Fr. JC Maximilian

Today’s Gospel reading, about the Rich Young Man, has a special place in my heart. When I was in the seminary, taking my first homiletics practicum, this was the first Gospel I was assigned to preach on. As I have reflected on this passage I have always been struck by the richness of Christ’s teaching. In giving a homily to a group of seminarians I focused on Jesus’ courage to be disliked – He most likely knew that the rich young man would not like what He told him, but Jesus had the courage to say it anyway. Yet Scripture is so rich that as I sat to prepare this homily the Holy Spirit prompted me to talk about something else.

As I hope you were aware, our parish recently hosted a lecture series entitled, “From the Religious Sense to Christianity: The Basic Writings of Msgr. Luigi Giussani, the Founder of Communion and Liberation.” The works of Msgr. Giussani are quite profound, yet as I meditated on today’s Gospel I saw how the basic structure of Msgr. Guissani’s theological project is found within this Gospel passage.

First notice that the rich young man “ran” to Jesus. There was a deep excitement and eagerness to learn what he needed to do to inherit everlasting life. We all seek happiness, we all seek fulfillment, we all long for understanding. These deepest human desires are what Msgr. Giussani calls the “Religious Sense.” Some of our desires can be satisfied easily, on my own. If I am hungry I have a desire for food, but if I eat a sandwich that desire becomes satisfied and I no longer have it – at least not for a while. However, there are other desires of which we can never completely satisfy. Can we ever have enough “justice” or “truth” or “goodness” or “love”? No, when we experience these, we desire them all the more. We see this expressed beautifully in today’s first reading from the Book of Wisdom.

Notice also that the man called Jesus “good teacher.” Jesus, in saying to the man “why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone,” was not rejecting the praise the man was offering Him. Rather Jesus wanted to do two things. First He wanted to show the depth of meaning of the man’s words: Jesus is good not because He is a good man, but because He is God, who is goodness itself. In pointing this out, Jesus is showing us that these deepest longings of the human heart, which prompted the rich young man to run to Jesus, and what Msgr. Giussani calls the “Religious Sense,” can only be fulfilled by God who is infinite Love, infinite Good, infinite Truth, infinite Justice.

Secondly, Jesus wanted to caution the young man, and all of us. The Christian life is not something of mere, overflowing emotion. It cannot be a sentimental passion for just the human Jesus that attracts us to being a Christian, rather we must look at God – see the divinity in Jesus and not just His humanity. Jesus in effect told the man to “Stop and think!” The fullness of love is not mere emotion, but is also reason and an act of the will.

This is the second component of Msgr. Giussani’s theological project; he calls it the “Origin of the Christian Claim,” — simply that God, who is the fulfillment of our deepest desires, came into time and history, “the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us.” It is our faith in Jesus, the God-Man, that makes us Christians, and our encounter with Jesus is what truly makes us happy.

Our desire for Christ needs to be the first priority in our lives. Our relationship with Jesus must color everything that we do; all the decisions we make. We cannot allow anything to become more important than our love for God and our desire to do His will. Yet the road is often filled with many difficulties, and often we are tempted to give up and find happiness in counterfeits of God’s love and truth. These counterfeits are the idols which the Prophets warned the People of God against throughout the Old Testament, and which are too often still a stumbling block for us today. Jesus, looking at the man with the eyes of Divine Love, saw the idols of wealth and prestige in the man’s life and called him to turn away from his idols to follow Him – the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The rich young man walked away sad. Do we?

Msgr. Giussani tells a story in one of his books which is appropriate for today’s reading. Imagine that you are a prospector looking for gold; you spend years looking for it. Once day a person comes up to you and says, “I know where you can find a lot of gold. I have mined it for years and have become very rich. I know that there is still a lot of gold there, and I want to share my good fortune with you.” He then tells you to go to the river and go to a certain spot, where in the middle of the river, under a deep level of very black mud, you will find the gold. How many of us would say, “No, I don’t want to have to go into that cold water, fight against the current, and dig through all that filthy mud to get to the gold. If the gold was all nice and clean from mud, and sitting on the bank of the river, I would take it, but not when it is in the river covered by mud.”

Wouldn’t we be crazy to say something like that? Yet too often we do just that. NOTHING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD! God is our Gold! Yet how often do we make excuses for missing Mass because of work or sports or vacation or any number of other reasons? How often to we fail to preach the Good News of Jesus Christ by our lives because people might not like the witness we give? Or some people say that it does not matter what they do because “Jesus is my friend,” without recognizing that He is also our Lord and Savior, God-in-the-Flesh. Or they allow the hardships in this life, and even the scandals in the Church, to make them bitter, angry, or discouraged? When we do that we are choosing the mud over the gold. Choose Christ! Follow Jesus!