So here we have Salvation 101, or “How to Lead a Good Life; in 4 Easy Steps” (Don’t lie, cheat, steal or kill!)
Pretty much any religion, or even those without a religion, would agree on that. The young man in today’s gospel (Mk 10:17-30) knows that. He’d been brought up knowing it. But he feels there must be something more. And he is right.
Jesus does offer something more. But it also requires something more of us. He offers the chance to be close to him, to follow him, to be one with him – and thus to be one with God. But to achieve that we have to detach ourselves from everything else. For many people the thing that is most sticky is wealth – not surprisingly – that’s what provides us with security. But it’s not just wealth. Jesus suggests we detach ourselves from “house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands” – all our material security and all our relationships.
This detachment doesn’t mean we somehow stop having parents or somewhere to live. It means that other things have taken priority; that our life no longer revolves around those things; it now revolves around Jesus.
Another way to look at this is as a contrast between two different frameworks for our lives. On the one hand there is a framework of what we do (and don’t do). That framework for the Jews was the Law, which they called the “word of God”. On the other hand there is a framework of relationships, of who we are. That is something that goes beyond or deeper than what we do and how we behave. That alternative is what Jesus came to demonstrate, to live out, and to leave with us.
The Jewish people had begun to get some sense of this even before Jesus. The “spirit of wisdom”, in our First Reading (Wis 7:7-11), was a way of thinking about something beyond our physical well-being and circumstances. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews builds on this tradition to explain how the teaching of Jesus goes beyond the previous understanding of the Jews (Heb 4:12-13). He refers to the word of God as active and living – it actually gets inside us, it does things to us, in a way which may not always be comfortable. This is very different from the word of God as “law”, a list of do’s and don’ts. That list is what Paul says is dead – “the law cannot give life” (see Gal 3:21).
So pretty much everyone can agree on the basis of a good life, what to do and not to do. Jesus offers something more, something that requires we give up everything else to follow him, that we no longer have the security of wealth and position and power and family – all we have is him. But if we have him then nothing else matters. We may still have those other things but those aren’t what our life revolves around, and as they come and go they don’t affect us in the same way. And sometimes, if we are particularly attached to some part of that, as the young man was to his wealth, then we have to consciously break that attachment.
Then we will have “countless riches at her hands” (Wis 7:11), the hands of God.