Second Series

January 1885

The Way

The passage: If you want to be perfect.

For many deep reasons, not least the fragmentary records, whoever reads them without the candle of the Lord (the light of truth in his inward parts) will fall into a thousand errors and, worse, fail to see the life struggling there to reveal itself: the Son of Man’s own thought, feeling, and intent, that by which he lived and which he poured out for us. Yet this life, his inner being shown through his outer life as far as the spiritual eye can see, is the one thing the reader has to do with.

Readers who do not study the Greek Testament should use the revised version for the incident I want to unfold. Had I not known and rejoiced in it before the revision, I would owe the revisers endless gratitude for the true reading of St Matthew’s report of the youth who came to our Lord. Whoever does not welcome the change cannot see its preciousness.

In the revised version, St Matthew’s opening of the conversation is very different from St Mark’s and St Luke’s. There is no need to reject either; they blend perfectly, and I rejoice to have both. Together they give a complete conversation, which I read thus; let my fellow students see how naturally these differing, not opposing, reports combine.

Not daring to reply to this, the youth leaves it and turns to his purpose in addressing the Lord.

“What good thing shall I do,” he says, “to have eternal life?”

But again the Lord takes hold of the word good:

“Why do you ask me about what is good?” he replies. “There is One who is good. But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.”

“Which?”

“You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, honour your father and mother; and, you shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

“I have kept all these. What do I still lack?”

“If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”

Let us look at the story.

As Jesus went out of a house (St Mark x. 10 and 17), the young man ran to him, knelt in the way, and called him “Good Master.”

The Lord’s interruption reveals the whole attitude of his being. At every moment, as much as in Gethsemane or any hour men call a crisis, his whole thought and delight was in the will and being of his Father, the joy that made life life to him. Jesus needed no pause in action to send him home. His heart’s home was the Father’s heart, the mystery of his gladness, claiming every degree of delight from calm content to ecstasy. His life was hid in God. He saw every truth and grandeur of life as it was, undistorted by ambition or disappointment, and beheld and loved them from the Father’s bosom. He did not come for himself, to establish his power over men, but that they might know the Father who was his life. That the Father should have all the sons of men, his children like himself, in his bosom was the one thought of his heart, whatever it cost him. He did not care to hear himself called good; he was there to let men see the goodness of the Father in whom he gloried, and for that he entered the weary dream of the world, where the glory was so dulled and clouded. “You call me good! You should know my Father!”

The Lord’s greatness consisted in his Father being greater than he: he who calls into being is greater than he who is called. The Son is always the Son, not of himself but by the Father; he does not live by his own power, as the Father does. All that is his is the Father’s, given to him, and his goodness is of the Father’s goodness. So when the word good reaches the Son’s ears, his heart lifts it at once to the Father of all. His words do not deny goodness in himself; but he was not its origin, nor did he care about it except to be good, which was a matter of course to him. He would spend life and death to make his Father’s goodness known! The Son no more thought of his own goodness than an honest man thinks of his honesty. A good man seeing goodness thinks of his own evil; Jesus had none to think of, yet he thinks only of the Father’s goodness. “Why do you call me good? None is good but one, God.”

Checked thus, the youth turns to the question that brought him running: what good thing shall he do to have eternal life? Whatever he meant by that, it was something he needed and lacked, to be gained, he saw, on some path of good. But he thought to gain by a doing what he wanted as a being: he would have as a possession what must possess him.

The Lord cared neither for isolated truth nor for orphaned deed, but for truth in the inward parts, the good heart, the mother of good deeds. He cared for no speculation in morals or religion; he cared about good men, not notions of good things, nor even good actions except as the bodies in which the live actions of love and will in the soul take shape. Could one word from him have settled all philosophy’s questions about the supreme good and absolute truth, I venture to say he would not have spoken it. But he would die to make men good and true, and his whole heart would answer the cry of the sad publican or despairing pharisee, “How am I to be good?”

