Questions
on the Way to Cross III:
“Why Do You Call Me Good?”
Sermon by Cynthia
A. Jarvis
March 30, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Isaiah 53:1-6
Mark 9:14-32
" Jesus said to him, 'Why do you call me good? No one is good
but God alone.'"
The definitions of the word "good," according to Webster, are legion: effective,
fertile, fresh, valid, healthy, sound, honorable, enjoyable, dependable,
thorough, best, adequate, virtuous, pious, proper, able, loyal. With these
seventeen definitions comprising only the half of it, Webster continues
defining the good for another paragraph, completing the effort with the
perfect segue into our story this morning. The good, Webster concludes,
may be defined as "1. those who are good 2. what is morally good." "1. Good
Teacher, 2. what must I do to inherit eternal life?" The question asked
by the unnamed man in Mark's tenth chapter surely is our own in these days
when we wake to news of the death we have dealt in order to end death-dealing
and then watch ourselves being burned in effigy; when we hear hatred hurled
against even our best intentions as we tell ourselves, because no one else
will listen, that we mean the world well. In W.H. Auden's words, we "Exaggerate
to exist, possessed by hope…./With power to place, to explain every/What
in [our] world but why [we are] neither God nor good…/As [we bumble] by
from birth to death/Menaced by madness." What is the good and who is
good in a world where previous definitions do not avail? This was the situation
of the man in Mark's tenth chapter, whose prior understanding of "good"
required further definition now that Christ had come. Running up and kneeling
before Him who appeared, by every definition, to be "good," Mark's breathless
man interrupts Jesus on the way to the cross. "Good Teacher, what must I
do to inherit eternal life?" No merely human teacher would be addressed
in this way. He calls Jesus "good," because something in him knows he is
having to do with more than a human teacher: he is having to do with the
judgment of God who alone is good! So the question recast to include
us all is this: to be with the God who has chosen to be with us, what must
we do? As those raised on the thin ice of popular Christian piety, we take
this really to mean, "How must I behave to go to heaven?" But Mark is daring
deeper, darker waters. For centuries, people had been asking rabbis, "What
must I do to enter and to share in life." Furthermore, "it was common in
Israel to speak of 'inheriting' what God had promised, because it was known
that the future inheritance depended upon God's gracious promise alone [personal
merit being inconsequential]. "Only when in the course of history the
unity of Israel-particularly in religious matters-was destroyed," says Eduard
Schweizer, [I think of the golden calf in the wilderness, the divided kingdom
and the exile, the death and resurrection of Jesus, the destruction of the
Temple] only when unity was destroyed "did the question arise: 'Who then
belongs to [the community] to whom God's promise applies?'" No doubt this
is what we are asking these days in all of our disunity as Presbyterians:
Who belongs to the community to whom God's promise belongs? "It was not
simply a well-adjusted, happy life which is at stake," says Schweizer. "The
question is concerned with 'eternal life,' final existence in the presence
of God." What must I do to be found in the company of God's own forever?
"You know the commandments," Jesus says, then proceeds to enumerate what
is known as the second tablet of the law, somewhat rearranged, reduced and
enlarged: you shall not murder, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness,
defraud, and you shall honor father and mother. We know God's command as
a list of those things that, by the doing or not doing of them, we will
be judged good or not good. In this sense, we know the gospel as law, believing
that with it we can know even better what is good, forgetting that only
God is good, and so can be like gods. Such was the road Mark's man had
traveled, bringing him to Jesus seeking insider information in order that
he could be among those who, in Paul Lehmann's words, "have been granted
reserved seats in advance at the messianic banquet…empowered to occupy the
chief seats in the kingdom of heaven." With this in mind he says to Jesus
as if Jesus has asked, "Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth."
Or we say, "Teacher, I have come to keep all of these since my wilder days."
Or we say, "Teacher, I intend to keep all of these from this day forth."
But Jesus has not asked. Jesus accepts the report of our obedience, but
knows we are lacking what we really have come seeking, lacking the very
thing the commandments presuppose: we are lacking a life with God. Having
carefully kept the external demands of the commandments, we still live as
though we are without God in the world! The irony, you see, is that
it is ourselves, already chosen and loved by God before we do anything,
it is ourselves that God means to have at in the details of the Decalogue.
