Sermon for Pentecost 20 (Proper 23B), October 11, 2015

Text: Amos 5:6-7, 10-15; Mark 10:17-22

            Beloved in Christ, the Israelites in the Old Testament reading and the rich man in the Gospel had this in common: they were called to walk in paths of great righteousness, but in the end they walked away. They couldn’t bear the particular burden that God was setting before them. And so they simply walked away.

            Both the Israelites in the Old Testament reading and the rich man in the Gospel thought of themselves as pious people of God. If you read Amos carefully, you see that he was writing to the church-going people of northern Israel. Yes, there were Baal worshippers around in that society, but Amos didn’t address them. Nowhere did he excoriate the Israelites for worshipping Baal. Instead, he looked specifically at the people who were worshipping the LORD God at Bethel. They thought of themselves as good people. After all, their king’s ancestor had gotten rid of much of the Baal worship in the land and reinstituted many good laws that had fallen into disuse. They faithfully brought their sacrifices to the LORD and thought that they would inherit eternal life.

The Prophet Amos
Gustav Doré

            But God was deeply displeased with them. It boiled down to the way that they perverted justice. They saw that the poor often had no one to stand up for them and were not articulate. The poor didn’t know the ins and the outs of the law. It was easy to hoodwink them. And those who did justified it all as socially acceptable. If their customers were too stupid to realize that they were putting their thumbs on the scale or mixing a little of the chaff with the wheat, that was too bad for them. Buyer, beware! And if their customers were going through some misfortune, that just gave the merchants all the more power to drive a hard bargain and get what they wanted cheaply. They didn’t think it was a matter of right or wrong. It was just plain business.

            But God called them to be more righteous. He asked them to do one simple thing: stop bullying the weak and the poor. God didn’t command Amos to preach that the Israelites should give alms to the poor. That is found elsewhere in Scripture, but not in Amos. Instead, he makes an even simpler request: don’t oppress the poor; that is, don’t be unfair in your dealings just because you are more powerful than they. It was a simple request, but the Israelites couldn’t do it. They were disheartened by what Amos said and “went away sorrowful, for [they] had great possessions”—and that was all that mattered to them. A generation later they went away in exile, never to return to the land of Israel again.

            Nearly eight centuries later a rich man came on the scene. He had devoted himself to great acts of piety. He had tried never to break any of the commandments. In fact, when Jesus rattled them off, he couldn’t think of any that he had ever broken. He had always been a well-behaved child. He had never committed a felony or even a misdemeanor. Sure, he longed to do something even greater for God, but it certainly wouldn’t be something too difficult, given how well schooled in piety he was.

            And at first it looked as if Jesus agreed. Jesus told him, “You lack one thing.” It was just one thing, one simple little thing. “That’s great,” the man must have thought. “I’ve done 99% of the work; now all I have to do is this 1% remaining. Easy-peasy. Go ahead, Jesus tell me what it is.” And Jesus replied: “Go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” If he were a man of great piety, as he professed, it would not have been a problem, for he would have known that our Lord is the greatest treasure of all. But instead we are told that “disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.” Two simple requests to live righteously—and neither the Israelites in Amos’s day nor the rich man in the Gospel can fulfill those requests.

            Would we? Do we find it easy to treat those weaker than ourselves with the respect that they deserve? Isn’t it easier to take advantage of them? Sometimes we can do this rather crassly, as when bullies beat up or pick on their marks, or when con artists run a scam. Other times we do it more subtly, such as when we push and shove our way to the top at work. And if we have a hard time saying no to that type of unjust behavior, how would we ever heed our Lord’s call to put Him above all things? We are tempted to be disheartened by what our Lord has said and to go away sorrowful.

            But our Lord hints in today’s Gospel that He wants us to look at this question in a deeper way. The man approached Jesus as one good man coming to consult another. To be sure, Jesus would have been a tad wiser, since He is the “Good Teacher,” but the man assumed that it was a meeting of like minds. But Jesus asked him to consider the matter more deeply. If Jesus is the Good Teacher—and He is—then He must be true God, for “no one is good except God alone.” And so we are invited to consider how this is so.

            Amos had said that a hallmark of piety was not being unjust to the poor. Our Lord took that a step further and allowed Himself to be treated unjustly. Not only did He not harm others, He also allowed Himself to be condemned unfairly. His enemies took advantage of His silence. When He refused to stand up for Himself, they beat Him. When He stood humbly before Pilate, they clamored for His death. And Pilate figured a little injustice was an acceptable price to pay for peace and quiet in his realm.

            But we shouldn’t think of our Lord as just a victim who got swept away by circumstances beyond His control. He actively chose this route of obedience. For the very things He commanded of the rich man He embraced Himself. The rich man was not being completely truthful when he said that he had kept the commandments from his youth. He may have refrained from gross violations of them, but he had not kept his heart pure from anger, lust, greed, envy, and rebellion. But Christ had kept all those commandments perfectly. He did so because He delighted in righteousness and because He wanted to live the completely holy life that we and the rich man and every other human being have been unable to live.

            But Christ knew that couldn’t be the end of it. It wasn’t enough just to live a pious life Himself. And so He took everything that He had and gave it away to us poor human beings, who had no spiritual riches of our own. He emptied Himself of every right and privilege that He had as the Son of God. Instead, He humbled Himself to the point of being grabbed by a mob and then led to the cross after a couple of show trials. But He did this, not so that He would “have treasure in heaven,” but rather so that we would. And so Jesus walked away. But He didn’t walk away from God, as the Israelites and the rich man did. Instead, He walked away from all His prerogatives and went on the lonely path to the cross. And because He did so we have all the treasure of heaven.

            What does this mean? It means that we are completely forgiven. All the times we have behaved like jerks to the people who were weaker than us; all the times we have thrown our weight around rather than serve humbly; all the times we have clung to our wealth and power rather than yield to God and His kingdom—all these things have been forgiven. You have been set free. You are God’s beloved children because Christ has paid the price for you to become so.

            So what do we do now? We stop asking silly questions such as “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Have you considered how stupid that question is? What do you have to do to inherit anything? Nothing. The person leaving you the inheritance has to do all the hard work of setting up the will and the even harder work of dying. What must we do to inherit eternal life? Nothing. Christ has died for us and has left us in His will.

            Instead we simply treasure the gift that God has given us. We “seek the Lord and live.” We enjoy the forgiveness of sins that He has already given us. And we enjoy the new life and fellowship we have with Him. As part of that new life, we will take seriously the call to put Him first—above all our material possessions and everything else we treasure. Because we delight in Him, we learn to “seek good and not evil.” In fact, we learn to “hate evil and love good” so that we can “establish justice” wherever people need our help. All of these things simply flow from the gifts that God has given us.

            Because Christ has not walked away from us, we are not disheartened and therefore we should not walk away from Him. In Jesus’s name. Amen.