When the Lord says, “Why do you ask me about what is good?”, we must not stress me, as if he refused the question as he had declined the epithet. He was the proper person to ask; but the question was the wrong one: the good thing was a small matter, the good Being all in all. [In a footnote he says that, as it stands, the passage is hard to read without stressing me, which spoils the sense, and that “Why do you ask me concerning the good thing?” would be better.] “Why ask me about the good thing? There is one living good, in whom the good thing and all good is alive and ever at work. Ask not about the good thing but about the good Person, the origin of all good.” We have to do not with this good thing and that, but with the power from which comes even our power to speak the word good, with him to whom no one can look without the need to be good waking in his heart. To think about him is to begin to be good. To do a good thing is to do a good thing; to know God is to be good. He cares less to make us do all things right than to make us hunger and thirst after a righteousness which, once ours, will leave us no need to ask what is good, for we shall refuse the evil and choose the good by a motion of the will that is at once necessity and choice. He refers the youth again to his Father.

Note that the youth’s question is not about doing something he knows to be right; to that the Lord would allow no question, for the one thing he insists on is the doing of what we know we ought. But the youth is looking for some unknown good thing, and the Lord sends him back to doing what he knows.

A man must have something to do in the matter, and may well ask such a question. The Lord declines only its form, to help the youth to what he really needs. He has hinted that the answer lies in God himself, but the youth cannot yet receive that; so he starts farther back: “If you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.” If the commandments had nothing to do with entering into life, why were they ever given? This is his task.

Then the road to eternal life is the keeping of the commandments! Had the Lord not said so, what man of common moral sense would dare say otherwise? What else can the way into life be but doing what the Lord of life tells the creatures he would have live for ever? It is the beginning of the way. A man who had kept all the commandments would not therefore have eternal life in him; yet without keeping them there is no entering into life. Keeping them is not life, but so much of the way to it, and closely and essentially related to it.

The Lord says nothing about the first table of the law. Why does he not tell this youth, as he told the lawyer, that to love God is everything?

He had given him a glimpse of the essence of his own life, but the youth was not ready for it. To love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind is to know God, and to know him is eternal life, the end of the whole saving matter and the eternal beginning of all things. But the youth was not capable of it. To begin with that would be like telling someone who asks how to reach the top of a mountain, “Just set your foot on that shining snow-clad peak, high there in the blue.” It would have been to mock him, who could not yet see or believe that this was eternal life, or look at life even from afar. How many Christians can, and how many know or care that they cannot? So the Lord answers with something he can do: keep the commandments. And when he asks “Which?”, he names only those about his neighbour, ending with the highest and hardest.

“But no one can perfectly keep a single commandment of the second table, any more than of the first.”

Surely not, or why were they given? But does keep mean nothing unless qualified by perfectly? Is there no keeping but perfect keeping?

“None that God cares for.”

There I think you utterly wrong. That nothing but perfect keeping will satisfy God I hold with all my heart; but that he cares for no other is one of the enemy’s lies. What father is not pleased with his little one’s first tottering step? What father would be satisfied with anything but the manly step of the full-grown son?

When the Lord names the commandments he means, the youth answers that he has observed them from his youth up. The Lord takes his word: he looked on him and loved him. Was he deceived, or did he believe the youth had kept them perfectly? There must be a keeping, anything but perfect, which is yet acceptable to the heart of him from whom nothing is hid. In that way the youth had kept them, and however he failed of perfection, he had not missed the end for which they were given. For the immediate end of the commandments was never that men should succeed in obeying them, but that, finding they could not do what yet must be done, and that the more they tried the more was required, they should be driven to the source of life and law, to seek from him such reinforcement of life as would make fulfilling the law possible, even natural. In the youth it had been wrought: his observance gave him no satisfaction, and he desired eternal life, of which the law says nothing; keeping the law had developed a hunger no law could fill. Must not the imperfection of his keeping, even in the lower sense in which he read the commandments, have helped reveal how far they were beyond him, and how their implicit demands rose into the infinitude of God’s perfection?

