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Mark 10:17-31 · The Rich Young Man
If I Were a Rich Man
Mark 10:17-27
Sermon
by Mark Trotter
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The gospel lesson for this morning is from the Gospel of Mark, the story of the rich, young ruler who came to Jesus, asking, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" This is usually interpreted as a text about money. But it is not really a story about money. It is a story about salvation, and a devastating critique of the popular notion of how you get it.

Money is a tool, an instrument, the means to an end. You can do all kinds of things with money. It is often said, "Money is the root of all evil." That comes from the Bible, from I Timothy, only that's not what it says in I Timothy. What it says is, "The love of money is the root of all evil." In other words, making money an end in itself is the source of evil.

Money can be the means of doing a lot of good, which is why Christians have an ethic in regard to money. It is called stewardship. Stewardship is based on the assumption that money is given to us as an instrument for doing good in this world. But more often, even among Christians, it is not used as an instrument for doing good, but to be somebody, a way of measuring success. Which is the way the rich, young ruler used it who came to Jesus, and which is still probably the way money is used today. Remember the Hunt brothers, down in Texas, who owned those football teams. I think it was Lamar Hunt who said of his father, "He really didn't care about money. It was just a way of keeping score."

That is a spiritual use of money, a way of gaining assurance that our lives are worthwhile and important. Which was the way money was used in Jesus' time. The dominant theology of the day was the idea that if you were good, then God would bless you with material things. You would become rich. If you were not good, then God cursed you with poverty, and all manner of evil would come upon your life.

That was called the "Deuteronomic code," because it came from the Book of Deuteronomy, which made it abundantly clear that God has arranged a moral universe with sanctions. If you follow God's laws, then you will prosper. If you do not follow, then you will not prosper.

There is truth to that. There are consequences to our actions. You can see it especially over the long haul, but not always immediately. You can see it clearly if you read history, but not so clearly if you read the daily newspaper. There it often appears otherwise. There are those who prosper, who get all the breaks in life, and they are far from being exemplary citizens. And there are other wonderful, beautiful, almost saintly people, who have all kinds of calamity visit their lives.

So Deuteronomy has to be qualified. But in Jesus day they did not qualify it. They took Deuteronomy raw. They believed that wealth was a sure sign of God's blessing in your life.

Now a rich man comes to Jesus. Everyone in the first century in Palestine would immediately recognize who this man is. He is the prototype of the good man. Once more, he can prove it. He's got wealth, he's got the credentials, which was to say, he was living the kind of life God wants him to live, and therefore God has blessed him.

In Mark he is simply referred to as a "man" who comes to Jesus. In Matthew he is called a "good man." In Luke he is called a "ruler." So the composite picture of him, which is probably accurate, is that he is rich, young, and a ruler, that is to say, a land owner. To put it in our terms, a young man comes to Jesus, extremely successful, extraordinarily rich, and therefore right with God.

Our reaction to such a life would be, "Well he must be doing something right." They would have had the same reaction in the first century, except they would have said, "He must be righteous." Which is the title given to successful people in those days, which meant they were right with God.

I tell you, the man who came to Jesus to ask, "What must I do..." would have been the envy in that society. If you know that, then you will be able to see how radical, and indeed how subversive, this scene is.

There are three extraordinary things to notice. The first is, the man kneels in front of Jesus (that in itself is an extraordinary act for a Jew to kneel in front of another man), and asks, "Good Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus rebuked him for using the adjective "good," saying, "No one is good but God."

So the scene begins with a contradiction of the popular opinion that the world can be divided between good people and bad people, and the simple way to tell them apart is to look at their circumstances. Good people will prosper, have good health, live well. Bad people will suffer and be poor. So here is the first assault on that popular theology. "No one is good but God alone." We are all sinners. That being the case, then maybe our safe, comfortable, affluent lives are not the product of our goodness, but the gift of grace.

Then the man's question, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" He is the last person you would ever expect to ask that question. It, too, is devastating to that whole popular religious belief structure which said, if you obey the law, do all the right things, you will know eternal life. He should know it. So why is he asking the question?

