ORDINARY TIME, 28TH WEEK

October 11, 2009

Mk 10, 17-30

CANA GOOD BOY GROW UP? Mini-series on discipleship, n.4

We are working each week at present on some traits of living a ‘child life’ as a key to becoming a real disciple of Jesus. This week we are going to look at allowing the initiatives in our life to come from someone and somewhere else than ourselves – as children do. We can find that idea if we look at the gospel passage today.

This well-known story deserves a close look. It is often called the story of the ‘rich young man’. There is no actual mention of his youth in Mark’s text! It is only Matthew who makes him ‘young’ as well as rich. Often we hear a comment on the text that highlights the difficulty of having riches and becoming a disciple of Jesus…. Here we go, God not Mammon etc…

Fair enough. But read the text. This man has kept all the commandments of Torah. He has done it all. That means, he has also helped the poor, the widow and the orphan, and he has done this presumably using some of his finances. He has done right by God and by Israel and by the poor. Perhaps he has not given away ‘all’ he owns, but he doesn’t seem to have had trouble with that sort of thing before. If there is need, he gives. Anything God asks. He seems able to disburse himself to whatever extent asked for, and to give it all to the poor, whom he has helped and loved. So what is his problem? I don’t think his problem is letting go of his riches. I think it is in the further invitation from Jesus – ‘come, follow me’.

Before we look at that, let’s note that he has been ‘a good boy’ ‘from his earliest days’. Is his faith a bit immature? Is it a kind of infantilized faith? Has he grown up? Did Matthew read it right when he called him ‘young’?

To follow Jesus (or anyone else) means making an act of faith in Jesus’ person and his values and his program of life. It means handing over to him the initiative in deciding the direction to go from here on, and the circumstances surrounding that. It means letting Jesus, not himself, call the shots. It is a big ask. For a man who has read the book, done the book, and called all his own shots on the road. It’s hard to ‘follow’…

There is a lot in the word ‘follow’. Elijah once said, follow some god, be it Yahweh or Baal!! But follow!! The hard part is not finding the right god, it is being able to follow at all….

It reminds me of the scene in Dostoievsky’s Brothers Kramazov. The Grand Inquisitor interviews Jesus. “Your gospel, Lord, is too demanding. It is reserved for an elite, for an elite group that is thirsting for the Absolute and that has no weaknesses. It is not for normal people. It is reserved for some few special people whose moral courage can only put off weak and mediocre people like us. That is why we are going to water it down, we are going to eliminate this radicalism that puts fear into everyone, we are going to bring it down to the level of tepid people. We are going to make it acceptable to the world, in the name of a fully human mercy, and not let it disturb our tranquility.”

In today’s gospel the demand was too high for this rich and religious Jew called by Jesus to follow him.

I read a story recently, of another ‘rich young man’. When he was young he listened to church people telling him and his mates not to be cocky and macho, but to be meek and mild like a child. He thought it was pathetic. He thought it had nothing to offer – not robust enough. He dropped out of religion. Some years later he was a member of an airborne infantry combat battalion of the US forces in Vietnam. One night on guard duty in the darkness of the jungle and brightness of the stars, he felt guilty. He had killed that day. He had taken life. And he now experienced brokenness. He was poor. He wondered where he was before God if there was a God. He was not the captain of his ship. He could be killed at any moment. He began to think there must be a better way to live. He began to think that meekness, and justice, and mercy, and peacemaking had something. They were a counter-measure to the way society operates, to the way he was operating. A better way. A childhood. Now, he could ‘follow’.

It is interesting that Mark’s text goes on to describe Jesus taking a child and inviting his followers to welcome the child. Is Mark (and Jesus) saying that to respond to his call we must give up a false adulthood as well as an infantile way of believing, to discover that child in us? Is there yet another dimension of ‘child’ that we need to heed? That is, the capacity to be led, and to follow?

I suggest it has two elements. One, we need to think as if we are not the most important person on earth, so it is ok if we go along with someone else who is in practice right now more important than we are. Two, some particular direction and circumstance isn’t in the last analysis all that important either – let someone tell us one, and it might be as ok, or better, than another one we might dream up for ourselves! Neither we nor anyone else has to be 100% right and perfect all the time!

The child does that spontaneously. It is hard for an adult, self-possessed, with means to do what he or she wants, to do that….

An outstanding example of someone who, ‘rich’ enough, gave it away and followed a call from Jesus, is Helder Camara. It is currently 100 years since his birth. He was brought up to be a conservative, orthodox religious (Jesuit) priest and bishop. Then he discovered the poor of Brazil. In them he heard Jesus asking him to follow Jesus in the poor. He gave his life as service of the poorest. He became the voice of the voiceless. His daring in their favor was prophetic. He demanded for them, not charity, but justice. He insisted on justice as a condition of peace. He was non-violently active, and actively non-violent. He slowly built up a brotherhood of truly human people who joined the poor and became poor with them. He got very close to the excluded, and enabled them to come up with solutions to their problems. He set up a’providence bank’ with ‘micro credits’ so that they had and owned the wherewithal to live in a basically human way together …He said, and he showed them, that God’s love for them was bigger than any diocese and any church institution.

He was censured by the military dictatorship. His successor in the episcopate would try to destroy all he had done. Some in high places in the church wanted his voice and his life to be forgotten. But John Paul 2 called him the brother of the poor, ‘my’ brother…

It is easy to think you are following Jesus if you imagine piously some spiritual Jesus saying nice things to you in your dreams. But that is not following the real Jesus. The real Jesus himself followed the poor of God. When he turns to you from among them, and asks you to follow him and them, perhaps you realize the truth of the gospel comment, it is hard for a rich man to do that…it’s ‘hard to follow’….

But then it helps if you have something of the child in you…the capacity, that is innate in a child, to follow the real….