Sell! Sell! Sell!

Jesus was never particularly soft on rich people.  “Good teacher,” the young man asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” 

His question is one that all the faithful ask at one time or another; the rich young ruler’s words are echoed in my own thoughts.  His question resounds with the individuality that we’ve come to expect today; it is doused with a liberal dose of flattery.  “What must I do…?”  There is no need to hear what anyone else should do; the only important person is me.  All the others who are listening are inconsequential to me because I have everything – I am young, I am rich and I am in charge of a rabble much like this. I know just enough to be dangerous and I am pious enough to fake my way through the religious shallows of life.

I stand back in the shadows of this story, smirk on lips, as Jesus brings this arrogant young man back to reality.  Enough of the flattery – don’t presume to know who I am by simply because you’ve heard my name in the streets:  “Why do you call me good?”  You don’t know anything about me.  You’ve been raised in a religious family.  You can repeat the commandments, I’m sure – “Do not commit adultery.”  Interesting that Jesus puts this commandment first for the rich man because he is probably unaware that his own love affair with himself and his wealth had broken the back of the commandments in his life for most of his adult existence.   “Do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and your mother.”

Jesus doesn’t even put the commandments in the right order.  Didn’t he ace his confirmation lessons? 

My guess is that Jesus was watching this young man very closely.  Inwardly, the young man might be checking off the list of the commandments on his fingers and piously - and shallowly - examining his own life. 

You can almost see him blowing on his knuckles and polishing them on his chest.  “All these I have kept since I was a boy.”  Maybe his voice was raised so that the entire crowd could witness the blessing that would be coming from the ‘good teacher’ for his righteousness from birth.  It was obvious, wasn’t it, that he was born under a lucky star – fame, fortune and glory followed him.  Now, it was only a matter of time that God’s almighty presence would bestow spiritual glory also.”

“You still lack one thing,” Jesus says. 

Standing the in the back of the crowd, the shadows wrapping me and my voice like a blanket, hiding me from the rich ruler’s eyes, “Yes, Jesus, give it to him.  He lacks humility.  He lacks empathy.  He lacks generosity.  He lacks all the good things that any self-respecting Christian would covet – peace, patience, meekness" – I use my fingers as counting tools, checking them off in my own external judgment of this man that I so desperately want to be.  I want his looks, his past, his future, his money – I feel dis-comfortable with my own lack of resources which make me doubt God’s existence and blessing.

And in my own casting of the first stone, I would guess that Jesus eyes turn towards me and he points the same finger at me, “Sell everything you have and give it to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven.  Then come, follow me.”

To contemporary western Christian culture there are no harder words that Jesus spoke.  Sell everything – not just the things that you’ve outgrown and grown to dislike – but everything.  Sell it all and give it to the poor.

Surely Jesus isn’t serious.  Selling everything would swap me positions with the poor.  Then I would be one of them.  Then I would have to depend on other people.  Then I would have to depend on God…

Then, I get it.  The impossibility of the scenario that Jesus places before us is that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God – whatever (and wherever) that is.  All the storing up that I’ve done for myself, my addiction to having enough for tomorrow and the next day, all the manna that has fallen from heaven into my lap, the blessing of God’s daily goodness, has been stored up and rotted because I have collected so much stuff that I no longer need God. 

My soul has begun to decompose under the detritus weight of my idolatry.

Those that no longer need God no longer see the kingdom of heaven as a treasure and they then fail to realize that the pressure of protecting the things with which they been gifted is a betrayal of God’s blessing in and to this world.  When all of our treasures on earth are rusting and our clothing becomes moth-eaten and moldy, we recognize how traitorous we have become.

Back to the garage sale, I guess.  

If Jesus says to the rich man (and I certainly am one of those attempting to hide in the crevices of affluence) “Go and sell all that you have and give to the poor,” I guess it’s time for one more excruciating episode of hauling what I once thought to be treasures out the door to be sold on the pavement of my driveway for less than one hundredth of what I bought them for.  Each item, whether table or table cloth, with memory attached, will be priced to sell.  Early morning garage sailors will be swarming around our lane, picking through our things before we’ve even put up the sign.  I want to slap their hands away, chastise them for their rudeness because I know in my heart of hearts that they aren’t the poor that Jesus is talking about.  I pull out the garage sale chair, watch baseball with my little girls,and hope that Jesus can see my sad face as all these memories are sold.

But then I read a little farther in the New Testament, in I Corinthians 13, the amazingly repeated scripture that is used ad nauseum at almost every wedding that I’ve officiated.  Almost always we start at verse four: love is patient and kind – check… but almost always we skip the first three verses.

Let me show you the most excellent way.

If I speak in tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

 

Shedding my things might be hard, but added to the recipe is a full measure of love.  That might be even more difficult.  But when we truly understand love in this world, a love that always looks outward and away from self: an agape kind of love expressed by God in his son, Jesus, the pain of loss morphs into something different.

Joy.

Not happiness.  But joyful contentedness in whatever might happen and the true blessing of shedding that which is conceivably dearest to me is a genuine need to depend on God and others.  In those dependent relationships we find freedom.  Strange, isn’t it?  The bondage of mammon enslaves us to selfishness, but the freedom of a Christian binds us to God.