In an article entitled “The Limits of Control,” which appeared in the New York Times this past June 15, author Leonard Mlodinow writes:
“My mother has always feared domestic animals, but now as a plump neighborhood cat ran up our driveway, she gazed at the feline, and revealed that 70 years ago she had had a pet cat. Her 87-year-old eyes teared up. Her cat was white, she said, and so thin you could see its ribs. Still, she loved to cuddle it. It wasn’t a house cat – it couldn’t have been, because she was imprisoned at the time, in a forced-labor camp the Nazis set up in Poland, the country where my mother was born and raised. Back then she was as emaciated as the cat, but still she shared her food with it. It gave her comfort she said, and it was a way of fighting back, to help this animal that, like her, the [Nazis] planned to let die.
“The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim concluded that survival in Nazi concentration camps depended on ‘one’s ability to arrange to preserve some areas of independent action to keep control of some important aspects of one’s life despite an environment that seemed overwhelming.’ Studies suggest that, even in normal conditions, to be happy, humans must feel in control. We are currently confronting economic hardship that, though a far cry from the horrors of World War II, has eroded the feeling of self-determination for many of us.
“Eliminate control, and people experience depression, stress, and the onset of disease. In a study of elderly nursing home patients, one group was told they could decide how their room would be arranged, and could choose a plant to care for. Another group had their rooms set up for them and a plant chosen and tended for them. Eighteen months later 15 percent of the patients in the group given control had died, compared with 30 percent in the passive group.
“The need for control can inspire great achievements, such as dams that prevent flooding, medicines to ease our lives, and perfectly confected chocolate soufflés. But it can also lead to suboptimal behavior. Though people generally view ‘control freaks’ in a negative light, that need makes us all vulnerable to making bad decisions – especially when it comes to money.”
In other words, while the exercise of control in our lives can be efficacious – even life preserving – it can also work against us in deadly ways. The wealthy man in today’s Gospel seems doomed by his inability to let go of things in his life that threaten to destroy the very life he wishes to save. He walks away from Jesus hump-shouldered at the prospect of enriching the poor and leaving all behind to follow Jesus and his goodness.
We all know this guy, don’t we? Next to the Good Samaritan, he’s probably the best known nameless character in all of Scripture. Who among us with any orientation to Scripture at all has not heard of him, and, having heard of him, does not remember him? Few, if any, I would venture to say. We often refer to him as “the rich young ruler,” though Mark says only that he’s rich. Matthew is the one who calls him “young” and Luke says he’s a “ruler,” which doesn’t say that they’re all wrong, but that he’s important enough to make it into all three of the Gospels that rely on common sources to tell their stories.
I think we remember him because when we put ourselves in his position, we find Jesus’ command to him very difficult for us as well. We may not think of ourselves as rich or wealthy – and many of us are not by any stretch in our society – but many more of us when put next to most other people of the world are comparatively quite “well off.” And to be asked to give up all the stuff we have is threatening. We’re all familiar with the adage sometimes pasted on the bumpers of cars: Let Go, let God. We recognize the truth in that saying, but when the tire hits the road the whole idea of letting go gets a bit more complicated, especially around issues of money. Having enough begins to mean a little more than I already have. Caution often takes a strangle hold on us in financial matters, and we incline more and more to the desire to accumulate.
Some who have accumulated a great deal, of course, are also quite generous. Foundations and grants greatly enhance cultural and civic life. Think of Philadelphia and the presence of names such as Kimmel, Perelman, Annenberg, and others.
But in some people the desire for more and more money becomes an obsession toward stinginess . A couple of days ago I caught just a little more than I wanted to – which was probably even less than ten seconds – of an interview with one of the most outspoken of those loud and raucous radio talk show hosts. He admitted that he will say anything, the more outrageous the better, to attract the largest audience he can. Because the larger the audience, the more opportunity he has to get what he really wants – and then he leaned in toward the camera and whispered, “What I really want is money.” Of course, he’s an egregiously vulgar example, but history – and we don’t have to go back any farther than even today’s newspaper for examples – documents the plethora of people who are in it only for the money. The more, the better. Fools beware.
Mahatma Ghandi – someone who didn’t care a lot about money but recognized the evil its pursuit can stir up – famously stated, “There is enough in the world to satisfy need but not enough to satisfy everyone’s greed.”
Walter Rauschenbusch, the great advocate of what was called the “social gospel” in the last century, wrote in his work Christianity and the Social Crisis:
“Like all the greatest teachers of [humankind], Jesus realized a profound danger to the better self in the pursuit of wealth. Whoever will watch the development of a soul that has bent its energies to the task of becoming rich, can see how perilous the process is to the finer sense of justice, to the instinct of mercy and kindness and equality, and to the singleness of devotion to high ends; in short, to all the higher humanity in us . . .”
Jesus’ call to the wealthy man is not a call to self-inflicted poverty, but to a new life of blessedness. It is not a summons simply to give up his wealth and possessions – to renounce it all so that he can be penniless and miserable for the rest of his life. It is a call to freedom, a call to let go of the” religion of money” that has kept him in chains – which is expressed in his anxiety over whether he will have the gift of eternal life – in exchange for the “religion of Jesus” which will set him free. It is a call so close to home for us, for it is a call to each of us to divest of those idols – and so many are tied to the accumulation of wealth – that block us from experiencing the joy of salvation in Christ, both in this world and the next. The story of the rich man touches us all for its pathos and its disquieting closeness.
Perhaps Henri Nouwen says it for us: “The story of the rich young man, which I read during the Eucharist, continues to captivate me. . . . Jesus loved this young man and, as I understand it, desired to have him as a disciple. But the young man’s life was too complex; he had too many things to worry about, too many affairs to take care of, too many people to relate to. He couldn’t let go of his concerns and thus, disappointed and downcast, he left Jesus. Jesus was sad, the young man was sad, and today I feel sad because I wonder how different his life would have been had he been free enough to follow Jesus. He came, heard, but then left. We never hear of him again.”
But we do keep thinking about him, don’t we? For we see in him so much that we recognize in ourselves. Jesus loves the rich man and he loves us; he does not view him or us as intentionally evil. Indeed, the man appears to be faithful in many ways, as are we, having kept the commandments from youth. So rather than condemning our “sin,” Jesus confronts our weakness, our captivity to possessions that prevents us from living into the full life of the kingdom.
The lectionary planners could not have known how appropriate this text would be for us today as we begin our annual financial stewardship season. Such a time inevitably sets up an internal tug-of-war for many of us as we are challenged to gain a wise perspective on the resources we have and the needs for those resources beyond our own desires. This year may present difficulties we have not known for a good long time, for even wanting to be generous we may be confronting the realities of decreasing resources – issues including questions of job security when we never dreamed that would ever happen. For others, however, the call may be to step up to a new place, a higher level of giving, a level that, surprisingly, may show us the face of Jesus in a way we have not encountered before. In Jesus’ economy, letting go can be a way of climbing on, a way of knowing as never before the blessedness of a life freed of burdens that weigh us down. Amen.