[Machine transcription]
Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him, you lack one thing. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints of God, this is a beautiful but difficult text that we have in the Gospel of Mark chapter 10, as we continue to read through the Gospels. I have two things that I want to give you by way of preface to warm up to the Scriptures.
The first is to note that there are three stories in the Bible that are somewhat similar, of a young man coming to Jesus and asking Him a similar question and having a similar conversation, and it’ll be good to get those three stories sort of distinguished in our own mind.
The first is in Luke chapter 10 when a lawyer comes to Jesus to test Him and asks Him the same question that the man we heard today asked: what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, “What does the law say? How do you read it?” The man answers him, “You should love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and you should love your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus said, “You’ve answered well, go do that and you’ll live.” The man, Luke tells us, in order to justify himself, asks Jesus, “Well, who is my neighbor?” And then Jesus tells him the parable of the Good Samaritan, teaching what that means.
The third story, and we’ll come back to the one that we have in the middle, is on Holy Week. In fact, it’s on Holy Tuesday when Jesus is teaching in the temple. First, the Pharisees come and ask Him a question about paying taxes, and then the Sadducees come and ask a question about the resurrection. Then a young lawyer comes to Jesus, also to test Him, and asks, “What’s the greatest commandment?” Jesus answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commands hang all the law and the prophets.” That man, Mark tells us, went on to respond to Jesus, basically saying, “Lord, you’ve answered well. That’s right.” And then Jesus says to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” From that moment on, no one dared to question Jesus at all. We find that account in Mark chapter 12 and in Matthew chapter 22.
But this is the third story of a rich young ruler, Mark 10, our text, also in Luke 18 and Matthew 19, who runs and finds Jesus. Jesus is down in Perea; this is the region where John was baptizing. It’s on the east side of the Jordan River. It’d be right where the people came before they crossed over and attacked Jericho, right down in that area.
Jesus is going down there, and this is preparing us for the last sort of press of Jesus up the mountain into Jerusalem for Holy Week. This man runs to Jesus. Jesus is about to leave, and he runs and he finds Him. He says, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” So it’s good to have all three of those stories kind of clean in our mind.
The other thing that I want to put by way of preface is that as we now are in Mark chapter 10, we’re sort of ramping up towards the end, getting closer and closer to Passion Week, to the Lord’s suffering for us on the cross, and the mood changes in the Gospel of Mark. I want to read you just a couple of lines. I brought a few quotes from Alfred Edersheim today. I think I’ve told you about this book before, but if I hadn’t, by way of reminder, one of my favorite books to read on the background of the Gospels is Alfred Edersheim’s *The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah*. I think it was first published in 1899. I have the edition from 1901, but it’s really wonderful. If you’re looking for a book that kind of fleshes out some of the background of the Gospel, it’s a great one.
Edersheim says this about this section that we’re entering into in Mark: “As we near the goal, the wondrous story seems to grow in tenderness and in pathos. It is as if all the loving condescension of the Master were to be crowded into these days, all the pressing need also, and the human weakness of His disciples. And with equal compassion does He look upon the difficulties of them who truly seek to come to Him, and on those which, springing from without or even from self and sin beset them who have already come. So let us try reverently to follow His steps and to learn of His words.”
I think you get that feeling in this text because unlike the other two gentlemen that we’ve mentioned before who come to Jesus, they come to test Him, they come to tempt Him, they come to trick Him. This rich young man doesn’t. In fact, we see it already in how he approaches Jesus. He hears that Jesus is about to leave and he runs to Him. This is an act of honor; if you were a rich person or a person with authority, if you were a person with any sort of status in society in the Middle East, you would never run. You would never condescend to run anywhere. That’s one of the great truths of the… remember the parable of the prodigal son when the father pulls up his robes and runs to the father. He doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him. Well, so this man. Jesus is leaving; he says, “I gotta get him. I gotta get there.” So he runs to Jesus, and then he falls down in front of Him. A true act of honoring Jesus, he kneels before Him and he says something that no rabbi would ever say: “Good teacher, good rabbi.”
And then he asks the question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Now Jesus, already sort of hinting at what He thinks the problem is going to be—and Jesus knows what the problem is going to be—responds and says, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.” And it’s going to turn out that this man’s issue is what he’s calling good. We’ll come back to that.
