had to walk away from Jesus with such deep and stunned sadness if only Marie Kondo had been around two thousand years ago. Just think, if he had heard her theories he may have been able to work toward a life less filled with stuff, leaving room for greater purposes like serving the poor. Have you heard of Kondo’s little book which was all the rage a few years ago? It’s called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of De-cluttering and it’s based on two basic steps to get rid of all the extra stuff that is filling our closets and drawers and spaces of all types in our homes and keeping it de-cluttered, making room for more intentional living.
The first thing you are supposed to do is to put your hands on everything you own and ask yourself while doing this – Does this spark joy in you? If it doesn’t you’re supposed to then silently (or if you’re like me and find yourself talking out loud to yourself) thank it for its service and get rid of it. Then once all that touching and thanking and disposing is done and you are surrounded only by joy-giving objects, you are supposed to put each item in a visible place that is accessible so you can get to it and, I guess, savor the full joy from the object easily.
If you take one look at my office bookcases which are a pretty good indicator of my acquisitiveness, you will know that I have not yet embraced Ms. Kondo’s method but I keep thinking I should every time I go into my hall closet and pull something off the shelf and I’m showered with a random sampling of umbrellas or gloves or purses.
The man, who had many possessions here in Mark, known as a “young man” in Matthew and “a certain ruler” in Luke’s Gospel is what could be described as a seeker. He comes to question Jesus not as a hostile opponent, as some of those who encounter Jesus on his travels do, but rather he is one who has faith and has done works. He is the kind of person many of us would like to think of ourselves as yet once he gets to Jesus, the answer Jesus has for him as the way to have eternal life is the thing he is not yet ready to hear. Are there things we know we should be doing to be Jesus’ followers that are just too hard for us to wrap our hearts and minds around? What would help make it any more possible for us to follow Jesus?
This lucky or unlucky man, depending on your perspective, who lives comfortably in a world which, back then, was more vividly distinguished between the haves and have-nots than we are today, is faced with a moral dilemma. During Jesus’ time on earth there were the wealthy and then there was everyone else who lived a daily existence in which they labored long and hard to put food on the table for their family, carried their water great distances and lived in very modest dwellings. Savings and insurance were non-existent. There was a greater dependence on the people around you for your care when you were ill or widowed or fell on hard times. The fact that he had so much to give up made this challenge that much simpler. The thing that was standing between him and life everlasting in God’s kingdom were those things that distinguished him from most other people of his time and which, ultimately he won’t be taking with him to the grave.
This is a hard story to hear because we can so easily relate to this man. We have built an economy and a whole way of life based on buying and producing and consuming and owning. We regularly hear the reports on the news that tell us what the Gross Domestic Product is which measures the total expenditure for goods within the country within a specific period of time. We are measuring our success as a nation by how well we produce and then purchase more stuff. Plenty of the stuff we produce in this nation is meant to be purchased by folks around the world so that they too can have more stuff. This way of thinking obviously makes it tough to buck the trend and say “No, I have all the stuff I need. I would rather spend my resources by investing in people and improving the quality of life for others.” This way of thinking would force us to reconsider how we exist as a nation. That is certainly a more overwhelming question than the one the rich man proposed to Jesus and the answer, I fear, would be filled with daunting complications. Maybe we need to start smaller and closer to home.
The challenge for us, as it was for the man with too much stuff who was in dialogue with Jesus, is that perhaps, like him, we are too wrapped up in ourselves. After all, if we’re really honest with ourselves isn’t the need to buy, protect and hold onto our stuff all about what it does for us? I doubt too many of us go on-line to shop or into a brick and mortar store and think, “I need to do my part to support the U.S. economy.” What empty space are we trying to fill with more stuff? In the end, as the man with the possessions learns, it is not all about me.
James Thompson reinforces a bigger outlook when he says, “If our primary concern is our own salvation, through faith or works, then we have missed the point of both faith and works.” (Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 4, p. 168) It is only when we stop worrying about ourselves and turn our attention to God and neighbor, that we are released from the stranglehold of self-centeredness which comes in the form of our worry about our fate which inevitably fuels the security that we think we can purchase when we surround ourselves with more things. Deep down we know that money cannot buy happiness but that still doesn’t stop us from trying.
Realistically, a devotion to the poor can be risky. Obviously the rich young man who came up to Jesus knew there was something more he could or should be doing. Jesus was not looking for perfection but rather effort. Archbishop Oscar Romero, who devoted his life to the poor and was an outspoken critic of the injustice he saw all around him, will finally be made a saint by Pope Francis today, decades after he was passed over for sainthood because of his support for the concept of liberation theology which speaks of Jesus’ preferential option for the poor. Back in 1980, Romero was killed by a sniper in El Salvador while saying Mass after having been threatened many times. Romero could not stay quiet when he witnessed the suffering of so many of his fellow Salvadorans. May these words from Oscar Romero get us started on the path to figuring out how we, each of us individually and collectively as the body of Christ, may turn away from acquiring more and toward those who have so little, knowing we do not act alone but rather allow that through God all things are possible: “We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.” Let us de-clutter our hearts and minds and our very lives and make room for God’s grace. Amen and amen.