Monday in the 20th Week of Ordinary Time, August 19, 2024

Matthew 19, 16-22

A young man approached Jesus and said, “Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?” He answered him, “Why do you ask me about the good? There is only One who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” He asked him, “Which ones?” And Jesus replied, “You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; honor your father and your mother; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  The young man said to him, “All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

St. Matthew identifies the man in this account as  “a young man” which is notable because of how unusual it was for the Evangelists to describe anyone by their age.  Nowhere, for instance, do they say anything direct about the ages of the Apostles or of the Blessed Virgin or of Mary Magdalene.  Age is mentioned only when a point is being made, as when St. Luke states that Jesus was “about 30 years old” (Luke 3, 23) when he began his ministry — the age at which a Jew could be considered a rabbi.  Considering what follows in the account, Matthew sees this encounter as about “maturation” in faith.  “Why do you ask me about the good?”  St. Mark, relying on St. Peter’s memory, quotes the young man as addressing Jesus as the “good teacher”.  In Mark’s version, Jesus asks why the young man calls him “good”.  Here, the Lord asks why he asks him about “the good”.  It actually amounts to the same thing.  The Lord is trying to draw out an act of faith from him, for: “There is only One who is good.”  The Lord waited for a response, and when none came from the tongue-tied young man, the Lord went back to answer his original question, as stated: “If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.”

“Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?”  The young man has a question but is at first unable to articulate it.  How many times has it happened to us that we come face to face with someone we have always wanted to meet and who can answer a long-standing question, but we stutter and stammer in trying to formulate it.  After listing a few of the commandments for him, the young man says to the Lord, “All of these I have observed.”  Let us consider this young man, probably in his late teens or early twenties.  He speaks innocently and without guile.  He really wants to know the answer to his question, and he believes Jesus is the one who can answer it.  Let us also note that he has obeyed the Law as every Jew, young or old, could and should do. But he feels there is something more to do and after hearing the Lord’s answer, he knows how to ask for it: “All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?”  This is a very adult question.  He is at the point of feeling in his heart that an adult believer in God must do more than obey the laws.  As St. Paul would put it: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But, when I became a man, I put away the things of a child” (1 Corinthians 13, 11).  That is, he moved on to take up the things of adulthood for which the things of childhood prepared him.

“If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”  Thus, the lectionary translation.  From the Greek:  “If you wish to be complete [or perfect, or, full-grown], sell what you have . . . Then come, be one who follows me.”  The Lord invites him to mature faith, to do what cannot be done in childhood: giving up all one’s property and means of sustenance and leaving one’s family in order to devote oneself fully to the Lord.  The call to “follow me” is not for a one-time or short-term engagement but for a continual relationship, learning from and imitating the Lord Jesus.

The lectionary: “When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad, for he had many possessions.”  A more literal translation from the Greek: “When he heard the word, the young man went away grieving, for he was possessing much property.”  “For he was possessing”: the tense is the imperfect, implying continual action in the past into the present and into the indefinite future.  He was a man of property, seeing himself only in terms of a property owner.  The young man “grieved” because it seemed the Lord was demanding that he go against his very nature, that he reject not so much his property as himself.  He steps toward adulthood, sees that it will entail a different way of life from the security and comfort he has known, and he reels.

You and I may not be called to actually sell all the property and possessions we have and give to the poor in order to follow Jesus, but we are called to do much more than to follow his laws.  According to our particular states in life and vocations we also must go beyond the things of childhood and, giving ourselves to the Lord without measure, take up the work he gives us as adults.