Jesus says, “You know the commandments. Don’t murder; fifth commandment. Do not commit adultery; sixth commandment. Do not steal; seventh commandment. Do not bear false witness; eighth commandment. Do not defraud; probably an addition of the seventh commandment or maybe even the summary of the tenth commandment for this man in particular, on your father and mother; fourth commandment.”
Now we just… maybe we can pause here just for a brief aside because the way we think of the commandments is pretty important. We know the distinction between law and gospel, and we know that the law is given to us, not so that we might have life, but so that we would know the will of God and so that we would know our own sin. The law reveals the depth of sin and makes us conscience stricken, but the law itself is not bad. The problem is not the law; the problem is us and our sin. The law, and this is consistent throughout the entire Holy Scriptures, tells us the way of life, and sin is the way of death. In fact, Paul will pick this up over and over in his epistles, that we walk not according to the flesh, for those who walk according to the flesh will die, but those who walk according to the Spirit will live.
So the law teaches us how to live. In fact, the law in a really beautiful way protects those good gifts of God. The fifth commandment protects our life; the sixth commandment protects our marriage and chastity; the seventh commandment protects our property; the eighth commandment protects our good name; the fourth commandment protects our families and our order in society and our honoring of one another, so that the commandments are protecting these good things. And we should, we Christians, should be striving to keep the commandments of God. We should know that we’re sinners because we’ve tried to not sin and failed, because we’ve tried to live according to the law of God and failed.
Now, what happens next is very interesting because Jesus gives him the law, at least the second table of the law, and he says to Jesus, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.”
Now we know better. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and no one is righteous, no, not one. We know that this man has not perfectly kept the law. So we could read this as if he was boasting in his own righteousness, which he knows he doesn’t have—the pharisaical sort of works righteousness thing. But I think there might be another more generous way to read his answer. You might have to bear with me.
The reason I think this is because Jesus, who looks at him and He loves him—Jesus is always angry with the self-righteous, but Jesus is not angry with this man. He’s very tender-hearted and he’s dealing very kindly with him. It even just tells us that, that Jesus looks at him with love in His eyes, so that this man might have actually thought that he had kept the law according to the teaching of the time. Remember, the Pharisees taught an external keeping of the law. They taught that if your hand had not reached out to kill anybody, then you’ve kept the law and you haven’t murdered, that if you’ve never committed adultery, you’ve kept the sixth commandment, that if you’ve never reached out your hand to steal something, then you’ve kept the seventh commandment.
This is why Jesus comes along and says, “If you’ve been angry in your heart, then you’ve murdered,” and “if you’ve lusted in your heart, you’ve committed adultery.” That sin is not just what you do on the outside, but also what you do on the inside. Even what you say, what you think, and what you feel, and what you want, it goes all the way down. And so maybe this man just simply had this pharisaical idea that if you avoided the external behavior, then you hadn’t broken the commandments.
So let’s read it that way with innocence; he says, “Teacher, all these I’ve kept from my youth.” So Jesus, looking at him, loves him, and says, “You lack one thing.” The Gospel of Matthew gives us a little bit more detail. In fact, in the Gospel of Matthew, the man says, “What do I lack?” And Jesus says, “If you desire to be full, one thing you need to do: go and sell all that you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. And come and follow me.”
Now this is an amazing command, an instruction and invitation that Jesus gives to this rich young ruler. In fact, it’s quite incredible. Can you imagine? There were times when people came and they were… they wanted to follow Jesus, and He would send them away. Time after time, He would send them away. But here, He gives the same invitation that He gave to the disciples: “Come, follow Me.” If this man would have done it, if he would have sold everything and he would have come to follow Jesus, then maybe instead of talking about the twelve apostles, we talk about the thirteenth apostle, and we know his name. It’s incredible that Jesus gives this invitation to the man.
But He gives it to him knowing precisely where the problem is, right? Knowing precisely where the trouble is in this man’s heart, that he loved his riches and he loved his wealth and that he was unwilling to part with them in order to follow Jesus.
In fact, if we look at the text in Mark and in Matthew and we put them together, it’s quite incredible, that Jesus considers his wealth to be a lack. His wealth is a void. His wealth is a problem because his wealth is precisely what is standing in the way of his faith and his following of Jesus.
