Twenty Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Fr Dominic’s Homily

Today we have the parable of the rich young man. And as always there is a lot packed in to this little Gospel of Mark.

The man approaches Jesus and kneels before him. Why would you kneel before Jesus? If you were to ever meet Jesus would you kneel before him? You might not be able to but I am sure you would make some kind of form of reverence.. Of course you would – because he is God. And by the way we do actually meet him every Sunday at Mass…

So he says to Jesus what must I do to inherit eternal life? It’s a good question. How does Jesus answer? Does he say that you just need to accept me as your personal Lord and you will be saved? No – as always he answers the question with another question. “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”

Is Jesus denying his own divinity? No. Jesus always uses these riddles and he is drawing the young man more deeply into the mystery of his divinity. Jesus is saying really that no human is good. Only God is purely good. And the young man is in fact correct as this is God standing here in front of him. So he is right to kneel.

Jesus speaks about the commandments. And He uses interesting and specific examples of these commandments because Jesus rarely makes mistakes. What he is intimating is that the true faith consists not just in good feelings in our hearts and not even just moral objectives but also obedience to Gods laws. The young man has done well. But he is now in a quandary. Jesus knows this and stares at him and loves him.

He does the same for us all here today. He looks steadily at us and loves us. Because he knows how difficult this life is for us. He knows all the difficulties we face in trying to follow his commands. But he is on our side and he looks at our disposition of heart.

The young man is attached to wealth and is not willing to give this up and follow Jesus so he makes the choice to go away and as a result is sad. Because these things will never fulfil him.

His treasure and his hope for happiness were misplaced. Treasure has a special connection to the heart, the place of desire and longing, the place of will and focus. The thing we most set our heart on is our highest treasure.

As the young man walks away Jesus uses this opportunity as a teaching for his disciples. He says it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

It’s thought that the eye of the needle was a small gate that a camel could only enter by getting down on its knees and being unpacked of its goods first. So in a sense you had to unburden yourself of your possessions first to enter the camp.

They were amazed at what Jesus had said because it was thought originally especially in the Old Testament that if you had great wealth that you were especially blessed by God. Job had many just as Abraham did. However the Lord himself is the greatest treasure we can possibly have.

We hear in the first reading about the importance of spiritual wisdom. That is so much more important than wealth. We spend our lives perusing health, beauty, silver, Gold, gems, houses, power and possessions when all this is like sand.

None of it helps us achieve eternal life. Only one thing is necessary. Spiritual wisdom. How often do we pray for this?

In the psalm we are reminded of the shortness of our lives. And that we should pray to attain wisdom. That we should want to achieve faith and understanding of God. Because we are designed for this. For truth. We are given hearts and minds and we need to use both.

Selling all that we have in order to follow Jesus could mean many different things – certain friends, our job shifts, our style of life, what we do with our free time if any of these are holding us back from the Lord.

Possessions in themselves are not bad things. So we can have material possessions but we must have the right disposition towards them. Jesus challenged the young man because his heart was too possessive.

Those who are generous towards God and others find that they cannot outmatch God in generosity. God blesses us with spiritual goods - such as peace, joy, love, relationships and friendship that do not fade or fail.

These far outweigh the fleeting joys of material possessions which only satisfy us in the present moment.

God alone can satisfy the deepest longing and desires of our heart.