Then Jesus says, "You know the commandments." He then recites them. Actually he recites five commandments, the second five. The first five commandments have to do with our relationship to God. The second five commandments have to do with our relationship with other people. He names them: "You shall not murder, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness, Honor your father and your mother."

Those are the second five commandments. But he adds another one. Most people don't notice this, it is tucked in there. He says, "Thou shalt not defraud." Which is most interesting. Why did Jesus edit the Ten Commandments and say, "Thou shalt not defraud"?

It is suggested that he is talking to a wealthy man, and in that society, wealth was gained by owning land and leasing it to farmers (we would call them tenant farmers), then exploiting them with high rents, and by taking a portion of their crops. Jesus, who grew up in rural Galilee among poor farmers, knew all about this. So it is suggested that he edited the Ten Commandments (I guess if anybody is allowed to do that, it would be Jesus) to include this common sin of his day of cheating or defrauding people in order to gain wealth. So Jesus asks, "Have you obeyed these commandments?" The man says, "I have done all of them."

Then comes another fascinating detail. It says, "Jesus looking at him loved him." This is the only place in all of the Gospels where it says Jesus loved anyone. Why here? Why this rich man? Perhaps because Jesus perceived his sincerity, innocence, and his honesty and courage to come to him with the confession that his life, though loaded down with things, was empty. Just as I suspect Jesus loves all of us who come to him to admit that the life we are trying to live without him is empty.

The rich, young ruler is therefore like Nicodemus, you remember, in the Gospel of John. Nicodemus, another rich man and a ruler, a landowner, seeks out Jesus under the cover of darkness to ask Jesus the same question about eternal life. It is to Nicodemus that Jesus says those famous words, "You must be born again."

"Jesus looking at him loved him." I think he loved him because he was a good man, raised on the ethic of Deuteronomy. He lived a good life. He was honest about his life. He did his best to be the kind of person he thought God wanted him to be. And yet his life was empty. He had the honesty and courage to say, "It's not working. What must I do to get what has been promised me, but has not been delivered?" Jesus loved him for that, and said, "Sell all that you have, and give to the poor, and come, follow me."

The scene ends with the rich man going away sorrowful, because he had many possessions, a testimony to how powerful is the thinking that possessions are necessary for our worth as human beings. It is an addiction, really, that I must have all these things in order to be somebody. The only way you get rid of an addiction is cold turkey. You leave it behind. You walk away from it. That which you cannot let go of in this life is an addiction.

Jesus then gives the disciples a little homily on wealth, how hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the Kingdom of God. It is the exact opposite of what everybody in that society was taught to believe. So you see how subversive this passage is. Jesus was thought, in fact, to be undermining the basis of morality in that society. That is why they were against him. That is why they arrested him.

The reaction of the disciples is what you would expect. They were perplexed, and asked, "Then who can be saved?" That is the right question, the obvious question, in a society that believed wealth was a sign of goodness and that God rewarded goodness with eternal life. In that kind of a world if a rich man can't be saved, then who can?

Which sets up Jesus for his punch line, "For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible." Which means, we are saved by God's grace alone, all of us. Which became the great affirmation in Paul's letters, the basis for the Reformation, and the foundation of our Protestant faith. We are saved by grace, and there is nothing we can do to earn it. That is the point of the story. You can do all the good works in the world and still not find your salvation, because it is a gift, given to us through this man, Jesus. Salvation lies not in what you can do for God, but in what God has already done for you in Jesus. "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that who so believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life."

"Rabbi, what must I do to get eternal life?"

"Nothing. You can do nothing, except follow me."

That is what this story is really about. It is not really about money. It is about grace. It is impossible for you to earn your salvation. That's what it is about. But it is possible for God to give you salvation.

Now the problem with preaching this text is that it may not apply to you. "If I Were A Rich Man," is the title of this sermon. If you were a rich man, addicted to your possessions, searching for meaning in your life, then this text would obviously fit you perfectly. If that is not your situation, if you are not necessarily rich...although wealth and poverty, as you know, are relative terms. I know people with lots of money who are sure they are on the precipice of poverty, and I know people with little resources who say they have all that they want. Besides, poverty is defined differently from society to society. Those who think they are struggling economically here, would be considered wealthy in most of the rest of the world.

