Monday, Twentieth Week in Ordinary Year

The young man in today’s gospel reading clearly has a very good heart. There is something very appealing about him. He had very good values and had a clear goal in life. He wanted to live in such a way that he would inherit eternal life, life in God’s presence. He kept the commandments God gave to Moses, including the great commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself. Yet, he wasn’t satisfied. ‘What more do I need to do?’, he asked Jesus. There is such a thing as a holy restlessness. We are conscious of a ‘more’ we haven’t yet attained. We sense the Lord calling us beyond where we are, even though where we are is good. We can point to good things we are doing and, yet, there are moments when we wonder if we are answering the Lord’s call as fully as we might. A questioning restlessness creeps into our overall feeling of satisfaction with ourselves, with our relationship with God and others. Like the young man, we are drawn by a sense that there is ‘more’. Jesus took the man’s searching question seriously and called him to a follow him in a very radical way, which entailed giving away all his great wealth. He was too attached to his great wealth; he couldn’t respond to Jesus’ call and a sadness came over him when he realized he couldn’t reach towards the ‘more’ that he so desired. We are all held back in different ways from responding to the Lord’s call to follow him more fully, to become an even more authentic disciple than we are. The young man’s struggle is the struggle of us all. At the very least, we need to remain alert to that deep desire within us for the ‘more’, even though we struggle to follow through on it.

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