Not for the first time, we find Jesus focussing in on ‘wealth’ in today’s gospel passage.  Christ is our wealth – even though if we had nothing at all in this world which we could call our own, in Jesus Christ, the Wisdom of God, we possess all things and we are rich in him. He is the word of God that is alive, and active in our hearts.

What is happiness for the Christian?  Quite simply, in doing God’s will and not our own. What is wealth for the Christian?  Having just what God wants us to have, and no more!

“Money can make us.  Money can break us…. Banks financed the Renaissance.  Bond markets decided wars. Stock markets built empires. And monetary meltdowns made revolutions.”  These are the opening lines of a British Channel 4 series, “The Ascent of Money” by Professor Niall Ferguson.  Interestingly, the purpose of the series was to explain the global credit crunch of 2008, which was in fact ‘the descent of money”!

Our daily life in the modern world revolves around money.  We work to earn money.  We spend restless nights calculating how we can increase it.  And we go through anxious moments as we plan how best to spend it!

Like many Jews, the man in Mark’s gospel lived his life‘ according to the Law’, but yet clearly he sensed that something was lacking in that he should have run up and knelt before Jesus, wanting to know what he should do in order to inherit Eternal Life.  Evidently, Jesus was of the opinion that ‘good’ should be applied to God alone, and then quoted from the Ten Commandments.  As ‘a liver according to the Law,’ the man was naturally familiar with these, and evidently had been faithful to the letter of them in his living, but as Jesus complained so often, his Jewish compatriots were so keen on ‘the letter of the Law’ that they failed totally to abide by the spirit of it.  In our more colloquial parlance, we might say, ‘unable to see the wood for the trees’, as I remarked only the other week!

Then it is that we’re told that this man had great wealth, and it was this which would deny him the Eternal Life which he craved.  In order to attain this blessed state, it would have been necessary for him to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor – we are left with the strong suspicion that this was simply too much to ask!

What, we might well wonder, is intrinsically wrong with being wealthy?  On the face of it, nothing, but when we look a little more deeply, we might then begin to understand more of what Jesus was driving at.  For a start, just how was that wealth acquired?  We don’t need to look any further than here in Thailand to be aware only too painfully that much wealth is acquired by corruption at all levels of society, from top to bottom, and in many cases, it is ‘the poor’ who are the prime victims of this injustice.  In other words, the commandment ‘you must not steal’ has been broken, as the money has been acquired through improper means –‘Brown envelopes’!

Now, even though wealth may well have been perfectly legitimately acquired through hard work and honest endeavour or else inherited, it is invariably a distraction away from the things that should really matter.  For some weeks now I have been intensely preoccupied with trying to judge just when was the ‘right’ moment to bring some more money over to Thailand from the UK.  When we came here in 2006, there were 70 baht to the pound, whereas the other day I got only a little under 45.  I had been holding back for a number of weeks in the hope that the exchange rate might improve a little more in my favour, which it had, but a dwindling bank balance here meant that I couldn’t possibly delay very much longer, and so in effect had to jump before I was pushed!  Sod’s Law of course – the moment I’d made the transaction the pound strengthened, and if I’d waited only a few more hours until the end of the trading day, would have received several thousand baht more – the benefit of hindsight would be a wonderful thing, if only we had been blessed with it!

As you will, I’m sure, readily appreciate, I had allowed myself to be distracted from the things which really matter through my understandable preoccupation with wealth, or to be more truthful in this instance, the lack of it.  That is why Jesus said that ‘it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter into the Kingdom of God’!

Not that the disciples had any earthly possessions of any real consequence to their names, but they were undoubtedly dismayed at this, and asked Jesus, “Who then can be saved?”   Jesus told them quite simply that ‘for mortals this is impossible, but for God all things are possible!

This was too much for Peter, who yet again remonstrated with Jesus, as was his wont, reminding him that they had all left everything – home, family and possessions, to follow him.  You will recall that previously we heard Jesus say that in order to be saved it was indeed necessary to forsake all and give oneself unconditionally to God in order to be rewarded, not only in this life but also in the next!  Then comes again that phrase which we were thinking about together only a fortnight or so ago – the first shall be last and the last first!  In other words, those who have the most in this world will end up with least in the hereafter, as Jesus reminded his hearers in the parable of Dives and Lazarus!

The challenge for us as Christians is surely then the extent to which we give ourselves to God.  Are we like the man in the gospel who had done so much that was ‘right’, but yet was unwilling to take that last, crucial step?  To what extent are we prepared to shed our ‘baggage’ – rather like an emergency evacuation from an aircraft where one is expressly forbidden to take anything of one’s hand luggage?  In this case of course, earthly survival is the prime objective, but quite possibly our eternal salvation is similar?  Perhaps too, the prime reason Jesus was so attracted to ‘the poor’ was because they were completely unencumbered, and therefore so much closer to redemption than his more affluent hearers?

Now what does all this mean for us – we who live in a society governed by a capitalistic, profit-oriented, market economy; we who are constantly bombarded by consumerist ideology; we who are part of a society that uses people and loves things; we who are tempted to draw our identity from our possessions, enmeshing our being with our having?

The unidentified man in today’s gospel was not able to respond to his heart’s deepest yearning, because of his shallow desire for his possessions.  On the other hand, the disciples who ‘left everything and followed Jesus,’ – are known by their names even to this day.   Their identity comes from their relationship with Jesus.  Indeed they were rewarded a hundredfold!

So then, let us pray in this Eucharist that we accept the primacy of God and his kingdom in our lives, so that we only use things, but love people.  And in this way, we will be free not to be possessed by our possessions.  Amen