Unlike the hunger of the body, the hunger of the soul can be nourished only by more hunger.

In Mark 10:17-27 we encounter a single individual with universal application. He has everything it seems. Morality, riches, status, character, virtue... and he is empty. Even the disciples are amazed at all he is and can do. “If he can’t be saved, who can?” He is living the dream that someone set up for him but, a gnawing sense of emptiness takes over.

I wonder why. Recently, Jamie Winship spoke here and told his story. He was told he was a “disappointment” as a young child. He then spent much of his life with the negative emotion of overachieving in order to cover up. I wonder if this young man in Mark’s gospel had a similar experience that explains his emptiness. “You must make money, lots of it, you must act right, you must consume goods and use people to get ahead…..” What he now has to come to grips with is not repenting of bad things but of his relationship to good things. Trying to turn wealth that is rightfully his into a spiritual treasure to deal with an inner poverty.

We can all, at times, do these:

we try to turn physical beauty into a spiritual beauty

we look to romances to cover over inner hunger for intimacy

we look to family to cover over inadequacies of community and fear

we look to making a hit in the professional world to find popularity

we look to getting into some inner ring of people to cover over a sense of exclusion and unworthiness

Everybody is trying to do something. How do we relate to the good things? Do they become our identity? Jesus knew what this young ruler needed. He lacked eternity because he wasn’t, of himself, empty enough to find intimacy with Jesus. Jesus uses a series of verbs: go, sell, give, inherit, come and follow me.

At the end of the story the young man goes away grieved. Is it because he is near the end of himself and making  a turn? Has he been wounded such that God can now enter? The text leaves us in suspense. The anxiety its ending generates is intended to provoke in us a crisis of choice. We must complete the ending in our life, by our choice. Eternal life is impossible on our own. So, where do we turn?

Come and See

+Philip