“Two Men; Two Mountains”

• Scriptural Reference: Mark 10:17-31
• June 1, 2008

When the young man came to Jesus, he truly wanted to know what to do. The guy was sincere. “What must I do to inherit eternal life,” the young man asked, perhaps with a voice laced with emotional pleading.

“You know what your religion has always taught,” answered Jesus. “You’ve been to Sunday School. You’ve attended worship. You must’ve heard a million sermons, slept through a few hundred thousand. You’ve heard the gospel.”

“True. And I’ve done my dead level best to abide by all of what I heard. I really have!”

And Mark 10:21 yields one of the most tender passages in the New Testament. “Jesus looked at him and loved him.”

Isn’t that what we all want? Don’t you want that experience? Don’t you want to actually look at Jesus and see in his eyes affection and love as he looks at you? Even the most macho dude in the congregation would like that, wouldn’t you? As long as he didn’t hug you. Jesus saw in this young rich guy sincerity and devotion to religious tradition galore, and he really liked the guy. That’s why he decided to tell him how he could take it to the next level.

“Since you are so devoted to the spirit of the Lord our God, then go all the way with it. Detach yourself from everything you own. Turn it into an advantage for those who are disadvantaged, and in the process, follow me.

Then, right after we have one of the most tender passages in the New Testament, we have one of the most tragic. “At hearing this, his face fell and he went away sorrowing; for he was a very wealthy man.”

Verse 23 says, “Jesus looked around. . .” He wasn’t looking around because he was searching for his disciples. He knew where they were standing. I think this “look around” description conveys astonishment. I think Jesus’ jaw dropped open and he looked up at the sky and at the houses and at the faces in the crowd, not seeing any of them because he’d been emotionally ambushed. He really thought this young man was going to make a dramatic commitment. After all, he was sincere and Jesus loved him because of it. He expected something other than the young man’s utter timidity.

The rest of 23 is a cry of astonished disappointment. “It’s so hard for people who own a great deal of possessions to live by the principles of God. It’s as possible as driving an 18-wheeler through my front door.” You know, this story of the rich guy walking away sad really rankles us in the 21 st century American Empire. We want to spiritualize this one away more than just about any other passage in the Bible. Surely Jesus didn’t mean it when he said that my wealth can be a hindrance to my living in the Kingdom of God. Surely, if anything in the Bible isn’t meant to be taken literally, this one isn’t, is it? Please say I don’t have to take this one seriously!

We’d rather attack homosexuality. We’d rather talk about the peccadilloes of politicians. We’d rather talk about the depravity of Hollywood celebrities. But there isn’t anyone in this room who hasn’t thought about what you’d do if you won the lottery. Getting rich and having all kinds of luxuries is one of the most venerated motivational topics held up by our culture. We don’t like it when Jesus says that the drive to attain wealth and the basic motivations of the Kingdom of God are incompatible. But folks, if we want to be biblical followers of the REAL Jesus of Nazareth, the author and founder of our faith, we better listen up to what he says about wealth and how he treated the whole subject of poor people.

In the fourth chapter of Luke, Jesus goes to Nazareth and to the synagogue where he grew up. They asked him to read and he opened to the 61 st chapter of Isaiah. He read this:

The spirit of the Lord is upon me
Because he has anointed me to
Preach good tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives;
And recovery of sight to the blind;
To set a liberty those who are oppressed,
And to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

Luke tells us that after he read this, Jesus placed handed the scroll back to the attendant and told those who listened that the scripture was being fulfilled in his ministry. What Isaiah had preached, Jesus intended to carry out. It was a good sermon and the folks felt proud that the local carpenter boy had made good and could speak so good. “That fellow sounds like Billy Graham when he preaches!”

But then Jesus went to applying the scripture. He said something on the order of this: you’ve heard the words of the Bible your whole lives, but you know what? You haven’t done them. You’ve done exactly what the folks in Isaiah’s day did. You’ve done exactly what the folks in Elisha’s day did. You got hung up on your religious traditions and quit paying attention to the things God wants you to notice. Because of this, your blessings are going to dry up.

