The Simplicity of Following.
Michiel Peeters - That man in today’s Gospel must have had the strong intuition that Jesus can help him with what he has been struggling with his entire life. Why else would he fall to his knees? “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Eternal life means, translated in our language: real life, living (as opposed to surviving), freedom, self-realization, happiness. He had dedicated his existence to achieving this, he had done everything possible for this purpose (“all of these I have observed from my youth”). And yet he had not reached it. “In what am I lacking?”
“Jesus, looking at him, loved him”—for Jesus really appreciates those who are so human and alive that they spend their lives to finding what they are made for, in whatever way they can—“and said to him: … You are lacking in one thing…: [just] come [and] follow me.” If you want to truly live, there are no other things to do, no other rules to follow.
Life is not the result of your actions. It is something totally different. It is a new way of being in reality, of being, of looking. You get an impression of what it is, if you look at how a child lives in the presence of his mother, or if you look at me. And if you want it for yourself, come with me!” As Italo Calvino said in the phrase we put on our church: “Learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, is not hell, then make it endure, give it space.”
If Jesus would have given him another commandment, another “instruction for life,” he might not have made objections. But now that He is proposing something totally different—childishly simple, but dissimilar to anything the man had in mind and done so far—he cannot accept it. “At that statement his face fell, and he went away…, for he had many possessions,” in many forms, and was not willing to give them up. “Men do not learn when they believe they already know,” said Barbara Ward. But he goes away “sad”: he seems to realize that he is missing out on a very big opportunity here.
Following the man with his eyes, Jesus says: “How hard it is for those who have wealth [for those who are attached to their goods and ideas, more than to the truth of their lives, to their own happiness, whenever they run into it]!” Peter then observes, “We have given up everything and followed you.” And Jesus: “There is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the gospel who will not receive a hundred times more [of those same things] now in this present age.”
If you follow me, you won’t lose anything of your existence, of all its goods, you’ll get them back a hundredfold, in this life. Like the Apostles, we too are invited to verify this promised hundredfold. But, attention, it is promised only to those who leave something “for my sake and for the sake of the gospel,” that is, for the correspondence to your desire that you have sensed in me, for the “radiance in your eyes” you have intercepted in me and in those following me.
In some minutes we will Baptize little Arthur. Through that gesture, he will be inserted in the long line of those who, like the man in the Gospel, have run into Christ and were promised the hundredfold. Arthur too is promised the hundredfold, in this life. Like the man in the Gospel, like the Apostles, like each of us, he will need a road to discover what it is he has run into. The possibility of his path depends largely on the road we are going: if he will be able to see the “radiance in our eyes” that is the sign of the experienced and verified hundredfold.
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The author did not review the notes and its translation.
20241013 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time B (Mk 10:17-30) with Baptism of Arthur (Homily by Fr Michiel Peeters, Tilburg University Chaplaincy)
