On our knees

Twenty Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

The rich young man comes before our Lord as a student seeking direction from a teacher, hoping to be enlightened as to how he can inherit eternal life. But as he comes before the Lord, he falls on his knees and addresses the Lord as “Good Master,” without realising that his words and action are revealing more than what he is willing to admit. Our Lord then says to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” Our Lord is not repudiating the attribute of good for Himself in some act of humility, but inviting the man to reflect more deeply on what he had just said and the premise of his potential relationship with the Lord.

Yes, our Lord is not just a good teacher. He is the source and foundation of all goodness. He is God! Pope Francis reminds us that those who wish to understand the mystery of God must first get down on their "knees", in an act of humility, otherwise "they will not understand anything." If we should seek knowledge and wisdom from Him, we should do so on our knees, which is to say that it must be done in prayer, with a heart open to conversion, and with a willingness to grow in faith, and not just in knowledge.

Where there is no relationship with God, there can be no true understanding of Christ or His teachings. Christ is not a puzzle to be solved in a merely intellectual way, nor a textbook to be studied from cover to cover to comprehend His ways. One may have vast encyclopaedic knowledge of the Lord, one may accomplish great deeds of kindness and charity in His name, but without true conversion that leads to assimilating the life of Christ into oneself, our relationship with Christ remains superficial and spiritually barren. Faith, conversion, and holiness, then, all go hand-in-hand with one another. A faith without conversion is a dead faith, a shell of its true form, and is incapable of attaining its proper end of sanctification and divine life, which begins even now here on earth in Baptism and the life of sanctifying grace.

Cardinal Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, wrote: ““The person who prays begins to see; praying and seeing go together because – as Richard of St. Victor says – ‘Love is the faculty of seeing’. . . All real progress in theological understanding has its origin in the eye of love and in its faculty of beholding.” There can be no genuine understanding of the faith without the love of God and faithful adherence to His Word.

This was the issue with the rich young man. He sought the secret to eternal life as an intellectual pursuit but lacked the love for the Lord, to see and grasp the meaning of His words. This man seemed to have the knowledge and he may even be “doing” the right thing by practising what he believed, but he lacked the love for Christ to allow him to make the ultimate sacrifice which our Lord had challenged him to do: “There is one thing you lack. Go and sell everything you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” Once again, we see the irony of this man’s actions. The one thing he “lacks,” is that he lacks nothing; the one thing which is holding him back from spiritual progress is the thing that he possesses, or rather the things which “possess” him. If Christ, the source of eternal life, was wholly sufficient for this man, there was no need for him to cling to any other material possessions or earthly securities. Walking away tells us that there were far more important things than eternal life.

But where the man lacks the love for the Lord, which is required for him to move forward, our Lord does not cease in loving Him. The evangelist tells us that the Lord “looked steadily at him and loved him.” It is this gaze of divine love that would have captivated the man’s heart and moved him to surrender all his earthly attachments - if he had seen it. But sadly, preoccupied with his own thoughts, he seems to not have noticed our Lord’s loving gaze. He had eyes only for his possessions, his ambitions and what he risked losing.

Our Lord’s disciples were no better. They condescendingly regard themselves as superior to this rich young man by boasting that they had given up everything, unlike this man who had been unwilling to part with his possessions. They failed to see that they are as equally mistaken as this sincere seeker of truth. The pursuit of eternal life can never be done on the basis of one’s own efforts, rather it is a gift given to those who acknowledge their own neediness. If you recall, our Lord had used the example of children to illustrate this point. And here, our Lord addresses His disciples once again as “children.” Children have no accomplishments with which to earn God’s favour, no status that makes them worthy. In their dependency, they exemplify the only disposition that makes entrance into the Kingdom possible: simply to receive it as a pure, unmerited gift. That is why the possessions of the rich young man and the sacrifices made by the Lord’s disciples are incapable of buying them a place in heaven.

The short parable of the camel and the eye of a needle can be understood in this phrase, “how hard it is…,” which our Lord uses twice. The way of following Christ would always appear hard and even impossible when we place more trust in our own status, knowledge, wealth and abilities as substitutes for trust in God alone. But remember: “For men ….it is impossible, but not for God: because everything is possible for God.” The Kingdom of God, the gift of eternal life, is something utterly beyond human achievement. It cannot be earned, it cannot be claimed as a right, it cannot be bought or bartered for a price, it does not come as a reward for good behaviour. It depends solely on the goodness of God, who freely offers it as a gift. Nothing we are capable of giving up or enduring for the Lord’s sake or “for the sake of the gospel” is worthy of comparison with the eternal life that we will gain in the end. So, there is no need to congratulate yourself if you think that you’ve put in more prayer, more donations, more service than the average person. Never keep a record of what you have done for God. But always remember what He has done for you, something which you can never hope of repaying.

Thus, what is required of us is not just being ambitious of acquiring knowledge or special graces, as if these were brownie points to be accumulated, nor do we need to prove our sincerity by the largesse of our sacrifices and contributions. Rather, what is needed is the humble child-like faith of a disciple who understands that he can only fall at the feet of the One who is the source of all goodness, on whom he depends for everything, including his or her salvation. We are called to come before the Lord “on our knees”, to gaze upon Him in loving adoration, knowing that He loves us back in such a degree that we could never hope to grasp or comprehend or repay.