Sermon: RICH, YOUNG AND POWERFUL

Today is their first full Sunday in Durham for several hundred young people who have arrived in our city at the threshold of their university life.  Some of you are here today, and you are welcome in this Cathedral.  We hope that you already feel at home in north-east England with its heritage, its landscapes, its traditions and its wonderful people. 

The start of term can make us nostalgic, though.  Who can forget our first day at school or college with its alchemy of excitement and trepidation, the realisation that in an important way we had left behind what was familiar and taken another step towards growing up?  If only we knew then how much we had to learn ....  ‘Start right and they'll walk happily ever after' said a famous advertisement for the Start-Rite shoes we used to wear as children.  The huge concave picture across the tube tracks showed a child holding the hand of a parent, brave but not quite certain yet, taking tentative steps down a long straight road into a brilliant sunrise that heralded life, the universe and everything. 

Who would not be young again, like the young man in today's gospel reading, running up to Jesus and eagerly kneeling in front of him?  He wants to know what he has to do to inherit eternal life.  He does not walk or stroll but runs: he wants to know.  This is not the lazy insouciance of someone who is not greatly troubled by the answer, whose question is merely a courtesy or a way of alleviating the boredom of being rich.  He wants to know because he needs to know and he will not go away unless he gets an answer.  So Jesus tells him, not without first pressing him to examine his assumptions: ‘why do you call me good?  No-one is good but God alone'.  Be sure of the premise of your question.  Does this would-be student of the kingdom of God have any idea who this good Man is who has stopped to teach him? 

Yet we can admire this youth who though young and rich and powerful is not so arrogant as to forget the importance of curiosity.  His running up to Jesus shows how true a student he is.  We should all run like that, not just freshers arriving in Durham.  He wants to be a disciple, a learner in the school of Christ, and embrace the kingdom of God that is coming upon the world and to which Jesus' teaching points so urgently.   We should run towards the kingdom as it bears down upon us with its promise of truth and peace.  There is a lot of springing up and running in St Mark's Gospel.  The book even ends with it, though there, it is women running away from the empty tomb on Easter Day because they are afraid when they should have been running towards the risen Christ.  

But our young student is not alarmed.  Far from it: he will do anything it takes to inherit life.  Anything?  Jesus tests him on this next, for now it is not only the premise but the resolve that must be examined.  ‘You know the commandments: don't murder, or kill, or commit adultery, or steal, or practise falsehood, or defraud; and honour your father and mother.'  It is a kind of spiritual triage: who can come out of it with clean hands and a pure heart?  Yet still he is there, undaunted, looking up into Jesus' face, full of desire to do the right thing and not disappoint the man whose words are charged with promise.  ‘Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.'  Does Jesus smile at a young man's naivete?  Or does he give him the benefit of the doubt: not that he has been perfect (‘no-one is good but God alone'), but that he has sincerely lived by torah all his life, the divine law that is the source of all that is wholesome and good in human life?  To follow torah is to learn virtue, train our moral compass, live wisely and grow in the image of God. 

He will not turn away.  And here St Mark's story makes the most telling point of all.  ‘Jesus, looking at him, loved him.'  That little detail, like the young man running, paints a picture a thousand words could not even sketch.  He loved him.  It is the only time Mark, Matthew or Luke ever say that Jesus loved someone.  Indeed, if you search the word ‘love' and its cognates in the first three gospels, you will only find it used of God's love for his Son, and our obedient love for God and neighbour, apart from here.  ‘Jesus, looking at him, loved him', a verb Matthew and Luke can't bring themselves to preserve when they tell this story.   Why not?  Is it that this love for a winsome youth is too specific, too particular?  What was it that Jesus loved?  His dogged persistence in not letting go?  Jesus always admired people like this: recall the Canaanite woman who was not put off by his insulting riposte that it is not right to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.  He told a parable about a persistent widow who wearied the judge into giving her what she asked.  He befriended the passionate, wayward Mary Magdalene because she clung to him.  And here is another unlikely companion: there are not many rich people in the gospels as dogged as this when it comes to a kingdom of nobodies. 

And then the denouement.  We don't want it to come, wish that it could have been otherwise, for we too have come to care about this young man and his destiny.  ‘You lack one thing' (how his heart must leapt at that: just one thing!). ‘Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come follow me.'  And at once the light in his eyes is snuffed out.  ‘When he heard this he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions'.  It's as if there has been a kind of death.  For it is a real bereavement: the hope, the promise suddenly knocked away from him, and only the stern, unyielding demand of the Teacher echoing in his ears as he slinks away, only the summons to give up his life for the sake of the kingdom he wants so badly. 

‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also' says Jesus, and this is the point of the story.  He goes on to reflect with his disciples on where lasting value lies: not, he says, in material gain but in following where the good news leads.  Contemplating the renunciation of what we have and what we are for the sake of the kingdom of God: that is the only test of how much we really want it, how eager we are to embrace it.  I let myself off the hook here if I water down this truth: it shows how compromised my Christianity has become. I think of Cuthbert entering the monastery at Melrose, and Francis embracing the leper, and Therese the Little Flower whose relics are on tour reminding Britain of the simplicity and purity of a young girl's life offered to God; and Mother Maria Pilenko stepping into the queue to go into the gas chamber in the place of a frightened old woman.  It is stories like these that tell me both that Christianity is true, and how far I have to travel before it becomes true in me.    

Most of us are not rich and not powerful, and many of us are not young any more.  Perhaps our running days are over, perhaps the gleam in the eye is duller than it used to be, perhaps our naïve but eager curiosity has been displaced by life's abrasions into settling for the easy compromises of a cosy, untroubled existence.  So how do we keep spiritual curiosity alive?  By looking beyond the transient into what lasts for ever.  We only have to run towards it, say yes to it, grasp hold of it.  The youth could not do it, or could not do it yet.  It's a sad end to a story that began so well.  Yet I am confident of this: that even when he turned away, the good Teacher did not stop loving him.