“A
Tough Pledge Card to Sign”
While I was in college, country singer David
Allen Coe recorded what he described as “the perfect country and western
song.” It hadn’t started out that way,
despite the claim of its composer Steve Goodman. According to Coe, he wrote Goodman back and,
as he reports it,
I told him it was not the perfect country &
western song because he hadn’t said anything at all about mama, or trains, or
trucks, or prison, or getting’ drunk.
Well, he sat down and wrote another verse to the song and he sent it to me,
and after reading it, I realized that my friend had now written the perfect
country & western song, and I felt obliged to include it on this album.
The last verse goes like this:
Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
and I went to pick her up in the rain
but before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
she got runned over by a d@$%#&d old train…
Not everything is a country song, but all of us – musicians, managers, engineers, laborers, preachers – develop standards of perfection and the rubrics for achieving it, including the otherwise unidentified man in Mark’s gospel who interrupts Jesus’ travel plans. While Matthew describes him as “young” and Luke as a “ruler”, Mark refers to him with the only descriptor held in common by all three: wealthy. And at this particular moment, he is an interruption – the ringing telephone just as you are walking out the door; the colleague who stops you at the elevator with “one more quick question”; the bedraggled man who rides up on his bicycle after church as you are locking the door to go home and calls, “Oh pastor, I was wondering if you could help me out…”
Running up to Jesus just as Jesus was leaving on a journey, the man fell to his knees and asked, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Perfection is what he is after, where all themes are encompassed, all requirements accomplished, and all loopholes closed – a neatly aligned, legal brief demonstrating religious adherence and fidelity that he could present to God at the appropriate time to defend his claim. Eternal Life as a commodity to insure. And from what we shortly learn, he was well on his way.
We aren’t privy to the audio or the video of this encounter. We are deprived of the usual non-verbals that routinely clue us in to a speaker’s intent, but if his greeting sounds courteous to our ears, it struck Jesus in a different way – as unnecessarily deferential; “obsequious” as one interpreter labels it; “sucking up” my kids might describe it; a little bit oily perhaps, but at the very least, Jesus seems to sense, dangerous.
“Why do you call me
good?” Jesus challenged, unswayed by the flattery. “No one
is good but God alone.” And with
that unbuttered boundary firmly established, Jesus ticks off a cursory
reply. “You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit
adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not
defraud; Honor your father and mother.’” To which the man responded, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my
youth.”
And somehow in that short, seemingly perfunctory conversational tit for tat, something happens. A subtle but decisive shift occurs. The brusqueness leaves Jesus’ manner – the impatient dismissal of a religious surface swimmer. With a description unparalleled in this gospel, Mark notes simply that “Jesus, looking at him, loved him…” Jesus loved him. “Sure,” we might respond, “Jesus loved everyone.” But there is something more in this simple observation. Perhaps Jesus put his arm around the man’s shoulder, or simply looked at him with a new patience and tenderness. But whatever demonstrated the change, Jesus suddenly engaged the man as more than an interruption.
“You lack one thing,”
Jesus told him in a new tone of voice.
“Go, sell what you own, and give
the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow
me.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many
possessions.
Now that is a tough pledge card to sign! It is tempting to take that staggering instruction as the literal “one thing” to which Jesus had referred; tempting for both those who dismiss the idea of selling everything as impractical and ultimately futile, and also for those who, like the rich man in the story, are earnestly searching for the secret recipe. “Go and sell it all.” But as countless interpreters through the centuries have pointed out, it seems too simplistic to translate Jesus’ words to this one man into a universal requirement for every disciple. For starters, it contradicts Jesus’ steadfast resistance to formulas that would-be disciples need simply “tick off” like a Saturday morning “to-do” list. Jesus’ answer to the rich man is subtler, more textured and intriguing than that. “You lack one thing.”
So what is it? That is something of the question underlying
Billy Crystal’s 1991 movie City
Slickers. In
the movie, three middle-aged best friends travel from New York City to a Dude
Ranch out west to pretend they are cowboys for a couple of weeks. In one poignant scene, Curley, the rough cut
and intimidating trail boss, guesses the age of Mitch Robbins, the character
played by Crystal. “How old are you –
38?” When Mitch acknowledges that he is
39, Curley offers a smug and knowing nod.
