Yoke of Jesus

Propers: The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 28), A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Let us assume for the moment that the rich man in this morning’s Gospel reading is a decent enough fellow. Let us take him at his word when he says that he has kept all the Commandments from his youth, to the best of his ability, and that he earnestly seeks eternal life in the Kingdom of God.

Let us not look too deeply at the fact that Jesus goes out of His way to mention “thou shalt not defraud,” and assume instead that this man has made his money through honest dealings, indeed by keeping those selfsame Commandments—which is to say that he became rich by being faithful, pious, upright and true in all things.

Let us furthermore assume that our eternal destiny lies in the hands of God, and that we needn’t necessarily worry about it here. We tend to read parables like this as ways to avoid damnation. But Jesus looks at this rich man and loves him. He does not condemn him; He does not denounce him. He sees him and He loves him.

Moreover, Jesus gives him what he asks: He gives him eternal life! Not in some distant Heaven, not in the apocalypse at the end of the Age, but right here and now. This is eternal life, He says: “Sell what you own, give the money to the poor, and follow Me.” Here, now, today. I am the Kingdom of God. I am the life of the Age.

And the man goes away mourning not because he disbelieves, but precisely because he does believe. He knows what Jesus says is true. But he also knows it will be hard.

The rich man here embodies the paradox of faith in that he is saved, he is being saved, and he will be saved. He has come to Christ as Christ has come to him. Jesus sees him, loves him, and gives to him precisely what he asks: the words of eternal life. And as the man goes away, that Word is already at work within him. It is doing what the Word of God always does to us. It is convicting him, remaking him. It is killing him and making him alive again! Death and resurrection is our salvation. It is the work of God within us, raising us to eternal life.

That is why he suffers. That is why he mourns. These are what St Paul calls the birth pangs, the agony that leads to new life. God freely pours out His salvation upon the world, upon rich and poor, young and old, male and female, slave and free. We see this when the disciples cry out, “Who then can be saved?” and Jesus responds, “For mortals it is impossible. But for God all things are possible.” Salvation is free. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It requires nothing less than the death of our ego—the death of who we think we are—so that Christ may live within us.

For God, all things are possible. Yet for the rich it will be hard. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God.” And these days, folks, we’re all the rich. All of us here are this man.

Christ calls us to a completely new Way of life. “I am the Way, the Life, and the Truth,” He says. And He doesn’t do this as though we need to earn Heaven. Heaven has already been earned for us. As I said at the beginning, let us assume for the moment that our eternal destiny is assured, as was made explicit upon the Cross.

Rather, Christ calls us to a new Way of life here and now, that we might have eternal life today—that we might be liberated from sin and death and hell, not to mention consumerism, ignorance, pride, and infotainment. We are called to walk the Way of Christ that we might come ever more closely to resemble the life of Christ within us. And we do this not for fear of punishment nor desire for reward, but because this is life as it was meant to be: good and true and beautiful: a selfless life lived for love of God, love of neighbor, and especially love of the poor.

So what does this Way look like? What does it mean to walk in the footsteps of Christ?

First and foremost, it means prayer. And not just prayer as we usually tend to think of it. Verbal prayer—oration—consists of speaking to God, silently or aloud, using words both spontaneous and prepared. And this is good, indeed very good. It is the life of our worship together, and also the life of our worship at home. But this is only the beginning. Oration is the milk of prayer. We also need the meat.

Meditation is that meat, and it takes many forms. Most crucially, meditation requires reading. We are to read the faith, read the Scriptures, read the scholars and the saints. Our God is not silent! He speaks to us from the pages of this book, from the life of faith lived out by our forebears over thousands of years of suffering and struggle. This book was written for you. We must wrestle with it, strive with it, weep and laugh and scream with it. In the words of Luther, the Bible has feet and it pursues me, hands with which it seizes me; the Bible kills me and makes me alive again!

It is a good and a godly thing to argue with the Bible, wrestle with the Bible, disagree with the Bible. But as Christians the one thing we cannot do is ignore the Bible. We are people of the Book. We have always been people of the Book. Jesus meets us in this Book! There’s a reason, after all, that we call Him the Word of God.

Read especially the Psalms, in which we can find the length and breadth of all human experience, all the words we need to plea with God, to fight with God, to find peace and thus repent in God.

And He has given us so many wonderful companions upon the Way! C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, J.K. Rowling, Gregory of Nyssa, Martin Luther, David Bentley Hart. These are our brothers and our sisters in the faith. Find yourself a master who speaks to where you are. Learn from them, as from the Christ who lives within them.

You don’t need to tear off entire chunks at once. Chew thoughtfully, slowly, a little at a time. Prayer beads are the most common form of meditation throughout the Christian tradition: the Rosary in the West, the Jesus Prayer in the East. A little Scripture, a little prayer, over and over, over and again, breathing it in, letting it seep within you, become a part of you, shape you to the likeness of Christ. Meditation re-forms the soul; which reforms your life; which reforms the world.

At last we come now to the apex of prayer, the climax of our efforts: contemplation. Which is to say, silence.

Silence is what we need more than anything else in this age. Silence, to listen to the still, small voice of God. Silence to humble us, to calm us, to quell the storms within. Silence to escape the tyranny of schedules and cell phones and social media madness. Silence to remind us of who we truly are, the deep truths of God, the world, and Man within it. And when at all possible, this silence ought to be found in Nature: the deer stand; the lake boat; the ice house; the garden; the forest.

I cannot stress the importance of this enough. We are bombarded every day by nonsense and noise, by information without meaning, knowledge without wisdom, advertisements without humanity, and propaganda without shame. This is why it is so hard for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God! Because of all these distractions, all of these diversions—all these things we think should matter but don’t mean squat to our souls, to the cosmos, or to God on high in Heaven.

Let it go! Cast it off. Set a timer on your phone for 15 minutes. Then 30. Then 60. Carve out a space for silence, whatever it takes. No music to distract you. No words to carry you off. Just the name of Jesus, the light of a candle, or a few grains of incense to keep you mindful of what’s true.

Silence is salvation in the here and now. It brings us home. It gives us life. It is free, isn’t it? But it ain’t easy. Your body, mind, and soul will struggle, will rebel, will flee with all their might from the One who waits for us there in the silence. You have to practice it, like exercise, like study. But I promise you: it will set you free.

Prayer. Reading. Meditation. Nature. Silence. This is the Way of Christ. This is the witness found in our Gospels. This discipline, the Yoke of Jesus, centers us, frees us, resurrects us—liberates us from stuff and nonsense that we might no longer be enslaved by our possessions but find ways to use them to help the poor, to help the neighbor, to save the world!

Do not worry about Heaven and hell. Heaven is yours. Eternal life is yours. Your destiny lies in the crucified hands of God. The only question left to us is how we shall use the time that we have to bring the Way and the Life of Jesus to this world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.