The Story of the Rich Young Man
Part One
An earnest spiritual seeker – by all accounts a young man of wealth and high status – comes to Jesus, and says to him: “Teacher, what must I do to have eternal life?”
There is something about his question that betrays the arrogance of youth, with the sense of entitlement and privilege characteristic of someone accustomed to getting their own way. And he’s trying to be clever, too. I don’t mean that he’s not being sincere. There’s no suggestion that he’s just doing it to show off in front of his friends. But there is something about his tone that gives the distinct impression of someone who believes he should be taken seriously, who wants people to think that he knows what he’s talking about, that he’s not just a beginner when it comes to all this spiritual stuff. An entry level question might have been ‘how do I pray?’ or ’how do I live the good life?’ But he doesn’t ask those things; he jumps straight into the advanced syllabus. He clearly thinks he deserves to be counted among the elect. Maybe he is even trying to test Jesus to see if he’s really all he’s cracked up to be.
It’s interesting that he addresses Jesus as ‘good teacher’. Is this meant to be flattery? Is he trying to ingratiate himself, to get into the master’s good books? Or is it a subtle form of condescension, along the lines of ‘do me a favour good sir’? It certainly sounds a bit patronising. Either way, it comes across as an attempt – whether deliberate or not – to assert superiority, to control the narrative, to manipulate the situation to his advantage.
And what is it he wants? Eternal life, no less! But what does that mean? It would seem this is basically a question about how to reach the goal or destination of the spiritual path. Is that heaven? Maybe. But, if so, we would have to ask what that means as well. Either way, we need to unpack this notion of ’eternal life’, which I suspect many of us will assume refers to some sort of post-mortem existence that lasts a very, very long time. Turns out it means the exact opposite.
The word eternal essentially means without duration, which is a bit contradictory because time by definition is duration, a measure of motion through space. The only period of time without duration is the present, which is literally no time at all. In other words, this may not, in fact, be intended as a question about how I can be me for a very, very long time. It’s not necessarily a question about physical immortality at all. Eternity is not simply a very, very long period of time, but that which is eternally so, beyond the passage of time altogether. Eternal life must therefore be that which is outside time and beyond change: permanent, unconditioned, ever-present. Eternity is past and future, beginning and end, alpha and omega, all rolled into one.
In the Bible and, in particular, the Gospel of John, where the phrase ‘eternal life’ occurs nearly as often as in the whole of the rest of the New Testament put together, the term ‘eternal life’ is frequently used to denote life in all its fullness, the fullness of life that is life itself. Eternal life is life with God. It is the perfect knowledge of God that is perfect communion with God. Eternal life is life from the perspective of eternity, suggesting that the deepest reality of what we are is, somehow, the ground of being itself. The notion of eternal or everlasting life is a way of saying that life itself is eternal, it goes on, forever. Because it is what is, ultimately speaking. And what is, what truly is, cannot not be.
Eternal life is not a very long time, but a state that transcends time altogether, and it is very much the goal of the spiritual endeavour. So, the question: ‘what must I do to have eternal life?’ is a question about how to realise that which is ultimately real and true. Eternal life means abiding in the realisation of being itself, ever present, and thus eternal.
This is it. Right now.
But there’s also a little detail in how he asks the question that is quite revealing, a sort of advance warning, if we’re attentive, of the inevitable dénouement to come. “What must I do to have eternal life?” he asks. There’s so much that’s wrong with this question, it’s hard to know where to start. First, there’s the assumption that it is in his power to do anything at all. What must I do, he asks, as if by a simple act of will he can assume divinity. It shows he really has no understanding of what it is he’s actually asking. And then, to make it worse, there is the conceit of asking how he can have – that is, own, possess – eternal life. Spiritual consumerism evidently has a longer history than we might have supposed. But, of course, the fruits of the spiritual life are not something you can ‘have’ but something you have to be. The notion of owning something presupposes an owner, who is separate from the thing owned. This fundamental alienation between subject and object, between the self and the world, is the obstacle that prevents us from experiencing union with God in the fullness of life that is life itself. Wanting to have the life that is God, is the surest way of not getting it. To be one with that which is ultimately real and ultimately true, requires all notions of I, me, and mine to get out of the way.