Again says Lehmann, "The Commandments are descriptive statements of what
happens behaviorally in a world that God has made for being human in-[has]
given, in Jesus Christ, a second chance for the experience and the fulfillment
of what it means to be human-and promises to bring to the fullness of desire,
memory, and hope, in a new heaven and a new earth." God would have at our
humanity for a great gladness by way of the commandments, and it is precisely
ourselves we withhold and hold at a distance, offering God only the outward
trappings of our obedience. "Binding us externally," says another, the commandments
"mean to bind [us] internally," to the God who has chosen us in love.
How perfectly this external binding is illustrated in our day when people
say, I believe in the values of the Judeo-Christian religion and want to
pass them along to my child, but spare me the relationships: the messy humanity
of the church and the holy mystery of the living God I neither want nor
need. Though not only those out there say this. We in here may follow the
rules to reserve a seat at the messianic banquet, but lack something crucial
with one another: like a sense of humor, like a life lived in lively relationship
with the God who alone is good, a life lived in the reckless abandon of
those who believe! No doubt the man who had placed himself at the feet
of God's judgment was ready to hear, given his obedience, that he had done
what needed doing to inherit life with God eternally. Instead Mark simply
tells us of God's undeserved goodness toward his children: "Jesus, looking
at him, loved him," says Mark "He loves him. He reckons him as His; He does
not will to be without him; He wills to be there just for him." And because
he loves him, because God loves us and wants at the whole of us, Jesus puts
what following him would entail, what life with God would look like, in
the form of an invitation and a direction: Sell what you have! Give to the
poor! Follow me! Suddenly we are like deer in the headlights. Revealed
is the fact that what we have has us! What the man in Mark has
really "has him-in the very way in which God would have him, and alone should
have him. He is ruled by the life proper to his great possessions," says
Karl Barth, "with their immanent urge to preservation, exploitation and
augmentation. Their grip makes him inaccessible and useless as far as the
command of God is concerned. It does this in a very simple way. It, too,
instills into him fear and love and trust and hope. It, too, demands obedience,
because it, too, is his lord." So Jesus invites him to die to the man
he is, that he might be the man who belongs wholly to the God who has chosen
to be with him. "Give it to the poor," says Jesus. In other words, live
as though it does not have you. Free yourself from the need to preserve,
exploit and augment your possessions. Live freely for the neighbor as God
is for you-to be there for him, to be at her disposal as God stands at your
disposal. Again, we are stopped in our tracks! That Jesus further invites
us to follow him is adding insult to injury. Having in Jesus to do with
the living God, we know that following Jesus is the answer to the question,
"What must I do to be with God?" Jesus offers us himself and, given everything
else we have given ourselves to, we cannot follow. We go away sorrowful.
Though Mark intimates that we are not completely gone from the scene, that
we remain in the story now as those represented by the disciples. With the
man still in his sight as he slumps away, now Jesus looks on the disciples,
on those who have left everything behind to follow him, on those
who are literally in the company of God's nearness. The disciples clearly
have been shaken by this encounter. "Who then can be saved?" they ask. Peter
even finds it necessary to tell Jesus what they have done and, in telling
Jesus, almost can be seen to be looking back as one possessed still by what
he has left behind. Yet the only difference between these and the man
who went away sorrowful, the difference between those in the church and
beyond her reach is simply this: these equally broken human beings, who
only appear to have left behind everything to follow Jesus, may now be witnesses.
By the unlikely reality of their being with Jesus still, though soon they
will forsake him and flee, their lives proclaim that what is impossible
with mortals is possible with God. My friends, by grace alone, by the
God who alone is good, we have been made obedient in him who, looking on
us, loves us. In him, the law is fulfilled because in him we have been had
for God alone and so travel the road that leads through his cross to life
with God eternally. Of all the unlikely lives, our lives together are witness
to this grace undeserved, and our sin is the strange evidence that nothing
can separate us--even as we become again those who will go away sorrowful-nothing
can separate us from the love with which Jesus loved even the man with many
possessions on his way to the cross: for with God, all things are possible!
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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