What's Missing?

 

What’s Missing?

March 26, 2021

 

It’s a familiar little story to many of us. You’ll find it at Mark 10:17-22. A man comes to Jesus and kneels before him. He ask Jesus what he must do to inherit what he calls eternal life. Unfortunately the story doesn’t tell us what he, or it, means by eternal life, but never mind. Clearly eternal life is something this man is powerfully concerned about and something he thought Jesus could help him with. Jesus says to the man you know the commandments. Don’t murder. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t bear false witness, and a few others. The man claims to have obeyed those commandments all his life, so Jesus tells the man that he lacks one thing. He tells the man to sell all he has, give the money to the poor, then come follow him. The man goes away grieving because, we’re told, he had a lot of possessions.

What’s going on here? I mean, this man is successful both by the standards of the Jewish faith tradition of his time and by the standards of the world. He has done what his religion has told him to do, and what Jesus at first told him to do, in order to be right with God. He has kept at least the most basic commandments of the Jewish law. He’s at least relatively rich in the way the world measures such things. Few people in his world owned much of anything beyond the bare essentials, if they owned even that much. This fellow is an exception. He apparently has had the resources to acquire a whole lot more than the bare necessities of life. It would seem he has it made. I mean, religion is about obeying the rules, right? And being rich and owning a lot of stuff makes you happy, right? By both the religious and the secular standards of his time, and of ours, this guy is living the good life.

Yet he comes to Jesus and asks how he can get something he hasn’t got, something he calls eternal life. Why? I don’t think he’s being greedy or selfish here. Rather, I think that the question he asks Jesus tells us that at some level he knows he’s missing something really important. Why else would he go see Jesus at all? I don’t think it was just out of curiosity. He did after all ask Jesus a pretty important question. Jesus wasn’t any kind of success by the standards of either his faith tradition (which at the time was all about obeying rules) or of his secular culture. Like all secular cultures, including ours, Jesus’ secular culture was about acquiring wealth as the criterion for success. Jesus had no time for the temple authorities and their rules from Leviticus. He owned essentially nothing and relied on others to provide the necessities of life for him. On the surface it makes no sense for this worldly, successful man to go to Jesus for much of anything.

Yet something was missing in this man’s life. He sensed a lack, though he may have sensed it only at a subconscious level. He may not even have understood fully why he went to ask Jesus this question, but he went. Jesus knew the man was lacking something important, and he knew what it was. That’s why he told the man to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor. Giving to charities that help people in need is a very good and worthwhile thing, but that’s not why Jesus told this man to sell everything he owned and give the money to the poor. Jesus told him to do that extreme thing because he knew that it was the only way to move him beyond the place where he was stuck and get him moving toward finding what was missing in his life, in his soul.

So what was missing? Several things, or perhaps just one thing that we can express in several different ways. They’re the things that are so often missing from the lives of people with many possessions. A commitment to the values of the Reign of God rather than the reign of Caesar, whatever form Caesar may take at any given time and place. A commitment to follow God’s ways rather than the world’s ways. Commitment to love our neighbor as ourselves. A reason to live beyond himself and his selfish desires. A desire for more spiritual wealth rather than monetary wealth. A desire for a life of depth and real meaning. A commitment to what is good and true rather than to the false desires of the world. Jesus knew what this man was missing, and he prescribed shock therapy to bring the man’s unconscious sense of what he was missing into his consciousness so that he could deal with it constructively.

As the New Testament says, it isn’t money that is the root of all evil, it the love money that is. 1 Timothy 6:10. We can safely assume that the man in this little story loved money. In my experience the people with the most money are usually though not always people for whom money is the most important thing. This man’s love of money was keeping him from living into the better angels of his nature. It led him to substitute what is false for what is true. Jesus knew that about him. Perhaps at the end of the story the man was beginning to know it himself. We’re told that he went away grieving. Why was he grieving? He could have just brushed Jesus off telling himself that that guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He didn’t have to take what Jesus said to heart, yet it seems that to some extent at least he did. He probably went away grieving because at some level he knew that Jesus was right. To use some old time religious language, he felt himself convicted. He wasn’t happy about it. He knew that to gain what was missing he’d have to turn his whole life around, to rethink his values and restructure his priorities. He’d have truly to admit to himself that he had been on the wrong track. None of that comes easily to any of us. Perhaps as he walked away from Jesus he hadn’t yet decided to do what Jesus told him to do. Perhaps he never would. Still, that he went away grieving tells us that somehow what Jesus had said to him to some extent at least struck home.

This story isn’t just about something that happened a long time ago in a place far away. It’s about us. This story points to the divine truth that true faith isn’t about obeying rules and true wealth doesn’t come from material possessions. And like all good Bible stories this one calls us to ask ourselves some hard questions. It moves me to ask, “Am I the man of this story?” Like him I yearn for a proper relationship with God, what the man in this story calls eternal life. Like him I have many possessions, or at least I do by the standards of much of the world if not by American ones. Like him I don’t cotton much to the idea of selling them all and giving the money to the poor. I think this story calls all of us to ask the same question the man asked Jesus and to be honest about answering it. I don’t mean that we necessarily need to sell everything we own and give the money to the poor. We too need the essentials of life after all; but I do think this story, like the whole Bible, calls us to reevaluate our priorities. To reassess our values. To be honest about whether the love of money or of anything else is keeping us from the fullness of the spiritual life that truly is a goal much to be desired, that is true wealth indeed. To be serious and prayerful in discerning what is missing from our lives. If we will do that, and if we are honest about our answers, this little story will have done its divine work in us. May it be so.