Homily: That Look

Year B / Ordinary Time / Week 28 / Sunday

Readings: Wisdom 7.7-11 / Psalm 89.12-13, 14-15, 16-17 (R/v 14) / Hebrews 4. 12-13 / Mark 10.17-30

Sisters and brothers, have you seen that look? That looks that says I know you. I am interested in you. I welcome you. I care for you. I am here waiting for you.

Have you seen that look?  That welcomes us in our need to belong. That look that accepts us with our limitations and imperfections. That look that forgives us for our sins. That look that loves.

Have you caught that look in the face of your spouse who forgives you? Your parent who accepts you? Your friend who encourages you? Your priest who hears your confession? Did you catch that look?

The rich young man in today’s gospel did not catch the look Jesus had when he asked Jesus “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He was too focused, too preoccupied, too bothered with getting the right answer. This young man has done everything right. He observes the Ten Commandments. He lives according to God’s Law. He is a good and moral man. 

But he wants to do something more to get to heaven. Something more that he wants Jesus to instruct him on. Something more from Jesus that he must do to be truly fulfilled. Something more: that right answer to do the right thing to please God.

All Jesus tells him is this: “Go, sell what you have, and give it to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come follow me.” Hearing this, “his face fell and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.” He goes away. This is the sign of his richness: not his possessions but a misplaced confidence that it must be he himself who has to do the right thing for salvation.

What was Jesus really asking of him?  Not just the act of giving away all. That’s only the expression he had to make if he really desired to respond to that deeper, richer gift Jesus is offering him: the gift of being with Jesus. Yes, sell all, give to the poor, your treasure is in heaven, then come follow me. Come and be with me.

What Jesus is really offering the young man -- and all of us, again, this evening -- is relationship. Relationship with Jesus; a relationship that is rooted in God’s love and destined for God’s salvation.

Often times, we interpret this gospel to be about giving up all for Jesus. This evening, I’d like to invite us to meditate on relationship. To choose relationship with Jesus. To prioritize relationship with Jesus. More significantly, to let Jesus have relationship with us because he wants to save us.

Many a time, aren’t we like the young man when Jesus asks something more of us? Don’t we tell Jesus: “I can’t give up what I have”; “I can’t do what you are asking of me”; “I am too scared to say ‘yes”; “I am unworthy”; “Not me, Lord”? We may also be like the young man because we may be too fixated in getting the right answer from Jesus. We want it, we demand it because we want to do the correct thing to get to heaven.

And what does Jesus offer us? Just himself, for relationship with us.

Maybe we are throw in our towels too quickly when we reject Jesus because we don’t really hear this that Jesus is indeed asking of us. Not an instruction or command. But really a loving invitation. Jesus’ invitation to become better, to be happier, and to live more as God wishes us to. Only by being in relationship with Jesus can we savour how good this is. This is why Jesus repeatedly invites us into relationship, no matter our state of grace. 

Jesus’ invitation to the young man is really to grow up. To take a step towards maturity. To take this step by entering into relationship with him. With him, who shows us the way to God and to live in God’s ways. With him alone.

The rich young man ran up to Jesus. And Jesus wants him to keep running. To keep running onwards to God. Running onwards to God with Jesus beside him

What did the young man miss? What could he have done? He could have caught the loving gaze of Jesus. “Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him, ‘You are lacking in one thing’”. What is this one thing?  To catch Jesus looking at him, loving him.  

Then he would have not needed all his possessions to try and win the love of others, and certainly not the love of God. Of God who so loved the world that he gave us his only Son, Jesus (John 3.16). Jesus whose love is the true richness being offered to the young man, to us, to the whole world. The richness of salvation freely and generously given to us because God simply wants to. Not because we have to earn it. The young man didn’t get it. Do you and get this truth too?

The question we have to honestly ask ourselves this evening is: “Have you and I caught the loving gaze of Jesus? Caught it not once but again and again in our lives, especially when we fail and fall in sinfulness?”

Often we catch the challenge today’s gospel presents when we hear it or preach on it: Jesus is confronting us to leave our attachments to material goods.

But do we first catch his loving gaze that the evangelist Mark places in the middle of today’s gospel? He suggests that catching Jesus’ gaze matters much more than how we sometimes misplace his love for what we achieve, or for how much good we have made with our talents, or even for the extent of what we give away to others.

So let us try hard and always to catch Jesus’ gaze on us. If we do, everything else in our lives will fall into the right perspective: we belong to God, as God belongs to us.

This is what Jesus’ look is all about. It’s a gaze of God looking at us, loving us, living with us. “We need that gaze to fill our hearts, a gaze that tells us who we are, and how much we are loved. It is a gaze that is unchanging, eternal and unconditional.”*

Indeed, it is out of this gaze of God loving us that all our responses will make sense. How we choose to live, how we use our wealth, how we act morally, how we care and share, how we love and forgive, will all spring from the look of love Jesus has for us. 

This is why I find much consolation in these lines from the Jesuit Pedro Arrupe:

Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.

Sisters and brothers, have you and I really caught that gaze of Jesus loving us as we are -- his beloved? 

*James McTavish, FMVD, Sharper than A Sword

Preached at Church of the TransfigurationSilenc
photo: still shot from film, The Look of Silence (thelookofsilence.com)