The rich man in the text was probably born rich…wealth and privilege that was getting in the way of his relationships with God and other people. One crucial aspect remains. “Jesus, looking at him, loved him.” Jesus’ purpose is not to shame or browbeat the young man, but to love him. He calls him to leave his possessions first of all for his own benefit, saying, “You will have treasure in heaven; then come follow me.” We are the ones who suffer when we let wealth or work cut us off from other people and remove us from relationship with God. The solution is not to try harder to be good, but to accept God’s love; that is, to follow Christ. If we do this, we learn that we can trust God for the things we really need in life, and we don’t need to hold on to our possessions and positions for security.
All of this, in the end, is about possibility: what is possible for us and what is possible for God. We don’t like acknowledging the limits of our self-made possibilities, and we like even less to be told that we are incapable of saving ourselves from the internal and external things that torment us. As Jesus says, no one is good, not altogether.
We can do good things and make meaningful choices, but we cannot fundamentally change the hurt that we have received and given in relationships, or wholly deconstruct the unjust systems we are a part of. No one is good. This is the fundamental impossibility that we, along with the rich man, the disciples and the camel, all face. But we cling to our ideas of self-perfectibility so closely that it’s hard for us to hear Jesus’ invitation to let go of the way we would re-make the world and ourselves and instead look to God’s.
Unfortunately we tend to hear our own impossibilities much more loudly than God’s possibilities. We do not need to give up on justice, healing and forgiveness and our participation in them, nor should we. Instead Jesus looks at us with love and asks us to follow a more gentle and more radical way, with the assurance that rather than carrying the weight of the restorer, we are just one of the things being restored.
This is the final thing this story asks us to give up: the belief that we’re capable of achieving perfection and fixing it all on our own, so that we can be invited, like the rich young man, to leave the hurt and anger and self-righteousness, and yes the money and possessions, that we’re clinging to and follow Jesus to a place where the first become last and the last become first, and all of us have enough.