You Gotta Let Somebody Love You: A Sermon for Proper 23

The rich person in today’s Gospel lesson is all of us. I say this because I believe that there is an innate longing in all of us for eternal life. We don’t want our life here on earth to be all that there is, and we don’t want death to get the last word with us. That is just human nature. And that being the case, we also long to know what we need to do to inherit eternal life. Religion – and particularly the Judeo-Christian tradition – gives us language, doctrine, and practices to help us put a frame around these existential questions with which we wrestle. So, I think that the question that the rich man posed to Jesus is very much the question that we all have, whether we are able to articulate it or not. 

 I’ve heard it put this way before – most people, if they ran into Jesus on the street today, and could only ask him one question, would likely ask him exactly what the rich man asked him – “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Of course, we’d have many, many other questions we’d like to ask him, but if we only could have one, we might as well get to the essential question of salvation. After all, it sure would be terrible to not know the key to life eternal but to know exactly how Jesus was able to feed all those people with just a few loaves and fishes. 

But the rich person’s story is our story too in another way. The rich man was a very righteous person. He was a faithful Jew who took his religious life very seriously. He observed and obeyed the Jewish law, and clearly was a productive citizen. In very general terms, we could call him a “good person.” When somebody like him dies today, the obituary is very flattering, describing a lot of accomplishments and a life well-lived.

So, all of this being the case, how is it that the story ends the way that it does? Don’t all “good people” inherit eternal life? If so, why does the man walk away from his conversation with Jesus grieving instead of feeling affirmed or included?

The reason that we oftentimes give for the rich man going away grieving is that Jesus’ answer to him was very simple, yet also seemingly impossible for the man. The seemingly straight-forward, simple part of Jesus’ answer was “follow me.”  But Jesus’ sensed that there was something standing in between this man and his willingness to follow Jesus – his wealth and his possessions. So, Jesus told the man to sell all that he had, give the money to the poor, and then follow him. And perhaps that was simply too much for the man to bear.

That is not an unfaithful interpretation of this text. But today, I’d like to offer another angle to this deeply fertile text. One thing that is oftentimes lost in this conversation is what comes immediately before Jesus’ directive to the man. St. Mark writes, “Jesus, looking at him, loved him.” In other words, Jesus wasn’t speaking to the rich man from a place of self-righteousness, self-importance, or pie-in-the-sky piety. It was important for Mark to include this critically important detail that “Jesus looking at the man, loved him.” Jesus looked at him. Jesus saw him. He understood the man in all of his goodness and all of his badness. He understood the inner turmoil that this man carried – the deep desire to inherit eternal life, coupled with his inability to give up the things that were deeply important to him.

One of my favorite songs by the Eagles is Desperado. I’m not always a sucker ffor Greatest Hits – I oftentimes go for the B-sides. But Greatest Hits are greatest hits for a reason – they’re just plain great. Such is the case with Desperado.

I understand the song being about a cowboy-type figure who has got a bit of the Lone Ranger syndrome – rugged and tough, seemingly free to wander in and out of relationships, and by virtue of that – sad and alone. One verse reads:

Desperado
Oh, you ain't getting no younger
Your pain and your hunger
They're driving you home
And freedom, oh, freedom
Well that's just some people talking
Your prison is walking through this world all alone

I see the Prodigal Son in Luke’s Gospel as a Desperado figure. And I see the rich man in today’s Gospel lesson the same way – while having material wealth, he appears to have a deep longing for something more. He indeed is walking through the world alone.

The final refrain of Desperado sums up the heart of the matter when Don Henley sings over and over, “You’ve gotta let somebody love you, before it’s too late.”

In our story today, Jesus looked at the man and loved him. And then Jesus invited the man to follow him. That was the invitation to eternal life. I wonder if it was Jesus’ gaze into the man’s eyes – the gaze that said “I see you, in all of your goodness and all of your badness, and I love you” – that made the man walk away grieving. Perhaps it wasn’t the command to sell his possessions that stood in the way of the man and eternal life. Perhaps it was the fear of being seen and being loved in a way that he simply couldn’t come to grips with.

And if we are honest with ourselves, being seen and loved in the way that Jesus sees and loves us can be terrifying. It can make us feel exposed and vulnerable. He might ask us to give up something that we do not want to part with, even though that thing might serve as a stumbling block between ourselves and following Jesus. He may tell us something we need to hear, not what we want to hear. He might not affirm us – he might transform us. The sort of love that Jesus embodies and invites us to practice is, more times than not, sacrificial love. It is the love of the refiner’s fire.

This fear of being seen and lovingly challenged is why so many of us resist going to a therapist. We are afraid of being seen, and we are afraid of being exposed. The same goes for pastoral care, spiritual direction, or 12-Step groups. Many of us ask not to be added to the parish prayer list. Many of us want everyone to assume that we are doing just fine.

But many of us are not doing just fine. We are desperate to be seen and loved by Jesus. But we are also terrified of the transformative, sacrificial love with which  Jesus sees and loves us. We are like the man in today’s story – we want to be happy. We want to be well. And we want to inherit eternal life. But we are also terrified of the sort of love that Jesus invites us into. Because this love always requires much of us. It doesn’t require good works or good deeds. It requires that we follow Jesus. And the path that Jesus leads us on – the path to eternal life – goes straight to the cross. The good works and good deeds are the fruit of this love, not the requirement.

Our story today reminds us that Jesus didn’t die on the cross to affirm us or coddle us or tell us that we are really just fine the way we are. He died on the cross so that we might have eternal life. He took humankind’s brokenness, pain, and sin upon himself so that we might be healed from it all.

And with that self-sacrificing love comes an invitation for us to humble ourselves enough to allow him to look at us and see us – and to love us. And our call as Christians is not to run away from that love, but to allow ourselves to be transformed by it as we follow Jesus.

In one way or another – we are all the Desperado in that great Eagles song. And perhaps our most essential calling is to have the courage to let somebody love us –that somebody being Jesus - before it’s too late.