Mark 10:17–31: Jesus looked at him, and loved him

Introduction

Jesus may have been good at many things, but I don’t think he would have made a good priest/minister/pastor, he doesn’t preach the sort of message that people find comforting. Jesus offers many hard sayings that turn people off and today’s Gospel is as comfortable as a good dose of rabies. Already short on numbers, Jesus is approached by someone that most parish priests would be delighted to have in their churches:

1. If the man is generous with his obvious wealth, he would make a difference to church offerings.

2. Clearly the man has business and management skills and were he to approach me I would be wondering about how I could fast track him onto parish council. In my mind’s eye I can already see lay ministers lining up to sign him onto rosters.

3. The man that approaches Jesus seems to have a sincere spirituality and seems to work well with people and I may even wonder how soon I could be asking him to be a warden.

What does Jesus do when the man approaches with a question? He offers a terse and rather rude rebuff at being called “good teacher.” In answer to the man’s seemingly sincere question Jesus offers a somewhat impatient and brusque answer. (Jesus usually engages in dialogue and conversation by responding to a question with another question or a story). Let’s walk through the story step by step. 

Unpacking Mark 10.17-31

To state the obvious, Mark 10.17-31 is an episode within a series of events that have as a common theme the call to stand in solidarity with the least and the last or “the little ones of history” as Geoff described last week.  

Imagine that the Gospel of Mark is a Netflix binge series. As a TV series, season two of Mark’s Gospel has the healing of blind men in the first and last episode, reminding us that the remaining episodes are about healing our sight till we see the world as Jesus sees it. 

In today’s episode the man approaches Jesus asking about inheritance, in this case eternity: “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (10.17). Interesting choice of words, inheritance. We are immediately aware of the association of the word with extreme wealth, which prepares us to be unblinded by Jesus’ misquote of the ten commandments.  

At most Sunday Schools the ten commandments are learnt off by heart in return for a lolly or a sticker or a certificate. In case you forget the ten commandments they are relearnt in the catechism for confirmation and recited in the Prayer Book every Lent and Advent. Thus, if we are paying attention, we notice immediately that Jesus recites the decalogue incorrectly, he throws in “You shall not defraud.” Clearly there is a connection between the wealth of the man and economic exploitation.  

The man is a slow learner and claims that he is good and that he has kept the law (10.20). In response Jesus gazes at him in love: “Jesus, looking at him, loved him” (10.21). Jesus, looking at him, loved him – what a powerful moment in the episode. Jesus looks at him, he really sees him, and he loves him, and then offers a diagnosis, a judgement. Verse 21 of Mark 10 is why all of us should look forward to Judgement. In judgement we are seen, and we are loved. 

“Jesus, looking at him, loved him.” I would love for us to meditate on this verse and allow it to become our own. I would love for us to sit in silence and allow Jesus to see us and love us. This is the ultimate definition of prayer, to be in the gaze of God’s love, of Christ’s love. 

“Jesus, looking at him, loved him”. I am no psychologist but my experience of ministry among the vulnerable in South Africa has taught me how deeply people desire to be seen and loved. One story among many is this. I was the pastor of a church in an inner-city slum area of Johannesburg. The squatter camp alongside the church burnt down completely during one of the coldest winters. Having exhausted all offers of pragmatic help, one night I stood there, wearing the compulsory priest’s clothing, useless, with my hands frozen in the pockets of my coat, as the squatter camp dwellers scrambled together bits of waste and steel sheeting to rebuild their homes. A man came up to me and said that he was so grateful that I was there. I looked at him surprised and said that I was just standing there doing nothing, what possible help could I have been. He replied that because I was there, the people, and their suffering, was not invisible, they were seen. 

The Redistribution of wealth 

Jesus, having seen the man and loved him, invites him to redistribute his wealth and make the Kingdom of God his highest priority. As we were warned in the parable of the Sower in Mark 4, wealth like a weed with thorns, strangles to death the possibility of the kingdom happening in this man’s life: “Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful (Mark 4.18-19). 

In our capitalist democracy redistributive justice is the highest heresy. As we listen to the hard sayings of Jesus we squirm with tension because we know without a doubt, we are the rich of the world and we benefit from the systems that create wealth for the few at the expense of the many.  

The pheasant joke about the camel being pulled through the eye of the needle is no laughing matter for the rich. The famous assertion that the eye of the needle is a gate near Jerusalem that camels had to crawl through can hardly be taken seriously, it is a way of avoiding Jesus’ hard saying. As Jose Miranda described it, the text has been victim to “manipulation at the hands of bourgeois conscience tranquilizing exegetes” (In Ched Myers, Binding the Strongman, p275). A modern equivalent of what Jesus is saying is something like “the rich enter the kingdom of God when pigs fly backwards, or the rich enter the kingdom when hell freezes over.  

The disciples are shocked. Wealth and health were signs of blessings from God. Like we do today, the poor were blamed for their own poverty. Jesus repudiates this idea, turns conventional wisdom upside down and makes clear that the last are first, the poor have a head start in the kingdom of God, and it is the rich not the poor who are to blame for poverty. 

It would be a grave mistake to read this text individualistically. Jesus is inviting Sabbath-Year practices. In year of the Lord’s favour, or Sabbath Year, debt is released. The poor are also set free. The land itself is returned to itself, to grow as it will. And all humans and animals, for the space of that year, are released from labour and domestication, to live “wild,” and free.  

The reason the rich can’t enter the kingdom of God is that in God’s kingdom there are no rich and there are no poor. If, like Jesus, we really look at people and really love them, we too would design society, families, churches, economics, politics… everything with the most vulnerable and the most marginalised at the centre with their flourishing as our highest goal. The kingdom of God is a place where Mary’s Magnificat comes true, the rich are (joyfully) sent away empty because they have shared their excess with the hungry who are now filled with good things. Let us continue to pray that this kingdom of God may come on earth as it does in heaven.