What must I do?

In this episode, I reflect on the encounter between a young man and Jesus, exploring his earnest quest for eternal life. This young man’s eagerness mirrors the zeal many of us feel when seeking spiritual fulfillment. Jesus’ response, urging him to follow the commandments and ultimately to sell his possessions, highlights the challenge of letting go of material attachments. Drawing on John of the Cross, I discuss how any attachment, whether significant or minor, can hinder our spiritual freedom. I encourage listeners to identify and release these ties, embracing the true freedom and transformative love that Jesus offers.

00:00:00  Over the course of my life, I’ve certainly met many keen young people, you know, who have just come to that first realisation of the wonder of love, of life, of goodness, of God. And there’s just this zeal, this fire that is there in their bellies just wanting to know, what do we have to do? What’s the next thing that we must do in order to be able to, whatever the thing is, enter into eternal life? Is this question of this man just called a person in the gospel, not indicated as to what his age is, but the fact that he runs up is, you know, a sign that he was not old and decrepit just yet, that there was this desire to to be the fullness of everything that was available, and throwing himself down at the feet of Jesus as he kneels there to put this question to him. And of course, there’s been many answers to this question over the centuries. You know, many Theologians. Many church leaders have said, well, this is the thing that you have to do in order to be able to enter into heaven.

00:01:10  You know, make sure that you surrender your life to God. Pray the Jesus prayer, whatever that thing might be. You know, because Catholics, we perhaps have a slightly different answer to that, and ours is probably more along the line of what Jesus indicates today. Well, you know, the commandments follow them. And he rattles off five of the Ten Commandments, adding, the sixth one is that you shall not defraud, which actually isn’t in the list of the commandments. And you don’t actually find that as a commandment anywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures. It’s a kind of commentary on another passage. But this man is able to make this declaration. Well, that’s okay, because I’ve done all those things. I’ve been able to be faithful to all of those things since my earliest days. You know, since I was just a kid, I’ve been able to be faithful to that, which is a pretty astounding kind of claim, but we should take it on face value that this is what the man has actually been able to achieve throughout his life, that ability to find that level of freedom.

00:02:18  But then something new and his airness Jesus gazes at him. Have you ever had that experience of like a wise sage, someone who, you know that there’s just this, this depth to them, and when they look into your heart, they look into your soul. You know, you realise, oh my gosh, you know everything. It feels like it’s being laid bare within this, this experience, within this encounter. One of my spiritual directors used to be a bit like that. You know, he is Chinese. And so he had that kind of Confucian wisdom of being able to to look deeply into my soul. And so that experience of someone looking at you and loving you, and you know that they simply want the very best. They want you to experience freedom. It’s not this whole sense of burden, no sense of just this heaviness that is being pressed upon you. This desire to be free. And so Jesus says to this man, well, there is this one thing only a tiny, teeny weeny little thing that you have to do.

00:03:33  Just go sell everything that you have and give the money to the poor. You know, it’ll be as simple as that. It’s a very easy thing to do. But the response saddens both the man and Jesus, no doubt because he goes away sad. Because that little thing that Jesus asks of him, this one thing that is necessary to find this freedom he is unable to do. John of the cross in his writings and The Ascent of Mount Carmel. The first of those books, he says, look, you know, a bird just wants to fly. A bird is such a beautiful thing to watch. When you you see a bird just, you know, soaring away, you know, just that the whole sense of freedom, being able to dot and weave and all of of that, or being able to ride the the way that the torrents of the, the air currents and all of that, it’s it’s such a beautiful thing to be able to watch a bird flying freely. But John says it doesn’t really matter whether that bird is tied down by a thick and heavy rope or just this finest little thread.

00:04:47  As long as there’s something that is tying that bird down, it’s not able to fly free until it attends to that rope or to that thread, until it cuts that rope or that thread. The bird isn’t free. It’s not able to do what it was meant to do. And so the Lord is wanting us to find that freedom to recognize what is that thing. I mean, Jesus is looking at this man and loving him and seeing that that’s the one thing that this person is lacking, the one thing that is preventing him from being free for us. It might be something different. It may not be our wealth. I mean, Jesus then goes on to to tell us that it is a difficult thing when our whole sense of identity, our whole sense of power, a sense of purpose, a whole kind of ability to to find a place where we can rest is grounded in simply in what we have and the stuff that we possess. That’s so easy for those possessions to have us rather than the other way around.

00:05:54  But Jesus will look at us and he will see. Perhaps it’s that wound, perhaps. Is that relationship that went bad? Perhaps it’s that dream that never quite managed to succeed. Perhaps it’s that whole sense of ourselves that we so grounded ourselves in, and that seems to have been lost. Whatever that thread is, whatever that rope is that is tying us down. The Lord is inviting us to find that freedom, to cut those ties, to allow all of those things to fade away in order that we can be free, in order that we can live the kind of life that he’s invited us into to live the freedom of the bird that flies away and finds its rest in the wings of the Lord. What is that thing? It’s allowing the Lord today to hold us in his gaze, to look deeply with love into our hearts and into our lives. To see what is that thing? Will we be free? Will we let go? Will we allow the Lord to do his pruning so that we can indeed fly and escape, to be with the Lord in heaven?