The Parable of the Rich Young Man

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“And now a man came to him and asked, ‘Master, what good deed must I do to possess eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you ask me about what is good? There is one alone who is good. But if you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.’

“He said, ‘Which ones?’ Jesus replied, ‘These: You shall not kill. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not give false witness. Honor your father and mother. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

“The young man said to him, ‘I have kept all these. What more do I need to do?’” (Matt. 19:16-20).

This scene is one of special beauty. Perhaps this rich young man had listened to Our Lord on other occasions. This might have been the first time that he had the nerve to speak to Him. But he carried in his heart a longing to give himself, to love more. Perhaps he was unhappy with his life.

He comes to Our Lord, and he asks a very good question: “What good deed must I do to possess eternal life?” He doesn't say, “Who do I pay?” or “How can I buy eternal life? What must I do?”

Our Lord looked upon this fellow with great hope. Maybe all the other disciples stopped to observe the scene. Our Lord seems to deflect his question a little bit: “Why do you ask me about what is good?”

He is sort of testing him a little bit, probing: “There is one alone who is good. But if you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.”

First and foremost, Our Lord places the commandments in front of this young person—the basis of all Christian living. It's a good idea from time to time to try to remember the commandments, not just the first six or seven, but the last three.

These can be a bit challenging. Ask your children about them also. They're the basis of everything.

Commandments are not just a complication in our life. They're the pathway to happiness, the pathway to do what is good. We can only be happy from doing what is good.

Then Our Lord outlines very specifically some of the commandments. The young man makes a rather unusual reply. He says, “I have kept all of these.” What person alive could say they have kept all the commandments in their youth?

Then he asked the key question, “What more do I need to do?” He comes back to Our Lord, looking, probing, hoping, searching, seeing that there's something else that he needs to do.

Our Lord places before him the astonishing challenge—the astonishing challenge that He places before all the young people today: “If you will be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come follow me” (Matt. 19:21).

The question that the young fellow asks is the question that so many young people have asked themselves on recognizing that something is missing in their lives.

Our Lord, who is so attentive to the slightest movement of souls, is moved at the sight of this clean and restless heart. St. Mark says, “Our Lord looked upon this young man and loved him” (Mark 10:21).

He loved him, He loved his generous heart, and He loved these good questions that he was asking. That steady gaze of Jesus, that penetrating and unforgettable look, is in itself an invitation.

“Christ is inviting the young man to follow him by leaving behind all of his possessions. In other words, the invitation is to empty out his heart so as to fill it with the things of God, to exchange a love of material goods for the love of Christ, to become materially poor but spiritually rich” (Jesus Mundo Indart, Jesus En Su Mondo).

But the young man was not generous; he chose to keep his riches. That's why this story is one of the saddest stories in the whole of the New Testament.

Here is a young person with so much potential, so many years in front of him, so many great things he could accomplish. Possibly Our Lord was thinking that this fellow could be an apostle.

But he chose to keep his riches so that he could go on enjoying those things for a period of years. He lost his opportunity to have Jesus, whom he would have had forever. The rich young man did not expect this answer from the Master.

There's a story about a rich man who knew he was about to die. He'd worked hard all his life, but he had rarely thought about eternal life and Christ's kingdom.

He heard a priest saying recently in a meditation that people generally don't think about eternal life, to challenge people to think about eternal life. All that he remembered from his childhood Religion classes was that there was a fire in hell and golden streets in heaven.

He accepted the fact that he was about to die, but he didn't like the idea of leaving behind him all his hard-earned wealth. He converted all his assets into gold bars. He put them in a big bag on his bed and he lay down on top of it to die. And soon afterwards, he breathed his last.

When he woke up, he was at the gate of heaven, bag in hand. St. Peter met him. With a concerned look on his face, he said, “I see you actually managed to get here with something from Earth, but unfortunately, you can't bring in that bag.”

“Oh, please, sir,” said the man, “I must have it. It means everything to me.”

“Sorry, my friend,” said St. Peter, “if you want to keep that bag, then I'm afraid you'll have to go to, you know, to the other place. You don't want to go there, believe me.”

“Well, I won't part with this bag.”

“Have it your way,” St. Peter said. “But before you go, would you mind if I looked in the bag to see what it is that you're willing to trade eternal life for?”

“Sure,” said the man, “you'll see I could never part with this.”

St. Peter looked at the bag and then, astonished, said to the man, “You're willing to go to hell for pavement?”

When we get to heaven, all the rich, beautiful, wealthy things on this earth will seem like nothing. It's not worth anything, fading away. We have to try and look to the eternal treasures.

Often God's plans don't match with our plans. Our plans can be easily fabricated with our imagination, whereas God's plans have been planned for all eternity.

“I have chosen you out before the foundation of the world” (cf. Eph. 1:4). They are the best plans we could imagine, though at times those plans could upset us.