So let's say this. Let's say you are a Christian, you follow Jesus. You have experienced grace in your life, and you believe, like all good Christians, that we live by God's grace alone. What's more, you are not a rich person looking for salvation, but say you are relatively rich, already saved, or at least not worrying about it. But you are anxious, or at least curious, about what it means to follow Jesus in this life. If you are a disciple of Jesus, call yourself a Christian, then what does that mean about following him?

If that is your situation, then I would say you are right, this text does not speak to you. But do not worry, I have another one. If you would just follow me over here to the epistle lesson, we will look at that. James says,

What does it profit if a man says he has faith but has no works? Can his faith save him? If someone is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to him, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled," [that is to say, you just say to the person pious phrases, but you don't do anything for that person] what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

That is a remarkable passage. It is written in the kind of prophetic rhetoric which indicates for us that even in the first century, Christians had difficulty understanding this concept of giving. People were saying, we live by God's grace alone, not by our works, so you won't catch me doing any good works. I will live by faith alone.

James had to remind them of another religious fact. That while it is true that you cannot earn your salvation by doing good works, it is equally true that you can lose your salvation if you do not do them. Nothing was clearer in Jesus' teaching. We are given these things in order to do good in this world. That is what power is for. That is what riches are for. Wealth is power in this world. So much so that to those whom much is given, much is required. Money is a means. Money is a tool. Money is an instrument. It is given to us, and it is up to us to decide how we are going to use it.

We live in a time of extraordinary wealth, especially among young people, those who have been born in the last twenty years or so have been fortunate to have their coming into this planet coincide with the cybernetics revolution. As I understand it, this is the first time in our history as a nation when there has been so much wealth. In the past wealth was concentrated in a few families, but this is the first time that great wealth is distributed among so many people.

In previous generations accumulated wealth was wiped out by depressions, or by other misfortunes in people's lives. Until now, we have had waves of immigrants coming to this country. The first generation came here in dire poverty. Their goal in life was simply to give their children and grandchildren a better life. Now their children and grandchildren are at last reaping the benefit of the faithfulness and industriousness of their ancestors. For the first time in the history of this country, wealth is being passed from generation to generation.

It is an exciting time. A time of great potential. It is a time of reckoning, of moral reckoning. Which way is this society going to go?

Joan Konner, the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, said that there is a war going on in this country over values. On the one side there are those who say the highest value is private gain. On the other the highest value is social responsibility. On one side the highest value is personal ambition. On the other side the highest value is the commonwealth, the common good. On one side those who say life is measured quantitatively. That is to say, how much you have accumulated, like the rich, young ruler. On the other side are those who say life is measured qualitatively, how much you can enrich life for yourself, for others, and for future generations. It can be boiled down to this: Is life measured by what you get, or by what you give?

George Soros made an incredible fortune by trading on the currency market, betting that he was right and the rest of the market would turn out to be wrong. Most of the time he was right, or was right enough times to build an incredible fortune. The most famous incident in his trading life was in 1992, when he got international recognition by betting that the British pound was overvalued. The British government in reaction to that put a billion pounds into the market, but the market followed Soros' hunch and the pound collapsed, and Sorros got even richer.

It just so happened that a few days later he was to speak at Cambridge. His host introduced him this way: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is the man who cost her majesty's government a billion pounds. The only thing I can say in his defense is that he will doubtless spend the money much better than her majesty's government would have."

And indeed he did. Soros is a world class philanthropist, investing especially in those countries that were formerly a part of the Soviet empire and are now struggling to rebuild their societies. He established an international foundation for a civil society, and has entered the battle for the values of this world. He challenges those who use moth-eaten capitalistic slogans such as, "The common interest is served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest," by saying that self-interest must be tempered with a concern for other people, for the common good.

He said this. "Unless self-interest is tempered by a concern for the common good, the capitalist society will break down as surely as the Communist society did."

There are a number of reasons for being stewards. I would suggest that the most important reason today is to join the battle for values in this society. And to let the Church be the community that says with its deeds that we believe life is to be found in giving, and not in getting.

ChristianGlobe Networks, Inc., Collected Sermons, by Mark Trotter