Eternal Life

Eternal Life

by Anne Le Bas

A man runs up to Jesus in the Gospel reading we just heard and kneels down in the dust before him. We don’t know much about him. We don’t know his name. We don’t know where he’s from, or how old he is, or what he does for a living, but one thing is pretty obvious. He is desperate. He REALLY wants an answer to his question. He comes running, not walking. He throws himself on the ground. He’s begging for help. Which makes it all the more surprising that when he gets his answer he refuses to accept it and walks away. He is shocked and grieving, the story says, but he doesn’t even give Jesus a chance to explain. “Go, sell what you own and give the money to the poor” he says, “ and you will have treasure in heaven, then come, follow me”. However desperate he was for an answer, it wasn’t this answer he wanted. Many people in the Gospels find hope, healing, love and joy when they meet Jesus, but this man isn’t one of them. It’s a poignant story. Jesus looks at this man and loves him, we are told. He doesn’t condemn. He doesn’t judge. But he seems to know from the outset that he won’t be able to help him, and the reason for that is actually there in the very question the man asks him. “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” It’s that word “inherit” that gives it away. The Greek word Mark uses – klero - is the word you use of something that comes into your possession – a piece of land, for example. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve inherited it in our modern sense, from someone who has died. It could have been given to you in payment for something, or allotted to you for some other reason. The thing is, it is yours and once you’ve got it that’s that. You might build a house on it, or grow something on it, but if you wanted to you could ignore it completely and leave it to the weeds. It’s up to you. You might never set foot on it at all in fact, but it would still be yours. You could treat it as an investment, something to cash in when the need arises. It is yours, just sitting there for you to do with as you wish. It’s a bit like people who buy works of art not because they actually think they are beautiful, not because they want to hang them on the wall and look at them, but simply because they think they will one day be able to sell them for more than they bought them. They lock them in a vault somewhere, and there they sit, in the dark, waiting to be sold on again. That is how this man views eternal life, as a particularly valuable and sought after possession which he can store alongside all his other possessions for a rainy day – a divine insurance policy if you like. When Jesus suggests that eternal life might actually involve a radical change to the way he lives here and now, he takes fright. That wasn’t what he had in mind at all. I don’t think he is alone in thinking of eternal life in this way, as a thing to possess, a golden ticket to get you into heaven one day. In fact I’d go so far as to say that is a very common for people to regard it that way. Pay your dues and all will be well when the day of judgement comes. That might mean saying the right prayers, or going through the right rituals, or believing the right things or acting in the right ways, but the principle is the same. In return you get something which you can bank against the time you need it. Sadly, it’s a view that has often been promoted by both secular and religious leaders. If people’s eyes are fixed on a distant vision of heaven it is less likely that they will start asking awkward questions about this world and its injustices. Never mind that you are oppressed, hungry, poor now – behave yourself properly, guard that golden ticket, and all will be well one day. But the point Jesus is making here is that eternal life is not a thing that can be possessed or stored, it has to be lived. It’s obvious when you think of it. Life, the ordinary life that you and I and all creatures live, isn’t a possession, it is a process. It is one moment after another, made up of a succession of actions, thoughts, words. It’s a journey, not a destination. It is all the things that happen to us, all the things we do. We shape it, and it shapes us. Life is not a static lump of stuff that you can store somewhere until you need it – in the bank, on the shelf, in a file somewhere. When the Bible talks about eternal life it isn’t talking about something which is different in nature from that ordinary life, but something that is different in quality. Jesus calls it “life in all its fullness” in John’s Gospel. It is life, if you like, lived in colour rather than black and white, life filled with love, life lived with an awareness of ourselves, of one another and of God. Life that nothing can extinguish, not even death. But above all it is life that is lived. This man who comes to Jesus is making what philosophers call a category error. It’s like him asking “how big is yellow?” – a question that has no meaning. He is so used to thinking of everything as a possession that he assumes eternal life is just another one. But eternal life isn’t something that comes in a box from Argos. That’s why Jesus can’t tell him how to get it, where to buy it, what the catalogue number is, which is what he was hoping for. All he can tell him is how to live in a way that will draw him closer to God, in a way that has that eternal quality to it. The trouble is that living this way will involve change. In particular, in his case, he’ll have to get rid of those possessions in which he has put so much of his trust, and start to trust God instead. If he can do that, Jesus says, he will find he is living the life he longed for – he will have eternal life, treasure in heaven. But somehow is it all just too difficult, so he turns and walks away.

  • One of my favourite children’s stories is Rudyard Kipling’s Just-So Story,” the Sing Song of Old Man Kangaroo. This man reminds me very much of Old Man Kangaroo. The kangaroo, says the story, was once a very ordinary looking creature, with short legs, and a thin tail, like a rat. But the kangaroo wasn’t happy with this. He went to the gods and asked them, “make me different from all other animals, and wonderfully run after”. He was asking to be a celebrity, but the gods took him literally. They summoned the dingo, and set him to chase after the kangaroo – he wanted to be sought after, didn’t he? Kangaroo ran as fast as he could to escape, all across Australia, and as he did his back legs got stronger and stronger, until eventually he was hopping on them, and his tail thickened, so that it stuck out “like a milking stool behind him”. By the time the chase ended, back at the salt pans where the gods were bathing, the kangaroo was the shape we see today. But it wasn’t what he had had in mind at all, he complained. “This wasn’t what I had in mind,” he protested, “the dingo has altered my shape so I'll never get it back; and he's played Old Scratch with my legs.“ (1)
Doing what Jesus asks will “play old scratch” with the life of the man in today's Gospel – he’ll never be the same if he follows him. Jesus' promise is that this reshaping will lead him to the fullness of life he really needs and longs for. All he can see is what he will have to let go of, and that turns out to be too frightening for him to contemplate. The rich man turned away and rejected the changes which were the key to his transformation, the key to him sharing God’s work in the world, being part of the kingdom of God. Each of us is called to live “eternal life”, life that is full, overflowing with love, not just for our own sakes but so that we can help set right what is wrong around us. This isn’t about getting a ticket to heaven; it is about discovering heaven here and now. Just like that rich man, that involves change, unless we are saints already – and I’m certainly not.. He was called to give up his possessions. We may need to change our lives in other ways, though I am sure that many of us have more than we need, and more than is healthy for us too. It may be, though, that we need to seek forgiveness or give forgiveness. It may be that we need to learn more, deepen our faith, spend time in prayer, read the Bible. It may be that we need to do something active to create justice in our world – to stop cursing the darkness and start lighting the candles, as the saying goes. The point is that if we are serious about wanting eternal life, God’s life, in our lives then we have to accept that it will change us, and that is often hard. Jesus looked at the rich man and loved him as he struggled. He looks at us and loves us too, as we struggle with the challenges we face, but in the end it is up to us whether we come and follow or turn and walk away. Amen.
Reference:
  1. For more info, see http://www.readprint.com/work-948/The-Sing-Song-of-Old-Man-Kangaroo-Rudyard-Kipling
(Comments to Anne at ajlebas@GOOGLEMAIL.COM.)