This passage from the Gospel of Mark chapter 10 has two stories. One is the story of the rich young man who comes to Jesus and says, ‘Good Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He clearly had a rather mechanical idea about this journey to enlightenment, to eternal life. And Jesus helps him to understand what he’s asking. He said, ‘I’m doing all these good things, I am obeying all the rules, but how do I get further?’ And Jesus says, ‘Sell all your possessions, be radically poor.’ And the guy walks away with a sad face and we never see him again. And in a way that character is all of us.
Immediately after that, there was an exchange between Jesus and his disciples. He said, it is harder for a rich person to get into the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, and they are shocked by this, they don’t understand what that means. Peter began to say, ‘Look, we have left everything and followed you.’ The implication is, so what are we going to get out of this, how long is it going to take? Jesus says, ‘I tell you, if you become poor, if you give up everything, you will be amazed at what you receive. You will receive a hundredfold.’ So he’s using the materialist image. The rich young man and in that encounter with Jesus gives us a way of understanding the nature of the journey that we’re on. We understand the nature of the journey through time and over time we come to see what kind of journey we are making by meditating morning and evening every day.
( Enlightenment by Laurence Freeman OSB )
