For Sunday
Proper 23B
Collect
Lord, we pray that your grace may always precede and follow us, that we may continually be given to good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
The short response: This passage is about money.
A slightly longer response: This passage is about faithfulness, commitment, and the challenge of the gospel. And therefore it doesn’t condemn “rich people” so much as wealth and how we live.
A fuller response: Jesus responds to a young man who thinks he can ensure his own salvation by doing “the right things” without paying attention to how his wealth impacts others people or what it means to risk all his comfort and “success” in life for the possibility that Jesus offers the only actual assurance we can trust.
The irony of the moment is that Jesus’s disciples worry far more about the wealth and comfort of the pious young man than they do about their own place—which many of us do, too. Jesus doesn’t say living in the Kin-dom is objectively difficult, but that wealth blinds us to what wealth does, where it comes from, and how it changes the nature of the Kin-dom.
The disciples, who have already given all of their worldly possessions away, are living with a common purse, and followed Jesus a long way ask who could do this difficult teaching. They already are. It isn’t only possible, it is being done. By them. The ones worrying about how its done—even as they do it. Sound familiar?