Reading Francis

Who can tell you, successfully, that you’re living life wrong? 

I’ve been thinking about this question in relation to the Gospel story of the “rich young ruler” found in Mark 10, as well as in relation to our current cultural divisions in America.

The Gospel story, in short, is this: a rich young man comes up to Jesus and asks him “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” After he affirms that the man observes the Ten Commandments, “Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him, ‘You are lacking in one thing. Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’” The man “went away sad, for he had many possessions.”

What does this tell us about my question? Here are some elements that jump out:

• The man gives Jesus permission to critique his life by asking him directly what he should do
• The man recognizes Jesus’ authority by addressing the question to him
• The man acknowledges social rank with the title “good teacher”, even though Jesus demurs
• Jesus shows his care for the man (“Jesus, looking at him, loved him”)
• Jesus shows his experience in what he’s asking the man to do (“follow me”)
• Jesus offers to be an example or mentor

These seem like a good list of elements for who we allow to tell us how we live our life. It may not be a complete list, and you may value some of these more than others, but it’s a good starting point for this discussion.

My reading of the story is that the man goes away sad, not because he has lost faith in Jesus as a teacher, but because he knows that the teaching of Jesus is right; he just doesn’t have the will to follow it. I can think of two reasons why this happens:

• In this case, it’s the radical nature of the change called for that leads the man to walk away
• In other cases (I think of the cliché of overcritical parents who are never satisfied with their children), it’s the frequency of critiques that causes people to walk away.

How does this relate to our cultural divisions today? I think one way to read the dynamic at play in our country is a standoff between two cultures, two camps that are increasingly alienated with each other over the perception that the other is telling them that they are living life wrong. In both cases, they would credit the other side with none of the elements from the story above – permission, authority, rank, care, common experience or example – and both would say that the vision of a good life on the other side is both radical and so wide-ranging as to offer frequent critiques. Whether on gender roles or composition of marriage and the family or readings of history or what constitutes healthy patriotic values or, or, or… each side believes that the other’s primary focus is to tell them that they’re doing it, all of it, completely wrong.

I offer this not to justify one or another side or to argue “both-sidesism”; this isn’t about the validity of each culture’s critiques of the other at all. Maybe your side is 100% right and the other side has it all wrong. I offer this just as a way of understanding why neither side seems particularly successful at convincing the other to change their ways.

We don’t know where the rich man goes when he leaves Jesus. My guess is that he went back to his home and the many possessions he was unwilling to give up, and maybe he looked for friends who would reinforce his choice to stick with the status quo. Over years of mulling Jesus’ words, maybe he changed his mind and became an ascetic monk, but it seems more likely that time and desire distorted his memory of the encounter so that, by the end of his life, he was convinced that Jesus wasn’t really a good rabbi that loved him, but a demon out to destroy his way of life.

So what about you? Who do you trust enough to allow them to tell you that you’re doing life wrong? How much rope do you give them in offering those critiques? And how did they gain that trust? 

It seems to me that if there is a way forward in our cultural division other than metaphorical trench warfare, we won’t find it until we focus more on building that kind of trust in each other than on another round of uninvited critiques.