During the pandemic, we became more adept at communicating with our eyes. At first, with masks covering part of our faces, it was difficult to tell whether the cashier at the grocery store was angry or delighted that you just smacked eighty-five food items down on the conveyor belt—unless you paid attention to the cashier’s eyes. If the eyebrows were slightly raised, she might be smiling. If they were furrowed and scrunched up, he might have been annoyed. Those masks, annoying as they may have been, pressed us to look beyond mouths and noses for emotional clues.
Married couples understand eye communication, don’t they? If you’ve been together long enough, you don’t need words to communicate; you can use your eyes. You can read the worry in your spouse’s eyes when no one else is likely to notice. You’ll observe the twinkle of amusement at a dinner party, although it’s disguised to everyone else at the table. You’ll see your beloved’s sadness and joy there, too, based on the circumstances. And even when it’s just the two of you, words are often unnecessary. A look can convey more than a thousand words.
Jesus says everything with just one look at the man with many possessions who kneels before him. It’s a striking and rare example in Scripture in which we’re invited to look into Jesus’s eyes. What was the color of his eyes? What was the shape of his mouth? What intangible, ineffable glint was present in his eyes as he looked upon the man before him? What did Jesus see in that man that Scriptural details don’t tell us? Jesus’s look, we could say, was worth more than a thousand words. His look was worth everything.
In Jesus’s long, loving look there must have been such delight in the man as a child of God. Jesus could see past his obsequiousness in kneeling before him and calling him “good teacher.” Jesus would have seen the man’s earnest desire to find salvation. Jesus would have noticed the man’s wealth on display in his clothing, for he had many possessions. Jesus would have observed the man’s diligence in keeping the commandments and in trying to be good. Surely, this faithfulness would have evinced a sparkle of joy in Jesus’s eyes.
But complicating that hint of pleasure, there would also have been some sorrow and sadness in Jesus’s long, loving look. He must have known that something was lacking in that man, and I suppose his heart broke for him. Jesus would have understood how difficult it would be for this man to give up the one thing that had shaped his identity until this point: his possessions. Jesus would have looked upon the man lovingly and yet with pity, realizing that it would be nearly impossible for him to speak the language of love rather than the language of transaction.
That’s the world in which the man lives. It’s the world in which we live, too. We live in the world of transaction, and we have become so fluent in its language for so long that to speak another language is like a middle-ager trying to learn a foreign language. It’s almost impossible on our own terms. Oh, that we could go back in time and be like a little child, the one whom Jesus embraces just before encountering the man with many things. Oh, that we could learn the language of love again.
The man sees Jesus’s long, loving look at him, but perhaps he only sees it as judgment. He certainly sees it as loss, because Jesus’s long, loving look is immediately followed by a crushing blow to the man’s eager hope for salvation. It makes little difference that he’s kept all the commandments since his youth and that he’s been diligent and faithful and pious. He still lacks one thing. He has too many possessions, and to follow Jesus, he must sell them, give the money to the poor, and then follow Jesus. The man must give up the very thing around which his life and identity have been constructed. And this is when his own countenance falls. This must be the moment when he looks away from Jesus’s long, loving look and stares at the ground before he walks away.
But if he’d only lifted his eyes instead of walking away, he would have seen the same long, loving look from the face of our Lord. It’s the look that never turns away from us. While there may have been judgment in confronting that look of love, Jesus wasn’t looking upon him with judgment, only with love. But when your only language is the language of transaction, the look of love might seem like cruel condemnation.
It's too easy to explain away the man’s problem as a universal problem with wealth. Undoubtedly, for this particular man—as for many people—his possessions are his peculiar problem. He’s lived so long in a world of transaction that he believes everything can be bought or earned. Everything can be measured or bartered in a tit-for-tat system. And strings could be attached to his wealth, too. Maybe he could use his wealth for charitable purposes, serving as a benefactor to those in need. And wouldn’t that gain him salvation points? And by keeping all the commandments, wouldn’t he be assured of eternal life? Surely, he must be justified in expecting to inherit eternal life.
And it’s in this posture that he kneels before Jesus, possibly expecting to be justified in what he’s already done. This man is proficient in doing¸for doing is the character system of the language of transaction. And should he have failed to do something, Jesus can definitely tell him what that final thing is that he needs to do to inherit eternal life.
Jesus does tell him to do something, but in a way, it’s not about doing at all. Jesus explains what the man lacks in order to receive the gift of eternal life. Jesus offers not an immediate answer to the man’s quest for the assurance of salvation. He gives him a long, loving look, a look that points to something eternal, worth more than a thousand words. This love isn’t something that can ever be bought, because it preceded our habits of transaction. There’s nothing we can do to win this love. It’s pure gift from our heavenly Father, something that we can only receive. And receiving may be the most difficult thing of all.
For the man with many possessions, his acquisitions are the primary obstacles in his life that prevent him from basking in God’s long, loving look. And this is why it’s so difficult to enter the kingdom of God when we’re attached to wealth and material things. Wealth is inherently structured around a language of transaction. Unless we can gaze back at God’s long, loving look, it will be impossible for us to speak the language of love rather than the language of transaction.
But it’s not only the wealthy who will struggle to enter the kingdom of God. We all will, and Jesus affirms that. For each of us, there’s something that will stand between us and God’s long, loving look. It may be our pride. It may be our resentment. It may be our covetousness or envy or desire for success. It may even be our own perpetual self-effacement. All these things will make it nearly impossible to enter the kingdom of God. But of course, finding eternal life is not impossible, because with God, all things are possible.
The face of Christ looking with love upon the man with many possessions was the face of God in earthly time inviting the entire world to speak the language of love instead of the language of transaction. God’s long, loving look summons us from transaction to trust, from grasping to receiving, from possessing to giving. And so, while we can never earn that love because it’s always available to us, there’s one thing we can do to receive that love with greater ease. We do it not because it will earn us something. We do it to empty ourselves, as an echo of Christ’s own self-emptying, so that God can fill us with his abiding love.
We give. We give selflessly and generously. We give recklessly. We let go of everything that has taken hold of our lives. In the Mass, we offer our selves, our souls and bodies to God so he can return them to us and eventually to the world, redeemed and made whole. We give sacrificially of our money because that emblem of the transactional world may be the most visible impediment to receiving God’s love. We give not to receive but because only in giving can we receive.
It’s so very difficult to enter the kingdom of God, but it’s not impossible because anything is possible with God. Our countenance may at first fall when we realize what we must relinquish to find eternal life. But if we hold our gaze high and look up, we will find there the gift that’s eternally present for us to receive. It’s the long, loving look that dispels all fear of not having enough or not measuring up or not being enough. In that long, loving look, we recognize what we lack, but we’re also assured that no matter what we must give up, something far greater is ours to receive. And when we are able to receive it, we’ll finally speak the language of love.
Sermon by Father Kyle
The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost
October 13, 2024