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Reflection for Date October 15, 2006

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Same question, same answer (more or less)

In today's Gospel reading a man asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, to become fully and perpetually alive. Jesus simply refers him to the Ten Commandments: don't kill, don't steal, don't lie and so on. The fellow says, "But I learned all that in Sunday School and have been keeping all those do's and don'ts since I was a kid - and frankly I don't feel any more vital than the next fellow who probably doesn't keep the commandments as well as I do. You could give me an A+ on my observance of all those major moral maxims and yet here I am feeling like something's missing - like I'm on a treadmill, bored, getting nowhere."

Jesus sees some possibilities here! The text says Jesus loved him, appreciated his desire to get real. He says, "So you want to graduate from elementary school, live life to the hilt? Then cut loose! You possess great wealth. Could it be that your attachment to your comfortable status quo (like your villa in Palm Springs) creates a lassitude that keeps you at no more than a Sunday school level of decency, creates a drag, leaves you less vital than you expected to be? Your wealth suggests you have an accountant mentality that keeps you focused on bank balances. Yet now you realize, regarding your spiritual life, that balance is not enough. You'd like to tip the scales, forsake your high wire act, experience free fall, LIVE instead of exist. Then share your Self; open the floodgates of your being! Come, follow me! Live like me! I dare you!" Of course the fellow couldn't do it, not because he possessed possessions but because his possessions possessed him.

How unlike the person who will address a similar question to Jesus in the Gospel scheduled to be read at Mass a few weeks from now. And how different (yet so very much the same) will Jesus' response be. This fellow will ask Jesus, "Which is the first of all the commandments?" In effect, he's saying, "Don't give me a list of the Ten Commandments the way you did to that other fellow. Be succinct. Give me something that spares me all the minutiae of the Old Testament, that reduces it to a single formula that I'll remember every minute of my life."

And Jesus simply says, "Love! Love wholeheartedly - the way someone loves when he sells all that he has and gives it to the poor! That's the key! First, you shall love God with all your heart and soul and mind and power. Can you do that? Can you stop doubting him? Can you take that plunge? Can you stop fearing him and trust that he loves you absolutely?"

And the second is: "Love your neighbor as yourself. Can you transcend your wariness of others, care about them as much as you care about yourself? And have you noticed how I've hidden a third commandment in there, namely: Love yourself? Can you love yourself, stop beating up on yourself, forgive yourself, allow God's guaranteed love (which bled itself white on the cross for you) to inundate you and thereby release your own vitality to inundate others?"

Of course this fellow (unlike the one in today's Gospel) will prove to be so much in agreement with Jesus' response that Jesus will say of him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God" - which is just another way of saying, "You are so close to that thing we call eternal life; to a vitality that's electric, contagious and - as they say - out of this world!"

-- Geoff Wood