Though
we may not have appreciated it at the time, many of us are surely thankful to have
had people in our lives who set us straight, told it like it was, and challenged
us to not to accept mediocrity. At times,
we can all fall into a fool’s paradise of thinking that all is well and we are fine
just as we are. It is so easy to rest on
our laurels and sell ourselves short.
The
rich young ruler who asked Jesus Christ what he had to do in order to find
eternal life must have thought that he had already met all God’s requirements. So when the Lord told him to keep the
commandments of the Old Testament, the man said that he had checked them all
off, that he had kept them his entire life. This is where the story gets really
interesting, for the Lord then gives him a commandment that he could not
imagine following: Sell all that you
have, give to the poor, and come follow me.
This fellow was rich and powerful and loved his comfortable lifestyle,
so he became very sad and apparently walked away. The Lord knew how hard it was for people who
have it all in this life to enter the kingdom of heaven, for they are tempted
strongly to love their possessions and status more than God and neighbor. Still, as the Lord said His stunned
disciples, “the things which are impossible with men are possible with God.”
What
did Christ mean by speaking in this way?
He certainly was not simply adding another law that the Jews had to obey. Instead, he challenged this man to stop
thinking about his relationship with God as a set of requirements which he
could master. Someone who responds to
the Old Testament laws by saying, “Oh, I’ve always followed them since I was a
child” has a very shallow understanding of what God requires of us. That would be like someone saying, “I’ve
always been a perfectly faithful Christian since childhood.” Oh, please. Get real. We know that is not true of any one of us.
The spiritual
life is never that simple. In the Sermon
on the Mount, Christ showed us the true meaning of God’s requirements. He said that we are guilty of murder if we
are angry with others, if we hate and insult them. He taught that we are guilty of adultery if
we lust in our hearts. And if we do not
love God with every ounce of our being and our neighbors as ourselves, we have
broken the greatest of the commandments. By these standards, none of us has anything to
brag about before God, for we are all the chief of sinners and need God’s mercy
and healing in our lives.
Christ
jolted this man out of his delusion, of his false self-confidence, by giving
him a commandment that He knew he could not keep: giving away all his beloved money,
possessions, and power. Perhaps for the
first time, this fellow was challenged to see that eternal life is not something
that we can accomplish by our own ability.
If we cannot offer to God that which we love most in this life, then we
obviously have not fulfilled all that the Lord expects of us.
And
since Christ came to unite our fallen humanity with divinity and to conquer sin
and death, it is pretty clear that even the most law-abiding person still needs
the mercy, grace, and love of our Lord in order to inherit eternal life. By our own power, it is not possible to share
in the life of heaven. That is why St. Paul
wrote that he boasted in nothing “except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
With Him, all things are possible.
As we
continue to prepare for the coming of Christ at Christmas, we do well to
remember that this great feast is not about the birth of a mere teacher, law-giver,
or example. Were our Lord simply another
prophet with a strict teaching, we would not rejoice at His coming. Instead, we would—like the rich young
ruler—become sad and dejected, for the last thing we need is another law to fail
to obey and make us feel guilty.
The eternal Son of God was not born at Christmas to
add to the burden of the law or to give us the impression that all will be well
if we obey a new set of teachings. To
the contrary, He became a human being to do what a mere law never could, to
bring us into His holiness, to make us partakers of the divine nature, to heal
and fulfill our fallen, corrupt humanity, to make it possible for us mortals to
put on immortality.
The Lord’s
shocking statement about giving everything away challenged the rich young ruler
to stop thinking of his life before God in legalistic terms. Likewise, we should use prayer, fasting,
almsgiving, and other spiritual disciplines of the Nativity Fast, of Advent, to be shocked
out of our conventional and shallow assumptions about what it means to share in
the eternal life of the Holy Trinity.
For Christ was not born to bring us what the world calls success. Neither
did He come to make us strict legalists who think that holiness can be reduced
to a list of “do’s” and “don’ts.” And He
certainly did not put on flesh in order to make His followers the
self-righteous judges of others.
The
eternal Son of God became one of us for completely different reasons. Out of unfathomable love, He wanted to make
possible for us to do what is impossible by our own power. We may take pride in what we accomplish, but
which of us can claim credit for the Incarnation? There is no earthly prestige in a Virgin
Mother giving birth in a cave to a baby who whose cradle was a manger, a
feeding trough for animals. The rich
young rulers of the world cannot understand a Messiah whose human life begins
in such lowly circumstances and ended on a cross. Jesus Christ’s birth, life, death,
resurrection, and ascension are not simple human accomplishments or rewards,
but truly miraculous manifestations of God’s eternal life in our world of sin,
death, and corruption. As St. Paul said,
“In Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails for anything, but
a new creation.”
A religion that simply provides more laws to
obey could never make us a new creation: a new, holy people who love and serve God and neighbor
with every ounce of our being. Laws simply
make things worse by giving us more opportunities to judge ourselves and others. It is often when we are ashamed of not
measuring up that we are most likely to shift our attention to putting down
other people in order to make ourselves feel better. Whenever we do that, we become like the Pharisees
who rejected our Lord.
The
God-Man Jesus Christ operates in a completely different way, of course, making
it possible for everyone, no matter their struggles or failures or social
standing, to find true peace through faith, humility, and growth in holiness--In
other words, through our ongoing acceptance of His mercy and healing in our
lives.
We
prepare to receive Christ at Christmas by opening our hearts and souls to His
salvation—not by mastering laws—but by true repentance. Both in our private prayers and in the
sacrament of Confession which we should all take during Advent, we repent by
honestly confessing our sins and asking for the Lord’s mercy, even as we
resolve to make a new beginning in the Christian life. Yes, we must cooperate with our Lord’s mercy
and grace by doing what we can to live faithfully. But even the best life does not somehow deserve
heaven. In fact, the more we grow in
holiness, the more we will begin to see clearly the gravity of our sins and how
far we are from the full stature of Christ.
The closer we grow to Him, the less we will think of salvation as a
reward for good behavior according to a legal standard.
So let
this Advent be marked for each of us by humility, repentance, and spiritual
disciplines, not as punishment because we have broken a law, but because we all
have room to grow in our relationship with Jesus Christ. Our hearts and souls are not worthy of
Him. We do not serve Him in every poor
and suffering person. We do not seek
first His kingdom and righteousness. We
are not perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect. But unlike the rich young ruler, we must not give
up and walk away in despair. Instead, we should say, “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son
of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” as we press forward in the Christian life as
best we can. For what is impossible with men is possible with the Incarnation
of the God-Man Jesus Christ. He is not a
law, but our Savior.