You see, Jesus knew about the directives written in Deuteronomy. He knew about Deuteronomy 15:4-11 which says literally, “You shall have no poor among you. You are to be open handed toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land.” Jesus knew about Leviticus 25:35ff which says that if someone becomes poor, treat him well and generously. Don’t loan him money with any sort of interest and don’t sell him food for a profit. He knew about Jeremiah 22:13-16 which says that knowing the Lord means that you advocate for the poor.

As he looked around himself in that synagogue, though, he knew that those people not only tolerated the poor among them, but that they were anything but open-handed toward them. Plenty of biblical evidence points to the conclusion that folks in Jesus’ day saw the poor much the way many in our world see the poor. They were poor because of their own laziness, or lack of ambition, or because they hadn’t worked as hard as those who had money.

As he looked around that room, he knew that there were plenty who took advantage of their fellow citizens’ disadvantage and indeed DID charge interest on loans and did see that selling food for a profit was a great opportunity.

As he looked around that room he saw lots of people who attended that synagogue regularly, who could quote the verses of the Torah, who had done their Bar Mitzvahs and memorized their bible verses, but who did anything but raise a voice on behalf of the voiceless. Those folks knew about Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Jeremiah, but it was all book learning.

The attitude was even among his disciples. If you read in Mark 14: 3ff, you’ll read that famous story of the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet. It’s a wild story. There’s Jesus, reclining at the table as they did at banquets in those days, that is, lying on his stomach on pillows with his feet out behind him. The servants are hovering about, picking up empty plates and bowls and replacing them with full bowls and plates filled with all manner of kosher meats and veggies. Then out of the shadows behind Jesus emerges a woman whom Luke remembers as a 1 st century Palestinian version of a street walker. She produces a jar of perfume – expensive perfume. Everyone knows how she was able to acquire the funds to obtain that perfume. She breaks the bottle open and pours the contents on Jesus’ feet. She then begins wiping his feet with her hair.

Everyone’s scandalized! How could someone like Jesus allow such quasi-eroticism in public? A hooker’s wrapping her hair around his feet, for heaven’s sake! The disciples and the religious professionals around the table take exception, and at this point, remember the poor. “He shouldn’t allow this, and besides, that perfume was expensive. Instead of wasting it on this carpenter, it could have been sold to benefit the poor!”

That’s when Jesus says, “Hey guys, the poor you have with you always.” It’s been done in the past. I remember one rather rotund deacon at a former church say to me one time that even Jesus said that you’re always going to have poor people. So quit worrying about them, which was a terrible distortion of what Jesus was calling their attention to. He was remembering the Deuteronomic Code which said, “You will always have the poor with you, so be open handed with them.” They’re always with you, so you should always be responding to them as the Bible commands. Don’t use religious sounding platitudes to belittle other people’s worship while at the same time excusing your lack of commitment.

It’s clear from all Jesus said and did that he expected his followers to address the issues of poverty and to work to establish conditions whereby poverty was eliminated. This was one of Jesus’ primary concerns. Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions, he said. Don’t store up treasures for yourselves on earth, rather store up treasures in heaven by obeying radically what God commands. It profits a person nothing to gain the whole world, he said, if he loses his soul. How do you store up treasures for yourself in heaven? By working actively to bring about God’s version of justice in the world, which meant, in large part, being active to make sure there are no poor in the land and that all are open-handed and generous with the poor.

Dom Helder Camera, a Brazilian Catholic priest became quite renowned some years ago for his work among the abject poor of Rio de Janeiro. Camera once said, “When I help the poor get food, they call me a saint. When I ask WHY they are poor, they call me a communist.” This is the case in our society. Any time a preacher begins to address the issue of poverty, frequently he or she is accused of being a bleeding heart liberal.

Abraham, on the other hand, took his most prized possession to the Lord, completely ready to give it up and the Lord handed it back. Of course, Isaac didn’t really belong to Abraham. Isaac was a gift. Abraham knew this. The rich young ruler didn’t understand this, which is the illusion woven by our wealth. We think we own it. We think we earned it, while most of us were born into circumstances which favored our success. Everything we have is a gift of God and in totality should be offered back to him. Abraham understood this.

Here’s the conclusion: two men went up the mountain carrying what they treasured to the Lord. Two men came back down the mountain still in possession of what they took up. One hung his head in great sorrow. The other danced joyfully into eternity.