Now Jesus explains this in the text following our text, and so I really want to lean into that next week. That’s something for you to look forward to—a sermon all about money and the idolatry of wealth. We need it, but I want to be a little more general this week.
Here’s another Edersheim quote. What he lacked, this man lacked, was earth’s poverty and heaven’s riches—a heart fully set on following Christ. This heart could only come to him through willing surrender of everything. And so this was to him alike the means, the test, and the need. To him, it was this: sell all you have and give it to the poor. To us, it may be something quite other, yet each of us has a lack, something quite deep down in our hearts which we may never yet have known and which we must know and give up if we would follow Christ. And without forsaking, there can be no following.
This is the law of the kingdom, and it is such because we are sinners. Because sin is not only the loss of the good but the possession of something else in its place. We are idolaters. We set up in our own hearts things to love, things to trust, things to be afraid of, and those take the place of Jesus.
Let’s just say it simply: this is the problem of Jesus—is that Jesus refuses to stand alongside any other gods. He refuses to share the throne. This is the first commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God and serve Him alone. You shall have no other gods before me.” Jesus goes straight after this, straight after it with this man and with us as well. That we want to hold on to something alongside Jesus, so that I can have Jesus and my wealth, or Jesus and my stuff, or Jesus and my good reputation on social media, or with the people at work, or Jesus and my other idols, or Jesus and my life, or whatever else.
Whatever it is that we trust in, whatever it is we look to for all good, whatever it is that we cling to in time of trouble, whatever it is we think that makes us sturdy and stands us up, any of that stuff is simply an idol. And if we cling to those idols, we go away from Jesus, sad, disheartened, sorrowful.
We’ve been training in this way and preparing for this exercise of throwing over these idols our whole lives, especially when we sing in the hymn, “Take They Our Life, Goods, Fame, Child and Wife.” Let these all be gone. They yet of nothing won. But all of these things would creep into our own hearts and ask us to trust them, to rely on them, to lean on them, to look to them for all good.
The man had an idol in his heart, Mammon by name, and so he leaves Jesus sorrowful.
Now, I think there’s hope for us. I think there’s hope for this man, even, who left sorrowful, and we don’t hear another word of him, but at least he left sorrowful and not angry. At least he left sad. At least it seems like repentance was begun. I think the church has always held up hope that this man, in fact, did repent and become a Christian and we’ll meet him in the resurrection.
Here’s one last from Edersheim; it’s nice. He describes him leaving Jesus. He says this: “So with clouded face, he gazed down into what he lacked within, but also gazed up in Christ on what he needed. And although we hear of him no more, who that day went back to his rich home very poor because he was very sorrowful, we cannot but believe that he whom Jesus loved yet found in the poverty of earth the treasure of heaven.”
And this is our hope too, that Jesus who refuses to compete with your idols, who refuses to share a seat with your false gods—Jesus who refuses to be loved, feared, and trusted along with other gods—asks us to lay down our lives and take up our crosses and follow Him, that Jesus is not asking us to do something that He Himself is not willing to do. In fact, that He Himself has not already done.
Because if this man thought he was rich, imagine the wealth of Jesus, who sat in eternity on the throne of the universe and basked in eternity in the glory of God, who had all things—the whole world in His hand—who is the maker and the creator of all and who yet gives all of this up so that he might be to you a friend and a Savior. Paul says it like this: “He who is rich became poor so that you, through His poverty, might be made rich.”
Church, Jesus has forsaken all. He was born of the Virgin Mary. He took on your flesh and blood. He carried your sins and your sorrows. He was stricken, smitten, and afflicted by God.
All, dear saints, all of this so that He might give to you the riches and the treasures that heaven and earth could never purchase and never buy. You could have all the riches in the world, and you could never afford an ounce of His blood and the forgiveness of sins that comes from His cross. But He has given this all to you, all freely, all without cost, all because He looks at you and He loves you.
Oh, He loves you. He delights in you. He’s forgotten your sins. He smiles. He’s washed you and made you holy and clean. He’s written His name with His blood in His book of life, and He stands working and serving and blessing even now, feeding you His body and His blood and promising you this cleansing.
He’s forsaken it all so that He might have you. And even though this word of the law is hard, “You shall have no other gods,” we leave here not sorrowful but, forsaking all and clinging to Christ, we share in His joy.
May God grant that for Christ’s sake. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