“You all come up here at the same age, with the same problems. You spend about 50 weeks a year getting knots
in your rope and then you think two weeks up here will untie them for you. But none of you get it. Do you know what the secret of life is?” Mitch shakes his head and asks for the
answer, but Curly merely holds up his extended pointing finger.
“This. One thing. Just one thing.”
“That’s great,” Mitch
replies, “but what’s the one thing?”
“That’s what you’ve
got to figure out,” says Curly.
One Thing.
“You lack one thing,” Jesus
told this man of “many possessions” – a description that may qualify him to be
the patron saint of too many modern readers.
While it is true that wealth is no modern phenomenon, we do routinely
confront one of the sad legacies of the industrial age in
which mass produced goods are met with compounding capital: we accumulate stuff. More and more of it, both trinkets and
treasures – as if the bumper-sticker maxim were true that “He who dies with the
most toys, wins.” Storage systems and
storage space are growth industries; closets are more precious in our homes
than living space. Perhaps this interrupting
inquirer represents too many of us who, borrowing the words from the hymn, are
“rich in things and poor in soul.”
And while that possibility should be reason
enough to prompt a thorough-going assessment of my basement and shelves with an
eye for divestment, the real problem is deeper than the economical accumulation
of factory-produced goods. It is the
meeting place of hunger and fear. Robert
Wuthnow, sociologist of religion at Princeton University, has concluded that
throughout our culture – and even in the church – people are choked by the myth
of scarcity. In reaction, we have
invested our lives in consumerism. We
have, in other words, “a love affair with ‘more’ – and we will never have
enough.”
So, does this all finally devolve into one more
vituperative critique on wealth and our consumerist culture: the malignant distraction of too much
stuff? There is certainly room for such
an attack, for as Wuthnow’s assessment hints, consumerism is not simply a
storage problem or, more significantly, a behavioral problem focused on acquisition;
it is a spiritual one that implicitly invests the power to secure and validate
and define one’s well-being in that which cannot finally deliver. As such, it is but one of many similar
distractions that were plaguing the interrupting supplicant in the story – and
us, who are constantly throwing ourselves at the feet of therapists,
politicians, scientists, self-help gurus and personal trainers, asking how to
find eternal life.
But no, this story is finally about something more
fundamental than money and whatever evils may or may not sprout from its
root. He was, according to the story, a
man of many possessions, and apparently a good and upstanding man. “But
you lack one thing,” Jesus told him after listing various commandments
which the man claims to have honored since childhood. And that list may well offer a clue. Notice the laws that are named: don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t
steal or commit false witness or fraud; honor your father and mother. And then notice, as well, which of those
familiar 10 are conspicuous by their absence:
the “God commandments,” we might describe them – “You
shall have no other Gods before me.”
“You shall not take the Lord’s name in vain.” “Honor the Sabbath and keep it holy.”
While the man’s
lifestyle seems commendable, it was finally misguided. Missing was grounding orientation – the kind
of North Star bearing of the soul that makes all those social practices
prescribed by the commandments simply the observable reflection of a spirit
rightly aligned. He came seeking eternal
life, and Jesus offered to lead him to it – Eternal Life, however, not as one more trinket in an already
crowded drawer, nor the winner’s prize at the end of the game, but as the
expression of being and behaviors that proceed from the faithful and joyful
positioning of the defining, beckoning God at the ultimate center of it
all.
But the road was too
narrow to accommodate the trailer he was pulling behind, and so he backed up
and went the other way – the only example recorded of a call from Jesus
declined. And turning to his disciples,
Jesus acknowledged the difficulty.
In fact, he said –
and as we, perhaps, have discovered – it would finally be impossible if it
weren’t for the strength and saving grace of the God through whom all things,
even the hard things of realigned priorities, recalibrated values, and
reconstituted securities, are possible.
Thanks be to God.