Audio of the sermon is here:

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

It is dangerous to come into contact with Jesus. A lot of people think they can keep Him at arm’s length. Maybe they say something like “Jesus is all about love. I’m all about love. Me and Jesus—we got an understanding.” They think that Jesus’ words are lying there dead on the page, and they can take or leave them, they can use or not use them as they wish. You can see that not only do they think that Jesus’ words are dead, they think Jesus is dead. “If Jesus were here, He would definitely do this thing that I think He would be doing.” Amazing how that works. Jesus would do exactly the thing that I think is right! That Jesus is not dangerous. He will pretty much leave you alone to do whatever you want, and He won’t interfere.

But the real Jesus is not dead. He rose from the dead. He’s alive and His word is living, and if you come too close, He might be dangerous to the way you think and the way you act. He might turn everything upside down. He might undermine your normal ways of thinking. He might make you see everything different from how you see it now. You cannot keep the real Jesus at a safe distance.

So this man comes running up to Jesus and falling on his knees before Jesus. It must be an urgent request for him to run. It’s weighing heavy on him. He says, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He has a question; he wants an answer from Jesus. That should be it. But Jesus will not let him remain at arm’s length. Why do you call Me good? No one is good except one, God. So much for Jesus being “just a good teacher” of generally applicable ethics or morality. If you call Jesus a “good teacher,” you are putting Him with God, which is what He intends, but I doubt that’s what most people intend by calling Him that.

It’s a strange question anyway: what must I do to inherit eternal life? We think, well, obviously, you can’t do anything to get eternal life. But more than that, unless you’re trying to worm your way into a will, you can’t do anything to inherit something. You have to be brought into the family, whether blood or not. Those who inherit things are generally part of the family. But Jesus doesn’t argue about those things. He says, “You know the commandments: do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false testimony, do not defraud, honor your father and mother.” You want to inherit eternal life from God? Be a child of God. This is what the child of God does. He answers, “All these things I have kept, I have guarded, since my youth.” And again, we might want to argue with him, but again, Jesus doesn’t. He is seemingly sincere. So I would take it in the sense of what Paul says in Philippians 3, when he is recounting his pedigree: “as to righteousness under the law, I was blameless,” Paul says. It doesn’t mean he never sinned, never failed. It simply means everyone around him would have looked at him and said, yep, he’s good; he keeps the law of God.

Jesus, instead of arguing the point, looks at him and loves him. “One thing you lack; you’re missing only one thing. He says “one thing,” but it sounds like three things: sell all you have; give it to the poor (and you will have treasure in heaven); come and follow Me. And the man went away sorrowful; his face fell; because, Mark tells us, he had great wealth, many possessions. Here we see that there is only one thing: the First Commandment. “You shall have no other gods before Me.” I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you up out of slavery, out of the land of Egypt; you shall have no other gods. I am the only true God. The one thing he is lacking is the true God. The one thing he cannot do is give up his god, which is his wealth. So he goes away sad, refusing to give up his earthly wealth for heavenly treasure.

Jesus and His disciples go back into the house, and Jesus says, “How difficult it is for the wealthy to enter into the kingdom of God. Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.” And the disciples want to know, if this is true of the rich, who can be saved? If they can’t, whom God is obviously blessing, who can? Jesus says, With people this is impossible; but with God, nothing is impossible. It is impossible that people would give up their gods for the true God, even if that God is standing right in front of them, inviting them to follow Him. It is impossible, because our hearts, as someone said, are perpetual idol factories, constantly churning out gods after gods after gods, especially when the things we trust in fail us. And of course it’s not just wealth. People without anything can make an idol out of money as easily as those with money. The problem is not how much of it you have, but how much you trust in it.

And money or wealth is an obvious one; it is this man’s idol. But we all have our own. You have yours and I have mine, and it’s fairly easy to identify: when things start going badly, to what do you turn? Where is the first place you look for help when you have trouble? And what do you spend most of your time, money, and energy on, to get it or keep it? Pretty good hints there. It is impossible for us, left to ourselves, to give up those things. And even if we stop trusting in one of them, our hearts keep making more. Impossible for us, but not for God. God sends His Son into the flesh, and when Jesus sees all of us deluded sinners, deluded into thinking we can make it out of this world alive, with our possessions intact; all of us, with our idol-making hearts going 24 hours a day. He looked at that man, stuck in his greed and idolatry, and He loved him. He looks at us, and He loves us. He looks at you, right now, and He loves you. It is dangerous to get close to Him, dangerous for our greed and idolatry, our false and failed trust. Because He won’t leave us alone. He, the good God in flesh, will bring you face to face with your own heart, and our hearts don’t like it. But He does not do that so we will go away sad, trusting in our idols. He says, “Come, follow Me.”

Come, follow Me, He said to you. He looked at you from the cross, and He loved you. And then He gathered you to Himself in baptism. Come, follow Me. We haven’t stopped making idols, any more than the apostles did. But the definition of disciple is: baptized into His Name and hearing and learning His words. That’s an ongoing process, and Jesus will eventually destroy all your idols. The Spirit is driving them out of you right now. We don’t know what we will have to give up when we follow Jesus, but eventually we will give up everything we have in this life and world anyway. You will not be able to keep any of it by holding on to it. Jesus says to Peter and His disciples, whoever has given up houses, land, mother, father, brother or sister, will receive back, now, in this time, many times more of lands, houses, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, in the eternal household of the living God. And also persecutions! But in the age to come, eternal life. Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all of this will be added to you. You do not inherit all this by doing the impossible and driving out all your idols yourself. You cannot make yourself a child of God. But Jesus looks at you, and He loves you, and He says, come, follow Me, and He brings you along with Him. He has made you His own dear child by water and the word. Come, follow Jesus on this adventure, no matter what happens!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7, ESV). Amen.

– Pr. Timothy Winterstein, 10/11/24