Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost; Post-feast of the Dormition; the Holy Prophet Samuel (11th c. BC).
1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Matthew 19:16-26.
Read Matthew 19:16-26
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
Love isn’t a “what”, it’s a “who”. Yes, love is lived out in acts of love – the “whats” – but the source, the means, and the end of all love is a person – a “who”: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). In the tone 1 troparion of the Divine Liturgy, we sing of Christ, the “only lover of mankind.” Today’s gospel reading focuses our attention back on this fact.
The rich young ruler asks Jesus, “what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” Jesus questions the very question and says he should instead be thinking about, “One there is who is good.” Jesus’ disciples are similarly preoccupied with the question of what is possible regarding the salvation of the rich (who they assumed were evidently in God’s blessing) and therefore of everyone else too. Again, Jesus directs them away from the erroneous focus of their preconceptions and back toward God, with whom “all things are possible.”
At risk of being lost by us in all of this, prone as we are to wanting to be reassured that people can be both rich and enter the kingdom of heaven, is Jesus’ emphatic statement, “Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Jesus said elsewhere that we cannot serve both God and riches (Matthew 6:24). He is saying here that if we are rich, it will be hard to not serve those riches instead of loving God as our only master. Today’s gospel is a call for us to do what those in addiction recovery groups call “a searching and fearless moral inventory,” asking ourselves, who do we really love, remembering that, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21).