I REMEMBER THE story of the rich young man from when I was a young boy, maybe 12 or so, around Confirmation age, in a series of picture books from the Concordia Press.
They were adaptations of the various and sundry parables and short stories told by or starring, as it were, the young and radical Jesus. They were in bright colors and I remember having a whole set of them at one time, all ready for me to pore over. They were called, I think, “Arch Books” but I remember getting all confused with their logo and with the St. Louis Arch, home of Concordia Press.
I loved those books so much—I was anxious for the Young Housewife who had lost one of ten (or maybe twelve) silver coins, basically her household savings and then found them again; the moral of the story is that God will take care of us, no matter what, and under any conditions, because God won’t give up hunting for us. (All these stories had a moral—and put it right in front of us young readers!)
I worried about the Rich Old Man who looked around him and saw that he had everything he needed to survive the rest of his life in comfort, and was then called “fool” by an angel, maybe the first time I encountered the figure of the Angel of Death. With other readers, I watched him go to hell, just because he knew he had enough but not enough to know and love God. The moral? Don’t count your chickens (or wheat, in his case, he had silos full) even after they’re hatched.
Oh, and I’m pretty sure that the tale of the Really Nice Person who was beat up by robbers on the road to Jericho and left to die there by (probably rich) priests and other clergy made me sneer at our poor pastor, who might have thought I had some kind of nose complaint and was all stuffed up.
He couldn’t imagine how much I hated him for those few weeks, though he had not done anything, except maybe rewrite my confirmation essay to its great detriment. How could he? I did manage to get confirmed but it was touch and go for a while there. My mom had to intervene and A.) she was Sunday School Superintendent and B.) was my mother, who could be absolutely fierce when she needed to be.
And then there was the story of the Rich Young Man (Mark 10:17-31) who had followed all the Commandments, as read out by Jesus and could confidently reply “I have done all of these from birth.” And then Jesus said “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
Whoa. Wait a second, because the young man in question is now revealed to be a rich young man. He’s got lots of stuff, lots and lots of stuff, and Jesus says you may be righteous all right, but you need to get to know me. So get rid of all that stuff and follow me (Later on, when I got around to reading my Dickens, I saw that he could have been the inspiration for Jacob Marley, forced to wander through eternity bound by chains and with his riches binding him down from seeing God.)
The other thing was that Jesus loved him, loved him and felt sorry for him: he knew that following him and leaving behind his wealth was precisely what the rich young man could not do.
That young man was as bound by his riches as others who could not walk or talk. You could call it today a disability and it was the first time I had ever thought of riches, of wealth, in that way. I realize now, in looking back at my time growing up in the western suburbs of Chicago that we weren’t necessarily poor but certainly not rich; we were probably on the low side of middle class at best, on the high edges of poverty at worst.
And that was the first time I really thought about money as a thing that could shape one’s life in the ways that Jesus seemed to be suggesting in this short little tale, but one important enough to be included in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, as always the mark of how much a given tale mattered to the early church.
No, I probably didn’t think about that aspect of what having money could mean to a person. I definitely got it right from the get-go with the story of the man with silos full of wheat, but I bet I missed it the first time around with the story of the rich young man.
In any case, when I reread the books and was a bit older, yeah, it hit me hard. The rich old man deserved what he got, though I don’t happen to remember what it is right now. But the young rich man? He should have been fine.
He recognized Christ as a great teacher and lord; he knelt before him; and he was able to claim the Commandments, to say with great power, “I have done all of these.” But what he was unable to do was to leave all the stuff behind.
The fishermen that made up the disciples that followed Jesus were different. They dropped everything and followed Christ. It may have taken an objection or two but they did it before Christ left their part of the world. So, we know their names, Matthew, Mark and John, and those of the other disciples.
The first three each have a Gospel named after them. They were able to tell the story of their walk with Christ.
But the rich young man? We don’t know his name. It’s lost to us and we can’t reclaim it.
It’s gone, and he’s gone.
What might he have added to the texts we know as the Christian Scriptures, aka the New Testament? We won’t ever know.
I like to think he didn’t grow up to be Jacob Marley, dragging his riches after him for eternity, but we don’t know and can’t know.
We need to make sure we don’t follow in his way. We need to make sure we follow Christ. It is not always easy to do, but God will hopefully give us the grace to proceed and walk with Jesus.
In our times, post Ascension, we need to lift up those around us who need to follow Christ as well. We all need to.
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Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. The Rev. Dr. Keith Dorwick is a deacon resident in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia.