Having kept the commandments, the youth was ready for a further lesson; the Lord, who came to seek and to save, would not leave him where he was. He saw him in sore need of perfection, which the commonplace Christian thinks he can best do without and the elect hunger after eternally. Perfection, the Father’s perfection, is eternal life. “If you want to be perfect,” said the Lord. What an honour, to be supposed desirous of it, and what an enormous demand! The one thing lacking was that he sell all he had, give it to the poor, and follow the Lord. Could this be all that lay between him and entering into life? God only knows what the victory of such obedience might at once have wrought in him. Much more would be needed before perfection, but the next step would have been the step into life: in the very act there would have been born in him that whose essence is eternal life, needing only process to grow into the glorious consciousness of oneness with The Life.

There was nothing like this in the law. Was it not hard? Hard to let earth go for heaven, to turn his back on Mammon and follow Jesus, to lose his rich friends? Let him call it hard who does not know the Lord, who has never thirsted after righteousness or longed for eternal life!

The youth had got so far, and so pleased the Master, that he would give him the highest favour: to be with him, to walk and rest with him and go from him only to plead with men as a mediator between God and men, doing for him what he did for his Father. He would set him free at once, a child of the kingdom, an heir of eternal life.

I do not suppose the youth was one whom ordinary people would call a lover of money, or covetous, or even wanting more. I imagine he was like most good men of property: he valued his possessions as a good. In another man he would have regarded such possession almost as a merit, valuing a man more who had means and less who had none, like most of my readers. They have no notion how entirely they will one day have to change their judgment, or have it changed for them. Well for them if they change it themselves!

From this false way of thinking, and the folly and unreality that go with it, the Lord would deliver the young man. As he was, he was a slave, for a man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself. The Lord could have taken the possessions by his own will, but he wished to do it by the young man’s will, which would be a victory for both. So the youth would enter freedom and life, delivered from mammon by the Lord’s lovely will in him, one with his own, and escape the corruption that is in the world through lust, the desire or pleasure of having.

The young man would not.

Was the Lord then premature? Was the demand a test rather than a word of deliverance, a next step too high for the child? I do not believe it. It was the very next lesson for which he was ready; he could respond, give birth by obedience to the redeemed and redeeming will, and so be free. Do you say, “But he would not obey”? Then it was time, I answer, that he should refuse, and know what manner of spirit he was of, and meet the sad searchings of heart that must follow. A time comes to every man when he must obey, or refuse, and know it.

Shall I then be supposed to mean that the refusal was final, that he was lost, that the door of life was closed against him? Verily, I have not so learned Christ. That the lesson was not lost I see in this, that he went away sorrowful. Was such sorrow in an earnest youth likely to grow less or more? Many have looked on his face and turned back, or kept company with him for years and denied him; but their weakness does not measure God’s patience. Perhaps this youth was never one of the Lord’s while he was on earth, but perhaps when he saw that the Master himself cared nothing for the wealth he had told him to cast away, that instead of ascending his fathers’ throne he let the people do with him what they would and left the world as poor as he had lived in it, then he became one of those who sold all they had and laid the money at the apostles’ feet. Meanwhile his soul was heavy: by the gravity of his riches the world held him and would not let him rise. He counted his weight his strength, and it was his weakness. Moneyless in God’s upper air he would have had power indeed. Money is the power of this world, a power for defeat and failure to him who holds it, a weakness to be overcome before a man can be strong; yet many decent people fancy it a power of the world to come! It is a little power, no mighty thing for redemption, and to those who have it the saddest obstruction. To make this youth capable of eternal life, the first thing clearly was to make a poor man of him, the more clearly because he went away sorrowful! He would doubtless gladly have devoted his wealth to the Master’s service, and gone with him as a rich man to spend it for him; but to part with it to be free for his service, that he could not, yet!

