What you own, and what owns you

A cautionary gospel passage

Today’s Daily Office gospel reading is Mark 10:17-31.  In it, we read of a man who runs up to Jesus and asks what must he do to inherit eternal life.  Jesus tells him to obey the commandments, which the man says he’s already been doing.  Now, at this point, Jesus could have just figuratively patted him on the head and said, “Good man, go in peace,” but that’s not what He does.  Jesus looks on the man with love, and tells him that he’s only lacking one thing:  to sell all that he owns, give the money to the poor, and follow Him.  The man is shocked by this, and he goes away grieving because he has many possessions.

One of my Franciscan vows is the vow of poverty.  Being a third order Franciscan, my vow does not have me literally divesting myself of all my possessions; I still own my apartment, I have my own business from which I earn a modest living, and I am a long way from being impoverished in any sense.  Instead, I am admonished to live simply, to avoid excess and waste, and to be generous with what I have towards those who have less.  In particular, I am called to respect what I am given while I work at not being owned by what I own.

In the gospel story, we don’t know what the man ultimately did.  He goes away grieving, but is that grief over the loss of discipleship (because he won’t sell all he owns) or over the loss of his possessions (because he will sell them to follow Jesus)?  Either way, he is clearly owned by what he owns.  I like to think that he did as Jesus asked, even if it grieved him.  “For God, all things are possible,” Jesus tells us, even if is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.

We Americans are very enamored of our stuff.  Success is too often measured by the things we have:  what house(s) we have, what cars we own, what clothing we wear, what bling we adorn ourselves with—the list goes on.  If what we own doesn’t measure up to what somebody else owns, we feel inadequate.  What we own ends up defining who we are—what we own, then, owns us.

Stuff is just stuff, in the end.  None of it matters to God, except insofar as we are good stewards of what we’ve been given.  Treasures of this earth remain with this earth.  Treasures of the spirit—love, above all—are eternal.