And yet our sense of self is very much in the driving seat most of the time. And that is why life as we experience it is characterised by limitation, of one sort or another. Not getting what we want. Having to endure what we don’t want. Physical suffering, emotional frustration. This is the human condition. It is characterised by what used to be called ‘sin’, a word that means missing the mark or falling short. Contrary to popular belief, sin is not so much about breaking the rules, as a way of describing the plain facts of human nature. There’s plenty more to say about sin but, for now, the point is that whatever else eternal life might be, it is surely something to do with freedom. We instinctively yearn to be free from the prison of time and our bondage to the past and the future, free of all limitation, in fact, including the ultimate limitation imposed by our mortality. That is why eternity is not anything to do with a very, very long time. It points to a mode of being that is outside time altogether: the eternal, timeless present that is the experience of what we call God.
We instinctively seek to be free from limitation, but we generally seek this freedom in all the wrong places and chiefly by attempting to satisfy our every desire. Everything – technology, the economy, culture – is subsumed to that end. Unfortunately, this path leads not to the satisfaction of desire – which would entail liberation from desire and, therefore, its extinguishing – but the constant stimulation of desire and perpetual slavery to our fickle cravings. Because of the fact that the things we desire have no permanence, we can never gain lasting satisfaction. True liberation is, paradoxically, only achieved through the disciplined sublimation of desire, reordered to an object that endures. And the only object that endures is the rather abstract and nebulous notion of 'God', defined as that which is uncreated and unchanging, or simply ‘eternal life’.
Thus the question the rich young man asks, when he asks about eternal life, is a question about salvation, liberation, the goal of the spiritual path. It is a question, therefore, about how to know God, in that to truly know something is in some sense to be very closely united with it. To be one with God, the way things are, is to be free of limitation.
Jesus responds by first rejecting the compliment of being called ‘good’ – as there can be only one true good – before advising the young seeker to keep the commandments. Note that he doesn’t offer esoteric teachings. He doesn’t initiate him into some secret ritual. Rather, he enjoins upon him the necessity of keeping the universal ethical precepts that apply equally to everyone. In making this his prescription for salvation, Jesus is signalling to the rich young man that there is no special advanced teaching for special advanced people. There is no upgrade that follows from passing the first level. Indeed, there are no levels at all. The everyday teaching and the higher teaching are one and the same. The spiritual life is not something separate from everyday life.
Unfortunately, however, there are plenty of ‘spiritual’ people who think they are special, who think they are more evolved, or tuned to a high vibration or whatever, and who suppose, therefore, that the requirements and conventions of mundane moral precepts are somehow beneath them. This is dangerous nonsense. The ethical dimension of a religious or spiritual tradition is not just for beginners, or an optional extra to be transcended by the more advanced adept. Anyone who thinks like this has not understood the first thing about the spiritual life.
A moral framework is foundational, not just to the spiritual life, but to any kind of life that involves more than one person. A community, any community, is a group of people bound together by a set of ethical precepts held in common. Even criminal gangs have codes of honour. Religion, as the word suggests, is that which binds; it is the basis of social cohesion. Without it, society disintegrates – as we can now plainly see. The discipline of living by a moral code is the foundation of the spiritual life, not just because it binds us into networks of mutual support and accountability, but because the exercise of a moral discipline is precisely the mechanism that brings about the deep inner transformation that is the object of the spiritual path.
Contrary to popular belief, a moral code is not just about obeying rules for the sake of it, it is about being shaped by the story. Conforming to a rule, a measure, is the means by which a person is formed spiritually. That’s the goal. After all, if our spiritual practice does not, in some significant way, change who and what we are in the world and how we behave in relation to the other people with whom we share it, then what’s the point of it?
“Yes, yes, I’ve done all that”, comes the rich young man’s somewhat impatient reply, “now give me the advanced teaching”. However, what Jesus says next is not quite what the young man was hoping to hear.
To be continued…