Amos 5.6-7,10-15; Hebrews 4.12-16; Mark 10.17-31

The Rev’d Sarah Hillman 

What is the question you would most like answered? If you met Jesus, what would you ask him?

There are all sorts of questions to which people want to know the answer. One of the most common is why God allows such suffering in the world as there is. A perceived lack of a satisfactory answer to that question leads many people either to deny the existence of God or to accept that there might be a god but not to want to have anything to do with a being who can allow such things to go on.

One of the things that the Church has in recent years been accused of is trying to answer questions that no-one is asking.

Surveys, particularly of young people, have shown that questions of eternal life and salvation are not what they want to know about. Most people have a desire to feel loved, but many people do not feel excited by the prospect of eternal life. This is, of course, at the heart of Christianity – Jesus offers us life. But so, of course, is love. The two cannot really be separated.

And yet if we look around our world at present, the big discussions are about death – can we allow people to die? How do we cope with men and women who facilitate the deaths of others? What should happen to someone who assists in suicide or stays with another while they die but fetches no help? End-of-life issues are prominent in society’s thinking at present.

What hasn’t happened in the debates is any sense of a question of what happens after death.

What is being presented is a clear choice. People either live with suffering until the natural end of their life, or they decide on their own time of death and take their own lives with or without the assistance of others. Life or death. A stark choice.

I’ve not come across any discussion yet about what death means. Does it mean a total end, oblivion, nothing-ness? Or is there some sense that life goes beyond death? And, if it goes beyond death, who will be in heaven and who will be in hell?

All sorts of answers are possible to these questions. They do not appear to be major preoccupations these days. In times past, the threat of hell and damnation kept people in a state of fear; no longer. Nowadays most people have some vague idea that death is not the end, but have no particular sense of what happens next.

All sorts of stories are told in order to ease the pain of separation – Look at that star – that’s Mummy shining down on you; Josephine’s an angel now – God needed more helpers, and so on – even though rationally most people accept that stars are stars and not twinkling humans beyond the grave.

Things were very different in the days of Jesus. Many saw the end of the world as imminent, and people were concerned about where they would end up. To an outsider, the rich young man who approached Jesus would have looked to be a dead cert. for a place in heaven.

First, he was rich. To those looking on, that would have meant a definite candidate for eternal life; to be a rich man was seen as a sign that God had blessed him. And yet, they only had to look back a bit and recall their knowledge of Scripture to know that riches did not necessarily mean acceptance by God.

Look back to today’s passage from Amos, where those who push aside the needy, trample on the poor and tax grain are condemned, though they themselves would have been rich.

Second the young man would have been seen as a good religious Jew. He has been living out the Jewish law: he’s not murdered anyone, nor played around with another’s wife, he’s not stolen or lied or defrauded, and he appears to have a good relationship with his parents. Outsiders would have viewed him as a decent, upright, moral young man.

But let’s look at what Jesus says. If we see which commandments he picks out, they are all about attitudes towards other people. He says nothing about the first commandments which relate to the relationship with God. (An aside – no one seems quite sure why Jesus has turned the command not to covet into one about fraud).

And when we spot that, we come to the heart of this story. The problem for the young man was not in what he did, but more in his attitude to God. Yes – he lived a moral life, as do many people today. But living a moral life wasn’t going to get him into heaven. What was going to do that was his recognition and living out of the first commandments: you shall have no other gods but me.

The man went away grieving. Jesus, in his answer, had hit a sore point. The man was rich; his wealth brought him a comfortable lifestyle. And when it comes to the crunch, he puts his trust in earthly things and not in God. His attitude was one of ownership – this is mine, not of stewardship – this is God’s and I am, caring for it.

He saw his worth in monetary terms. And our society is prone to calculating success in terms of wealth too. Those who are rich are the ones whom people want to emulate.

What many people look to is possessions and building up treasure on earth. I remember once watching a documentary on television, where young men from a large council estate were being interviewed. Most of them were involved in drug-dealing. Why? Because they had aspirations – not to do something with their lives, but to have fast cars.

That’s an extreme example. Those young men looked up to those slightly older than them who had managed to get the sports cars. What do other people in our society aspire to? The number of talent shows such as X-Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, Pop Idol and so on hook into many people’s desire to be a celebrity. If that wasn’t something important for so many, there would be no contestants for these programmes.

The aspirations of every Christian should be to love God with all our hearts, souls, minds and being, and our neighbours as ourselves.

I wonder how many of us can truly say that those are our greatest ambitions.

The rich man went through the motions of a relationship with God, following God’s commandments, but when faced with a decision between trusting in God for his security and in his riches, he chooses the wealth.

None of us know what happened to that young man after he wanders off sadly. Did he continue to ponder eternal life? Did he regret walking away from Jesus? We just don’t know.

He wasn’t the only one, though, who was taken aback by Jesus’s words. The disciples were confused too by what Jesus had said. He was again turning their world upside-down. They had clearly had no doubts that the man in front of Jesus would already be on his way to eternal life.

Surely, they would have thought, Jesus would have commended someone who kept the rules so well.

Jesus has to remind them that salvation is God’s gift not human wages. Rich people did become disciples – Zacchaeus is a good counterpart to the rich young man. Zacchaeus, when faced with the same decision, was able to give away his wealth, because it meant more to him to follow Jesus than to be rich.

We all have things that stop us following God whole heartedly. For some it’s money; for others family or friends, pride or greed. For many it’s embarrassment – people are just to embarrassed to talk about their faith. For vast numbers it’s time. It doesn’t take much to lead us away from God.

So it’s pretty amazing that God keeps on loving us, not giving up on us. But we all face a choice – the one the young man faced, and we all have to make a decision as to how we will act.

None of us can be saved through riches or power or celebrity or pride. They will only prevent us from being real with God. The young man tried to his behind his money. It didn’t work.

If someone came to you and said: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”, what would you say? I wonder whether Jesus would agree with our answers.