Sunday 28B
Wis 7:7-11
Hb 4:12-13
Mk 10:17-30
When we hear in the Letter to the Hebrews that ‘the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart’, we are not only listening to an abstract statement. This is rather a fact of experience. The Word of God calls us to conversion. It separates within us what is according to God from what is opposed to God.
It is exactly what we see in the moving story of the young rich man who comes to Jesus. He is a good man, even a religious man. He comes with a a good question: ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He wants to make his life meaningful. He wants to do what is right, to please God and to enter eternal life.
And first of all, the Word of God separates what is good from what is bad. This is the role of the commandments. They prescribe us what is absolutely bad, what must never be done. It is the basis. The rich man says that he has no problem, that he is perfectly at ease with these requirements. Maybe he is a bit naïve, because I think we have never totally finished with the commandments. Or he is a young man, enthusiastic and self-confident.
‘Looking at him, Jesus loved him’. Jesus was touched by the good heart and right desire of the man. He loved him, not that he did not love others, or that he had not loved him from the start, but because he felt called to give the best answer to the man’s desire. When you love, you want to give the best – not the minimum. The Law is a minimum, Jesus wishes to offer more. Here was a man in search of a wisdom of life – like Solomon in our first reading. And here was Jesus, the Incarnate Wisdom of God. Here was the thirst to receive and here was the readiness to give.
Out of love, Jesus demands. He pronounces a word, a living word, which separates. We could call it a work of discernment, of judgment: Jesus separates what is good from what is perfec. He shows the way to perfection. Perfection is not only the absence of evil, but what is best, the highest quality.
Here Jesus separates the love for God and for a good life from the love for money and earthly possessions. Is it bad to possess a house and other goods? Not in itself, but it may easily become so, if your possessions are an obstacle, that is to say, if your possessions possess you, if you are owned instead of owning, if they make you a slave instead of giving you freedom. And that may very easily happen, as we know too well.
The Word of God frees us from what may hinder us. We can be attached to many things: our reputation, our pleasures, our ambitions, our pride for our achievements, wounds of the past, addictions to this or that. The Word of God comes and separates us from sin and bad tendencies. But it also invites to further detachments. It spurs us on towards perfection.
St Francis famously married Lady Poverty. He was the son of a rich merchant. But he was led by the grace of God to free himself from the love of money and of human glory. He chose to follow as a poor man the God who had made himself poor for us. Each of us, as we listen to the Word of God this morning, let us try and answer this simple question: “What does God want me to let aside today? What must I get rid of so as to follow Jesus and to be worthy of his love?”