And how would he go on with keeping the commandments? Would he not see his shortcomings and their requirements more plainly, and feel keeping them more imperative than ever, yet impossible without something he lacked? The commandments can never be kept while there is a strife to keep them: the man is overwhelmed by the weight of their broken pieces. It takes a clean heart to have pure hands, the power of a live soul to keep the law: a power of life, not struggle; the strength of love, not the effort of duty.

One day the truth of his conduct must dawn on him with absolute clearness, and bitter must be the discovery: he had refused eternal life, turned his back on The Life! Humbled and ashamed, yet with the consolation of repentance, he would return to the Master and bemoan his unteachableness. Some, like St Paul, can say, “I did wrong, but in ignorance; my heart was not right, and I did not know it”; the remorse of such must differ from that of one who, brought to where he could embrace the truth, turned from it and refused to be set free. To him will come a time, God only knows when, to see his deed with the knowledge that he was dimly seeing it so even when he did it. All those months, or days, or hours, or moments, he might have been following the Master, hearing his words, looking through his eyes into the very gulfs of Godhead!

The sum of the matter is this. He had begun early to climb the eternal stair, and had climbed by every keeping of the commandments. But because he was well to do (a phrase of unconscious irony) he felt well to be, quite, but for that lack of eternal life. His possessions gave him a standing and consequence, and value in his own eyes. He looked up to himself because of his means, forgetting that means are only tools, and poor ones. To part with his wealth would be to sink to the level of his inferiors! He could devote it, but he could not cast it from him, nor devote himself; he could not make himself naked as a little child and let his Father take him. How could a rich man believe he would be of more value without his money, that casting it away would make him one of God’s Anakim, that God’s battle could be better fought without such an aid? But the Master had repudiated money to do his Father’s will, and the disciple must be as his master. Had he done as the Master told him, he would soon have understood. Obedience is the opener of eyes.

There is this danger to every good youth in keeping the commandments, that he will think of himself more highly than he ought. He may be right about the facts and wrong in his self-regard, thinking himself a fine fellow when he is only an ordinarily reasonable youth trying to do the first thing necessary to a man’s name or honour. One who has begun to recognize duty is still only a tottering child on the path of life. He is on the path, and the Father’s arms are stretched out to receive him; but he is not therefore a wonderful being or a model of wisdom, not the admirable creature his remaining folly would persuade him he is, in his worst moments, that is when he feels best; he is just one of God’s poor creatures. What share this besetting sin of the good young man had in this one’s failure we need not inquire; but he may well have thought the Master undervalued his work as well as his wealth, and was less than fair to him.

To return to the summing up:

The youth, climbing the stair of eternal life, had come to a landing where not a step more was visible. On the cloud-swathed platform he stands, looking in vain for further ascent. What he thought he wanted I cannot tell. I can hardly think his idea of eternal life was only the poor idea of living for ever that commonplace minds grasp at, its mere shadow, taken for granted by all devout Jews: when a man is one with God, what should he do but live for ever? Without oneness with God, continued existence would be to me all but the unsurpassable curse (the unsurpassable itself being a God other than the God I see in Jesus). Whatever his idea, it must have held, perhaps only in solution, all his notions of God and man and righteousness. While he stands alone and helpless, behold the Son of Man! It is God himself come to meet the climbing youth, take him by the hand, and lead him up his own stair, the only stair by which ascent can be made. He shows him the first step through the mist. His feet are heavy; they have golden shoes. To go up that stair he must throw aside his shoes and walk barefoot into eternal life. Rather than stride free-limbed up the everlasting stair to the Father’s bosom, he will keep his precious shoes! It is better to drag them about on the earth than part with them for a world where they are useless!

But how miserable his golden vessels, embroidered garments, and stately house must have seemed when he went back to them from the Lord’s face! Surely it was not long before, in shame and misery, he cast all from him, as Judas cast away the thirty pieces of silver, in the agony of everyone who wakes to find he has preferred money to the Master! For although no man can be saved without being freed from his possessions, it is only hard, not impossible, for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.