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Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost – October 13th, 2024
Mark 10:17-31
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
The man who ran up to Jesus in our gospel reading this morning had it all. He was wealthy. All his life he had kept the second table of the law, the commandments governing how we treat others, and so he was what people recognize as a good person. In Matthew’s version of this same story, we also learn that he was a ruler, so he had power. He had prestige. Matthew also tells us he was young – so it is probably safe to assume he still had his looks and his health as well. Like I said, this guy had it all.
But he didn’t really have it all, did he? Something was missing in his life. Something was missing, and he went to Jesus to find it. In fact, he ran to Jesus. This was urgent! He knelt before Jesus, showing both his vulnerability and his reverence for Christ. And then came the question: “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
In spite of “having it all,” there was something he lacked. He lacked peace. In spite of all his earthly blessings, he was still anxious about his relationship with God. In spite of all the outward blessings he enjoyed in life, he lacked the assurance that his eternal future was secure. He lacked hope. He lacked the true joy that comes from a trusting and intimate relationship with the God who created him and who held his future in his hands. And so this outwardly blessed but inwardly anxious man fell at Jesus’ feet and said to him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“Why do you call me good?” Jesus replied. “No one is good but God alone.” We shouldn’t read too much into this. This isn’t a theological statement about the hypostatic union. This isn’t suggesting that Jesus wasn’t truly the sinless Son of God. What Jesus is doing here is challenging this man’s assumptions. What he is doing is giving the hint of an answer to his question, which is that “goodness” has nothing to do with inheriting eternal life! You don’t earn it. You don’t get in with a good resume. A relationship with God isn’t dependent on your own goodness. If it was, no one would have a relationship with God. This is Jesus’ assessment of humankind: “No one is good but God alone!”
And then, as if to show this man that no one is good but God alone, Jesus started listing off the commandments. “You know the commandments,” Jesus said, “You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal or bear false witness or defraud.” And this rich young ruler responded by insisting that he had kept all these commandments since his youth. Check, check, check, and check.
Jesus then looked at this outwardly blessed and inwardly anxious young man, and, St. Mark tells us, he loved him. And so it was out of love that Jesus then zeroed in on his sin. Jesus put his finger on what it was that was getting in the way of this man’s relationship with God. It was his wealth. “Sell what you own,” Jesus says, “give the money to the poor – then come, follow me.” Jesus called his bluff on his keeping of the First Commandment. The First Commandment says, “You shall have no other gods,” and wealth had become his god.
Note well that in telling him to sell everything he owns and give it to the poor, Jesus was not giving this man something to do in order to earn him a place in the kingdom. Jesus was not prescribing a good deed that would finally put him over the top. Jesus was calling his bluff. Jesus was showing him his sin.
This becomes obvious in what happens next. In what is perhaps one of the saddest moments in all of scripture, the man hears what Jesus says, and he turns around and walks away. He just couldn’t give up the wealth which had become his god. “He went away grieving,” St. Mark tells us, “For he had many possessions.”
Jesus then turned to the disciples and said, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God.” This declaration caused the disciples to be perplexed. They were confused. You see, going all the way back to Abraham, wealth had been seen as a sign of God’s blessing. In fact, in the popular piety of the day, any good thing that happened in your life was seen as a sign of divine favor. And this man had it all: he was rich, young, powerful, and apparently, well-behaved! If this guy couldn’t be saved, who could!
Jesus then said that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. Several years ago, there was an interpretation of this saying of Jesus making its rounds which suggested that there was a place in Israel with a very narrow rock canyon called “the eye of the needle.” Supposedly travelers got their camels stuck in there all the time, but if they unloaded their camels and soaped their sides and made them suck in their guts, and if they pulled on their harness from the front and shoved their butts from behind, they could potentially squeeze their camel through. It was hard, but it wasn’t impossible. This is the “So you’re saying there’s a chance!” interpretation.
But this is exactly the opposite of the point Jesus is making! This is a proverbial saying. It is a proverbial camel and a proverbial needle. It is a like when we say something will happen “when pigs fly,” or that something has “a snowball’s chance in,” well, you know where. What we mean when we say that is, “It ain’t happening!”
The disciples got this. They got what Jesus had just said, and they were shocked by it. They were perplexed. They were greatly astounded. So they asked Jesus, “Who then can be saved?” If the people we always thought of as blessed and good can’t do it, who is getting in? And then Jesus lays it bare. He tells it plain. He says, “With mortals it is impossible.”
But that’s not all he says, is it? Jesus also says, “but with God all things are possible.”
I believe this poor rich man, perhaps more than anyone else in the entire Bible, reflects the spiritual state of our nation, our community, and much of the time, us – you and me. There is a quiet desperation that plagues so many in our decadent culture today. Like this poor rich man so many of us are outwardly blessed but inwardly anxious. Like him we have many possessions, but we are utterly lacking in peace, in hope, and in true joy.
And, as it was for him, this is a First Commandment issue. We stubbornly cling to other gods. That is to say, we look to things other than God to give us peace, hope, and joy. We turn to idols, those things we make more important than God. These idols are often wealth and the pursuit of it, but they can be other things too. They can be any number of the many things that our wealth makes possible. Our idols can be comfort or busy-ness. They can be television or alcohol or food or sports. There is the digital idol we carry around in our pockets, those phones we turn to over and over again for fun and for validation and for the answers to every question we have, letting them shape how we view others and the world around us. Our idols can be our political ideology and our election hopes. A pastor friend of mine recently quipped that, “nothing flushes out peoples’ idols like a close election.” Our idols always come back to us in the form of self-righteousness. We are our own idols, thinking we are good, or at least good enough. Keeping seven out of the Ten Commandments is good enough, right?
But it isn’t good enough. The First Commandment, “You shall have no other gods,” is the granddaddy of them all, and it is the one that trips us all up.
Who then can be saved? For mortals like you and me, it is impossible. Full stop. It will not be our goodness that saves us. It will not be our efforts that help us to gain eternal life. It will not be anything we do. Our Lord Jesus could not be more clear: “For mortals, it is impossible.”
Thankfully Jesus doesn’t stop there. “But not for God,” he says. “For God, all things are possible.”
Dear friends, the impossible has been made possible by God, who sent Jesus to us not just to be our “Good teacher,” but to be our savior. Now the question is not “What must I do to inherit eternal life,” but “What has he done for us?”
The impossible has been made possible by God as Jesus, himself young, himself possessing all the riches of God, himself ruler of all creation, gave up everything for us on the cross, looking upon us with love as he did so, making it possible for us to inherit eternal life with him.
The impossible is made possible today as God moves our hearts to walk towards this savior of ours instead of away from him, receiving what he has done for us through faith.
The impossible is made possible today as God moves our hearts to lay down our idols and to hold those outward blessings more loosely, in order to take hold of the peace and hope and joy only he can give.
Only in him do we truly have it all.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church