For the Sake of the Good News

Scripture: Mark 10:17-31

11.12.2023

The disciples have a problem. These guys who have been following this other guy all around Israel and Judea, who have seen him heal and seen him be run out of villages on a rail, who have heard the Word of God coming from his lips and see him bid the lame to walk and the blind to see and all the wonders that came from traveling with the holy child of God are starting to be held in the light of all that they have left behind them in their pursuits of “normal lives.” And it would seem that the reality of everything that they have given up in following this Jesus guy has started to set in on them. Perhaps it was the long walks, going town to town not knowing where they would stay or what they would eat when they got there. For many of them it was leaving behind friends and family, maybe significant others and children, it was a a minimum leaving behind parents while “letting the dead bury the dead.” It was living on the razor’s edge, a group of outlaw zealots, outside the bounds of both the religious culture of the day and the Empire. They have surely gotten the message by now that neither the Jewish leadership nor the Roman authorities seemed to care much for what they were trying to accomplish. The messiah had done his level best to anger both in equal measure and maybe this is just the day that for them, it has bubbled over. Maybe they were feeling more vulnerable to the temptation to leave on that day when this young man, so blessed in the eyes of the world, comes to Jesus seeking to have eternal life. Here is this man, we are told, who had lived a life that we are told was admirable, religious, filled with zeal for the torah. And yet, having seemingly all that he could possibly desire going for him, still comes to Jesus feeling unfulfilled. And it’s not really because of the faith tradition from which he has come. Jesus was a Jew. The disciples were all Jews. This man was a Jew and yet he comes to Jesus feeling completely adrift in life. As if his whole existence has not yet produced that which he seeks. And having heard this man come to Jesus and tell his life story, having seen him slink away unfulfilled and unhappy, it begins to dawn on the disciples the position in which following Jesus has put them. And maybe, seeing this man, who from all appearances is a good and decent kind of guy, maybe seeing him leave Jesus presence makes them begin to question their own goodness. Like they are clinging to a version of reality that is slipping through their hands. Like they are looking into a mirror and for the first time seeing themselves as they really are. Broken. Destitute. Without hope. Having left everyone they know and everything they have in hopes of finding the peace that Jesus was offering. But that peace, that calm required faith, and maybe faith was beginning to wane just a bit. And Jesus sensed that.

Watching the man leave his presence, sad and still alone. Watching the reaction of crowd. Jesus starts talking about how hard it is for folks who are distracted to see the kingdom of heaven. How hard it is for folks who are distracted to find peace, a lasting peace. How hard it is for folks who are distracted by everything else to see the things that matters. “Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.” This made the way no less clear for the disciples. They might have given up everything to follow Jesus but this new pronouncement made them feel like it was all for naught. “If this was the case,” they all collectively reasoned, “then who can possibly be saved from this broken world.” But Jesus quickly reassures them, “You are thinking about this in human terms and you are right, within the earthly realm there is no way to bring about your own salvation. The brokenness of the world, the brokenness of yourselves, the devastation wrought on all of creation, there isn’t salvation to be found here. But it’s not about what you can do. It’s never been about what you can do. It’s what God can do, and with God, all things are possible.” And it would seem that with that the disciples are satisfied and prepared to move on to what comes next, until Peter, still trying to figure it out for himself says, “Look, Jesus, we have left everything and followed you.” And in his declaration is really a deep longing. “We have left everything to follow you, our jobs, and our families, and our lives, how can we know that it is going to be worth it in the end?” And Jesus, always the patient one, offers a final assurance, “The truth is, there is no one who has left home, sisters or brothers, mother or father, children or fields for me and for the sake of the Gospel who won’t receive a hundred times as much in this present age—as many homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, children and property, though not without persecution—and, in the age to come, everlasting life.” And they continued on.

With our eyes today, it is equally difficult to be comforted by the words Jesus offered his disciples in order to quell their doubts. It is difficult because we know how the rest of the story goes. The lives of the disciples and Jesus get no easier and in a lot of ways grow harder with each step towards the triumphant entry into Jerusalem. We all know how it goes for Jesus on that final week or turning over tables in the temple, of running back out of the city to the Mount of Olives each night to escape the watchful eye of the Jewish authority and the Roman occupiers. After his death and resurrection, tradition holds that each of the disciples were ultimately martyred in a myriad of horrific ways and so when Jesus reassures the disciples that they will receive “a hundred times as much in this present age” we either have to conclude that Jesus was wrong or that there was more going on in this story and in this utterance than meets the eye.

Each of us, each day, finds ourselves trapped between the two realities, the two orders of the day. We feel ourselves pulled in two different directions. Do I serve God and be thought a zealot in the eyes of the greater world? or Do I serve myself and remain restless throughout my whole life stuck in a never ending cycle of needs and wants never being fully satiated, never being fully met. And when we read this passage about camels passing through needles followed by assurance from Jesus that whoever loses what they have for the sake of the good news will be repaid one hundred times over, I am more and more convinced that Jesus was calling the disciples in that moment to want, to desire, things that are deeper and more fulfilling than the stuff of this world. To want, to desire water from the well that is never found wanting. To want, to desire the peace that surpasses all understanding. To want, to desire the presence of God and nothing else. And we also, often find ourselves in that position within this world. We all often find ourselves struggling against the forces of brokenness that tell us that in order to be happy we must retain our youth, we must possess all that we can, we must be in constant competition with our brothers and our sisters for the dwindling resources of our planet until we end up with a few people possessing everything, most people struggling to get by paycheck to paycheck and close to a billion people who do not know from whence their next meal will come. So it is that the old way, the old order guarantees a life of constant hunger and dis-ease. So it is that the old way, the old order guarantees that you will search and search in vain for peace and comfort. So it is that the old order guarantees that many will go hungry unable to find when they search. We are called to something better.

Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible—but not for God. With God all things are possible.” In the old order of the world, the challenges of the world seem daunting and scary. They seem impossible and not worth even bothering with. But in the new way, the new order, the new being, we know that with God all things are possible if we are willing to step out just a bit, just an inch in faith and see what can grow out of that faith. In the new order we see the brokenness of the world that has left far too many folks on the outside looking in and we ask ourselves, how can we bring those brothers and sisters in? In the new order, we see the brokenness of a world in which violence continues to beget violence in cycle after cycle and yet we are called to respond with reaching out with open arms that people know that in God is found a bottomless fount of love that can never, ever be exhausted. Don’t hear me say that it is always easy, it virtually never is. There is going to be cost. Don’t hear me say that we will be normal, we won’t. There is always something counter-cultural about following Jesus wherever he goes. Don’t hear me say that we will always succeed. We might not. For every success there is an endless road of failures by people who stood up and tried before someone got it right. But this is what it looks like to live into the new order of the day. It is always just a breath away, erupting in our midst, as sure as the sunrise and a certain at the sunset?

Friends, we live in trying times. Times in which the challenges of the world may well seem overwhelming and beyond our capacities. And we are right. They are. And yet, we don’t live by the rules of humankind. We are not beholden to the ways things have always been. We are not frozen in time, predestined to live the same way as those we came before us. We are called to live with the faith that in God all things are possible and we are called to be about the work of making those things happen until that time when God calls all the children to come home, the time that there will be a new heaven and a new earth, the time in which peace will flow like a mighty stream and justice like a roaring river, the time in which we will see the movement of the spirit all around us and we will find the hope that lies at the birth of each new moment. Let us work towards that now and always. Alleluia, amen.