Today’s Gospel offers us what is to me one of the saddest scenes in the entire New Testament. A man (simply a man in Mark; in Luke he is an official; in Matthew he is “the rich young man”) asks Jesus about eternal life. They dialogue, and then comes the devastating conclusion: Jesus, looking at him, loved him… At [Jesus’] statement his face fell, and he went away sad…”
This is heart-breaking because he was offered the opportunity to accept love from Love Incarnate, and he couldn’t say yes to this gift. And he walked away from Love sad, but he walked away.
Was he afraid to love in return? Was he unconvinced that Jesus actually loved him? What was going through his heart and mind as he heard the invitation? Perhaps it’s a bit like the story about the hen and the pig talking about a breakfast of bacon and eggs: “For you it’s involvement; for me, it’s total commitment.” Was he simply looking for “one more commandment”? Was he caught off-guard by the request that he make a “total commitment”? Perhaps the man was looking for a way to “earn” God’s blessings, and he was embarrassed by the offer (a graced offer) of blessings without a price-tag…
If someone loves me, don’t I have an obligation to return the love? And what do I do if I don’t think that the love is real, or I don’t feel motivated to love the other person back? Isn’t the only alternative to “walk away sad”?
And what about Jesus? He must have also been sad when the man walked away. After all, He saw something there that caused Him to love him—perhaps his eagerness, or his heart, or… It’s like the final scene in John 6, after the “Bread of Life” discourse, when we are told that many of Jesus’ disciples said, “This is a hard saying; who can accept it?” And many walked away. Jesus was sad then, and when He turned to the disciples, He asked, “You want to walk away, too, don’t you?” And Peter’s answer, in paraphrase, was: “Yes, we do; but we won’t. You love us, and we love you, and we aren’t going anywhere.”
I have a fantasy or two about this man. I want to believe that later on he changed his mind and became a disciple. And I would love to think that it was in this man’s house that Jesus’ Last Supper was celebrated; he (or perhaps his son) was the young man in the linen cloth in the Garden of Gethsemane. Being unnamed, I like to speculate that the audience for Mark’s Gospel already knew his identity, and he might well have been Mark, the secretary of Peter, the author of the Gospel itself. But of course this is my fantasy.
The bottom line for us is this: do we know we are loved? Do we believe we are loved? Will we love in return and be willing to risk going beyond involvement to total commitment? -Fr. David