Fear in a handful of dust

And audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be heard here.

Today’s gospel (Matthew 19: 16-22) gives us one of the iconic failures among Jesus’ listeners. Here is the rich young man who turned away from the Lord – made Him a refusal of His loving invitation - and, as far as we know, never found his way back. We can but hope of course that he had second thoughts later on, but whether he did or not, we still have lessons to learn from his example.

We should not interpret Jesus’ initial reaction to the young man as hostile; rather, it is rabbinical rhetoric. What good deed must I do? the young man asks, and Jesus replies, There is one alone who is good. This is not just a philosophical statement; it is a provocation – a provocation to open a discussion. He already knows this young man’s mind. Sadly, He finds before Him a youth who is held back by two heavy chains: one is his worldly attachments, and the other is his spiritual attachments.

Wealth is actually relative, like money. It makes no difference to have a lot of money if the currency has collapsed like the Weimar mark after the First World War. In pre-Euro Italy, even a millionaire was not so rare. But clearly, if the currency is solid, money can make all the difference, as much between whether you can heat the house or not, as between whether you drive a vintage Bentley or an old banger. Yet wealth too remains relative, even when money is abundant. There are millionaires whose goods lie useless on the floor when their dopamine levels hit rock bottom. The relish of life has gone, and they look for other rewards; they have been driven there by excess. And there are also poor men whose wealth is in the faces of the passer by, the kindness of strangers, and the beauties that anyone can enjoy at the cost of a stroll in the public gardens.

The wealth of this young man in the gospel is something else, however. His wealth is a bet on the future. Jesus offers him an alternative to the assurances that his current wealth provides for him. But looking into a future of uncertainty alongside the Lord, the youth suddenly seizes up. This pious fellow – we’ll come to this piety in a moment – suffers a reflex action, induced by looking at the horizon Jesus points to. There he was one moment, so nobly debating with the great Rabbi the map of the moral heights, and the next moment he finds himself curling up in a sad ball, hanging on not to the present but to a future he unconsciously believes his current wealth guarantees for him. Jesus’ invitation is not so much to leave wealth behind as to leave behind what the man believes it gives him. Wealth is relative, as I said. But when the young man heard these words, he went away sad. Of course he did. He had never envisaged a future without his wealth, and the prospect Jesus offers induces in him a refusal of its possibilities.

Such is the first heavy chain this young man bears of worldly attachments. But now we come to his second chain: his spiritual attachments. Jesus’ provocative questioning at the beginning is like a warning flag: this young man knows it all but has learned nothing, and Jesus intends to shake him. Not only has he learned it all, but he has mastered likewise the moral law yet in its most superficial patterns of behaviour. We cannot blame him too much for this; Israel seems full of such examples at the time, and Jesus denounces them as hypocrites. Genuine, truthful self-knowledge is essential for us in our relationship with God and to navigate in the world, but this man’s self-image is modelled on norms of skin-deep conformity. The greatest commandment – oddly absent from the list of commandments discussed here – ordered him to unite his heart in love to the Lord his God, but this young man has not sought union but perfection wrongly understood. Thus, he lusts after the appearances of piety without any of their inner life. He holds his religion like he holds his money, the principle and foundation of all his assurances. He holds his religion like a handful of dust, and it escapes his clutches and lies beyond his grasp.

Some might say it would have been better for the young man to be an honest debauchee than a pious fraud. Jesus was cross with the Pharisees but not with the lustful. All the young man’s doctrine and morality were useless to him without the inner reality.

But that would be a hasty judgement; let us not devalue the young man’s fidelity, be it ever so superficial. God judges the heart, but our vices have social consequences too, and such social consequences have long-term spiritual impacts. Honest immorality is a lesser spiritual problem than hypocritical piety, but its impact on others – its capacity to dissolve healthy cultural settings through its lawlessness – can be almost as vicious. In 1968, many a priest and bishop thumbed their noses at Humanae Vitae in sincere revolt, and the Catholic family has paid a terrible price for it ever since. The spirit quickens the letter; it does not render the letter irrelevant.

The young man is like the cynic in Oscar Wilde’s definition: he knows the price of the Scriptures but none of their value. He went away sad because he feared the privation of money. Did he ever consider, as we must, that his own poverty really lay within?