The rich young man asked
Jesus what he needed to do to get eternal life and Jesus told him to obey the
commandments. In typical young adult fashion, the man inquired, “Which ones?” (Matt
19:18a NIV). His question makes me laugh…heaven forbid that he should try to
follow all the commandments. Today’s believers
do something similar as we parse out Scripture looking for the minimal
requirements needed to be called a Christian.
1 comment:
Gail;
This rich, young man had the frame of mind that he was already upright and blessed. All of the commandments Jesus listed he kept. Imagine the character of someone who actually does honor his father and mother. What is it to honor mom and dad? What is honoring a contract? Contracts present stipulations for shaping the behaviors of those entering them. A contract for building a ship means one party’s behavior is captured to effect a built ship, and the other party’s behavior is captured to the payment of a determined sum for that built ship. Honor is not a feeling. Honor is a frame of mind yielding a correlated behavior. If dad needs help building a fence, the honoring son will be there helping.
Of course, honoring mom and dad is just a piece of righteousness, like are the other five commandments Jesus listed. And while it is not all that common to know someone who has never murdered or stolen anything of real significance, it is less common to know someone who truly honors mom and dad. It is rarer yet to know someone who has not significantly lied or cheated on their spouse. And it is indeed rare to meet someone who actually does love their neighbor (unless the neighbor is who their cheating with.) At least it's like that in our day. My guess is that this young man was truly a decent person. I can imagine he accumulated his wealth by the effects which orderliness and righteousness work. The Psalms and Proverbs are sprinkled with the idea that righteousness produces prosperity. So, having reflected on his commendable, social behavior in the sight of his blessed prosperity, he might have wanted to know what other commandment might yield that eternal life thing he‘d forgotten to address, since he heard Jesus being so poignant about it.
I guess he should have known. He was honoring of folks around him, according to his claim of obedience, to which his prosperity attested. Although his mind could settle on the propriety of his behaviors amongst men, his soul felt the call to a more fundamental responsibility. Being well tied into a community of people who look to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he no doubt had knowledge of the other four commandments. Maybe Jesus did not list these because He knew the rich, young man knew them as well but could not honestly claim to be obeying them. Maybe his soul hungered for the meat and potatoes of obedience to the rest of the commandments he‘d forgotten.
Had he been obeying the first four commandments also, retaining his estate would not have been more important to him than honoring God. He would not have created in his mind the image of prosperity and wealth as the providers of his vital necessities, simple comforts, and emotional pleasures. He would not have been taking God’s name into mind emptied of all its meaning when he observed the Sabbath with the rest of his community. Nor would he really be observing the Sabbath without mentally filling God’s name with reflections on the beneficence of life, his own blessings received from God, the meanings of God‘s laws, the glory of His effects, and His praiseworthiness for working those effects upon whomever loves His laws.
-----The rich, young man got lost in the commandments for making and securing community. The effects of obeying those were immediate and pleasurable to him. But his soul, blinded by this foolishness, still sensed the vast void of his displaced attention for the commandments to actually know God as a teetering upon a cliff’s edge.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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