Upon hearing the words from Jesus, the fellow “went away sad, because he had great possessions” (Matt. 19:22).

Everyone who was there would have seen how he had walked away from that most loving invitation. Possibly later on, the young man might have found all sorts of excuses for his lack of generosity.

We can be reminded that we can become very attached to all sorts of things. We can have an envy, and a jealousy, and an ambitious heart that wants to have things.

One of the things we have to learn to be in this world is to be content with what we have. Thank God for every single material thing you have, even if it's much less than everybody else has, and it's not exactly what you wanted.

It is not an easy thing to be content, but it's a great grace. How many people in the world do you know who are content?

There was a wealthy man who observed and thought a great deal about having enough things and being contented, and also about discontented people.

One day he decided he would try to make some individual perfectly happy and satisfied. So he went to the poorest section of the city. He found a miserably poor widow.

He told her of his plan: that he would take her away from her wretched squalor and give her a nice cottage with a garden. He would provide her with food and clothing; whatever else she needed for her comfort. Of course, she was overjoyed at the offer.

Several months later, the rich man returned to visit this woman in the home he had established for her, expecting to hear words of gratitude and contentment.

Instead, he found that the lady was more wretched than ever. He was a bit perturbed, wondering what had happened.

He asked her and found out that in her new house, her neighbor had a canary which sang very beautifully. But every note of its warbling caused discontent to this woman, simply because she did not have a canary also. She was envious and jealous of her neighbor.

One of the principal causes of our discontentment can be covetousness. Controlling and even eliminating desires for things can nourish contentment.

This young man was condemning himself to a life of discontentment because he was so attached to his possessions.

Those very excuses for his lack of generosity might give him some degree of tranquility some day, some peace of soul, but only a little bit though.

True peace of the soul is always the fruit of self-sacrifice. Maybe he thought he was too young or that he needed more time to consider the matter. But what a missed opportunity!

When it comes to meeting with Our Lord, one ends up either following Him or getting lost.

How many people there are in the world who are lost. They don't know where they're going, they don't know what life is all about. They don't know the passing value and meaning of material things.

Each encounter with Christ is crucial. He never leaves anyone indifferent. The choice is one way or the other.

There may be different moments in our life when Our Lord asks us the very same question that He asked the rich young man. He invites us to “launch out into the deep” (Luke 5:4), to leave everything behind.

We're told the apostles left everything and followed Him (cf. Matt. 19:27). Someday we might acquire great wealth, or we might find that something we have is suddenly worth an awful lot. We might have great valuables, or we might be very attached to certain little things that we have.

That very thing that we don't want to give up will be the very thing that God will ask us for.

Each time that someone receives a loving glance from Our Lord, it’s never forgotten. It becomes impossible to live as before.

A lady in Asia told me once how people who separate, or get divorced, sometimes think they'll go back to being what they were before they got married. But the reality is that they become two halves of a whole.

Joy is the fruit of generosity, of responding fully to the calls that Our Lord makes to each one of us in our state in life. Life becomes full of joy and peace as the result of our complete abandonment to the Will of God, ready to be tested, maybe on a daily basis.

You've probably heard the story of Scrooge, a personality in a Dickens novel. He was the richest man in the city. He had enough money to buy anything the world had to offer. But he wasn't happy. He wasn't at peace.

He lived in fear of losing his money. He had put all his trust in money, so he hoarded it. He was a miser, and as a result, he was miserable.

He couldn't enjoy what he possessed because he was afraid of losing it. He wouldn't spend it because he was afraid he wouldn't get it back.

All material worldly treasures are like that, whether it's money, or position, or beauty, or reputation. All these treasures can be lost. They can be emptied out. They can be stolen or broken. They're inherently unstable.

When we cling to them, when we put our trust in them, we become like Scrooge, tense and angry and oversensitive. Underneath the surface of prosperity, we become miserable.

But Christ is a spiritual treasure. His kingdom is a spiritual everlasting kingdom.

It's worthwhile thinking about eternal life and eternal happiness. Christ became a man so that He could become our friend, a living person in our lives, a living spiritual presence that will never let us down.

When we cling to Him, counting on Him, following Him, when we let Him be the king of our lives, then this world's worries and troubles cannot take away our interior peace.

Scrooge eventually found interior peace and joy when he followed Christ's example, giving his wealth away to help those in need, just as Christ gave Himself to us to be Our Savior.

There are many messages that we can learn, lessons from this rich young man, and many ways that we need to grow to see everything that God has given to us as a gift.

“What have you,” says St. Paul, “that you have not received?” (1 Cor. 4:7). We can be grateful to God for everything.

In Friends of God, St. Josemaría says, “The young man refused to take the hint. The Gospel goes on to say: ‘he went away sad.’ … He lost his happiness because he refused to hand over his freedom to God” (Josemaría Escrivá, Friends of God, Point 24).

