Wis 7:7-11 / Heb 4:12-13 / Mk 10:17-30
Not so long ago, I saw a little Peanuts cartoon that offered a chilling bit of insight into the human condition. Linus is philosophizing with Lucy. “Life is peculiar,” he says. “Wouldn’t you like to have your life to live over, if you knew what you know now?”
Lucy stares out blankly and then asks, “What do I know now?”
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Good question! After all this living what do we know now? What have we learned about life? I suspect that most of us are like the rich young man in the Gospel: bit by bit we’ve learned that living by the rules, following the commandments, makes sense — don’t lie, cheat, or steal; don’t murder; don’t commit adultery; and so on. We’ve learned that the alternative to living by those rules is chaos or as the British philosopher put it, “the war of all against all,” perpetual fear, daring to trust no one, being always on guard, never relaxing.
That’s a nightmare and no way to live. So most of the time most of us work fairly hard at living by the rules. And when we succeed, everybody wins. So living by the rules is a giant step in the right direction, but as Jesus explained to the young man, it’s not enough. Staying out of trouble and causing no one any harm is a very good thing, but it doesn’t take us to the core of life. It brings us to the doorstep but it doesn’t take us inside.
As Jesus keeps telling us, if we want our lives to be really happy and fulfilling right now, we have to think big. We have to think like God, and that starts with knowing ourselves and our gifts very well, and then asking, “Who needs the gifts I have to give, and what’s the best way to bring my gifts to them?”
Now we know from experience that when we let go and think big and start seeing ourselves as God’s gift bearers, real joy comes: we know we’re needed, we know we’ve got a purpose, we know inside what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God. So why do we pull back so often?
The reason, and the barrier to all the joy we ought to have is fear: fear that I may have no gift to share, fear that my gift is not needed, fear that in sharing my gift I will lose it and have nothing left for myself. Those fears are very real and often very powerful inside us, but they are lies that needlessly stifle and shrink our spirits and cut us off from the best parts of our lives.
Jesus is calling us to turn our backs on those lies once and for all. He’s inviting us to redefine ourselves from the inside out and to remember that, like Jesus himself, we are God’s gift bearers.
May we never forget that! May we never settle for anything less!