If he wasn't ready to use his freedom to follow Christ, our true destiny, then for what use was his freedom anyway?

Sadness can take root in the heart like a poisonous weed when we distance ourselves from Christ, when we deny His call, when we lack generosity.

St. Thomas Aquinas says this spiritual sickness is “a vice caused by a disordered love for oneself” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, Question 28). Selfishness is ugly, focusing on the self, wanting things for me.

We can also grow sad because of poor health, or exhaustion, or pain, because we haven't known how to give these things to God.

This sadness of the heart has its origin in pride, in egoism: behind that aversion from enduring such privations may lurk a steady streak of vanity; behind that physical pain might be hiding a refusal to accept the Will of God; in that discouragement upon seeing one personal fault after another there could be more sorrow for self than sorrow for having offended Christ.

Another spiritual writer says. “If God has pardoned me, if his most merciful love encompasses me, how can I remain sad? If anyone feels his sorrow with anxiety about his guilt for sins committed, that man should know that he is only fooling himself” (Camilo López Pardo, On Life and Death).

Our faults and sins should be a motive for true repentance and a renewal of joyful love.

Our Lord frequently meets us along the pathways of our lives. Sometimes He asks a lot from us. If ever He asks a lot from us, it's because He wants to give us more.

At other times, He looks for little things like the fulfillment of a duty, fidelity to our plan of life, mortification of our imagination, details of refined charity…

It can happen that the Lord will cross our path so as to invite us to follow Him more closely, without leaving our place in the world but with an unconditional surrender of the heart.

St. Josemaría in The Forge says, “We have to learn how to give ourselves, to burn before God like the light placed on a lampstand to give light to those who are in darkness; like the votive lamps that burn by the altar, giving off light till their last drop of oil is consumed“ (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 44).

That's what Our Lord asks of each one of us in the place and state to which He has called us, in the particular and specific vocation that we receive from Him, in this family, in this job, in this marriage.

Vocation is the most important aspect of our life. Once our calling is known, then our vocation should be the business that occupies all our energies. We give everything with the help of divine grace until the end of all our days.

We're told of this rich young man: “he went away sad.” Sadness can cause a lot of harm to the soul. We look for our joy in the act of giving.

He went away sorrowful and we know nothing more about that young man. His whole story ends in disappointment.

He could have been great, but he ended up being a nobody. He didn't want to give his assent, and Our Lord respected his freedom.

He let him go. Our Lord didn't run after him and say, ‘Well, okay, okay, okay, come back, come back, come back, I'll make you another offer. I'll reduce the demands by 10 percent.’

Our Lord let him go, because Our Lord doesn't want half of our heart or 95 percent of our heart. He wants our whole heart.

Our Lord respects his freedom—the freedom that he did not know how to use.

St. Basil says, “The vendor does not become sad that he has to barter the goods he has at fairs to acquire the merchandise he wants; but you become sad at exchanging the chance of eternal life for a handful of dust” (St. Basil, Catena Aurea, Chapter VI).

The rich young man preferred to keep his dust, his wealth, instead of choosing the imperishable gift offered by Christ.

“Like a moth in clothing or a maggot in wood”, the Book of Proverbs says, “sorrow gnaws at the human heart” (Prov. 25:20) and predisposes one to evil. We have to try and react right away if at any time sadness comes to our soul.

In the Book of Sirach it says, “Delight your soul and comfort your heart, and remove sorrow far from you, for sorrow has destroyed many, and there is no profit in it” (Sir 30:23). From this state nothing can be expected but unfortunate consequences.

Because our lives are focused on Christ, it is logical that they would be filled with joy. This is the only true joy in the world, a joy without limit, a joy without end. It is compatible with suffering, with illness, with failure…

Another writer says, “Christian joy excludes and combats sadness in a definitive way. Envy, discouragement, depression are all incompatible with it. One of the fruits of Christian joy is the suppression of these pains, which are so perilous to the spiritual life” (J. M. Perrin, The Gospel of Joy).

There's a lot we can learn from this particular passage. A sorrowful soul is at the mercy of many temptations. How many sins have had their origin in sadness?

When the devil discourages us and brings us down, he can do anything. How many noble ideals have been undone because of sadness?

If at any time we should feel the pull of sadness, we should examine the cause with sincerity in our prayer. We'll find that we are lacking in generosity with God or with others.

“Let the hearts of those that seek the Lord rejoice,” we're told in Scripture (Ps. 105:3). We're told in The Way, “There you have light, to help you discover the reasons for your sadness” (J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 666).

We can ask Our Lady, Cause of Our Joy: Mary, may you win for us the grace to follow Christ ever more closely. Obtain for us the grace that we may never turn our backs on Him, not even in the little things of everyday life.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

VA