01.01. Misgiving
THE QUESTION OF MISGIVING ‘What lack I yet?’
Most people would have envied the man who put this question to Jesus. He seemed to havie everything that heart could wish. He had youth, which means hope and inspiration and an unknown inheritance in the future. He had social position, which usually tends to satisfaction with one’s self. He had wealth, which attaches the soul so powerfully because it is on the borderland, as it were, of the material and the spiritual — not bad, if not good, but a permanent possibility of dong and of enjoying most things that men wish to enjoy or to do. He had character, too, which was better than all: he could hear the commandments recited by Jesus with no qualms of conscience. Neither rank nor wealth nor youthful passions had hurried him into any of those excesses which can never be forgotten, and which make memory a curse. But in spite of this extraordinary happiness, in spite even of his good conscience, his soul was not at rest. He felt that something was wanting; he could not say he had eternal life, and it was a divine prompting that brought him to Jesus with the question, "What lack I yet?" No situation is commoner in the Church than that of this man. There are hundreds and thousands who have been brought up in Christian homes, and recognise more or less their own likeness in him. They, too, have kept the commandments all their life. There is no great stain upon their conscience that makes them hopelessly miserable. If they have not rank or wealth, at all events they know that it is not rank or wealth that would make any difference to them. They have been, as a rule, pure, truthful, kind, respectful to their parents, considerate of the rights of others, reverent to the law of God; but they are not satisfied. They know that at the very heart they are not right. They have religion, of a kind, but it is not the religion of the New Testament. They do not take it with rapture. The characteristic note of New Testament religion — its assurance, its confidence, its joy in a life which leaves nothing to be desired — is the very one which their voice does not command. They are perpetually asking, "What lack I yet?"
Jesus answers the question with the utmost plainness. But the answer was in more than words. "Fastening His eyes on him. He loved him." He appreciated all the good there was in the man, and still more his wistful inquiry after a more perfect good. Christ and a young man, as Samuel Rutherford said, is a meeting not to be seen in every town, but it is a grateful meeting to the Lord. No one can be surer of Christ’s interest and sympathy than one who comes with such a record as this ruler’s to put the same question of misgiving. If there must be something peculiarly trying in the answer, Christ will flash His love into the heart before he speaks, that the questioner may know that the exacting words do not come at random or from want of feeling, but are inspired by a genuine care for his soul. But after the loving glance Jesus did speak, and that with all gravity. He did not pooh-pooh the man’s misgivings, as unwise friends sometimes do. He did not say, ’This uneasiness of yours is morbid: it is an unwholesome mood which you ought not to indulge. Accept the responsibilities and the advantages of the position which God has given you, and do not worry or mope about ideals and impossibilities. Nobody can be more perfect than his nature and his place allow him to be; and it is a mistake to nurse what are really spiritual ambitions which forget what man is.’ On the contrary, with His earnest, loving look fixed on the man, Jesus answered: "One thing thou lackest Go thy way, sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow Me."
There is no understanding this answer until we see that the pith of it lies in the last words, and that those which precede are only conditional. When Jesus says Follow Me, He implies that He has what the ruler lacks, and that the misgiving which troubled the ruler’s soul was one which He, and only He, could overcome. This is the constant attitude of our Lord toward men; it is in this that we feel, first and last, how He is the Lord, and is conscious of being so. He stands over-against the world, and He knows that He has what all men need, and has it in such fulness that all men can obtain it from Him. This is the ultimate proof of His divinity, this is the infallible sign that He is Saviour: He can do for men, and for all men, what all men need to have done; He can give to men, and to all men, what all men need to receive; in His company, misgivings die, for He is the Author of perfection, of eternal life, to those who receive Him. There were men present when Jesus spoke who could certify that that was so. Peter was there, who had cried not long before, "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast words of eternal life.” John was there, who wrote long after, “God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.” This was what the ruler lacked, and it was to be had nowhere but in Jesus. Only through Him, through His words, through His revelation of the Father, through His coming death, through the Spirit which those who were His should receive, could he enter into a life in which misgiving should be no more. To sell all that he had and to give to the poor was for him, in the circumstances of the time, and with his moral constitution, the one condition on which it was possible to follow Jesus into eternal life. Jesus, in short, asked him to do what the twelve had done: "Lo, we have left all, and followed Thee,” — at the same cost he should have the same reward.
Yet, although this is so, great emphasis is undoubtedly laid upon the preliminary condition: “Sell all that thou hast.” Eternal life is not only the free gift of God in Jesus Christ; it has to be purchased with a great renunciation by every one who enters into it. He who lives in it, with a life from which misgiving has vanished, can not only say, as Paul said of his Roman citizenship, “I was free born,” but also what Claudius Lysias said of his, “With a great sum obtained I this freedom.” To put the same truth in another way, salvation is not only a gift, but a calling. Perhaps among Protestants it has been presented too exclusively as a gift. Men have been conceived as sinners simpliciter — as defeated, disgraced, doomed, in despair; eternal life for such must be a gift as pure and simple. But it is possible to conceive men also as seekers and aspirants. It is possible to find men in whom the inner life is characterised not by the sense of guilt, but rather by that of deficiency: whose souls do not cry with St. Paul, "O wretched man that I am who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" but rather question gravely with this ruler, "What lack I yet?" To these last salvation is a calling. Follow me is the sound of a trumpet. It is an appeal to those who are capable of great actions: who are brave enough, honest enough, earnest enough, to renounce everything, to pierce through everything, that they may win Christ. If they can find it in their hearts to count the cost and pay, they enter into the life which is life indeed. And they have no misgivings as to whether they are saved by grace. None are readier than they to confess what they owe to Christ. None are readier than they to utter John’s confession: “God hath given unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.” But the price has to be paid, and often it is staggering. It has to be paid by every one. "If thou wouldest be perfect . . .follow Me": Christ says that to us all, but between the two parts of the sentence comes the condition which must be fulfilled before we can follow Him, and enter into life. It will vary in different men, but it would be very extraordinary if it were not, in many, connected with money. There is nothing, for reasons already suggested, with which so many spiritual perils are associated. There is nothing to the advantages of which we are more keenly alive, to the risks of which we are naturally so blind. Does anybody really believe that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God? Does any one realise the deceitfulness of the heart implied in a remark of St. Francis of Sales, that in all his experience as a confessor no one had ever confessed to him the sin of covetousness ? If there is anything in the teaching of Jesus, we may be sure that voluntary poverty—the deliberate renunciation of possessions—is the strait gate through which alone multitudes can enter into the Kingdom of God. Self-scrutiny would often reveal that the one thing an otherwise good character lacks is to be made right with God in this particular: to resign a source of income that He could not approve, to arrest a self-indulgent expenditure, and replace it by an unselfish spending for a good greater than our own; to bring money, in a word, under law to Christ. And when we look at society as a whole, the one conspicuous feature is, not simply the power of money, but the power of money organised and entrenched against the Kingdom of God. The vested interests of iniquity are the most gigantic social forces among which we live.
It is easy to protest against such ideas, and one can easily imagine the disciples themselves protesting. It was seldom they had the chance of enlisting such a recruit as this respectable proprietor, and they were certainly astonished, and probably disconcerted, at the exacting terms of discipleship proposed to him by Jesus. Many share their astonishment, and criticise the incident in the spirit of Strauss, who thinks that Jesus in His teaching fails to do justice to the instinct of accumulation. Jesus had no right, such persons say, to make the demand He did. God gave the ruler his property, not to squander it on so-called charity any more than on self-indulgence, but to administer it in His service. It is enough to reply that of this the ruler was the best judge, and his conscience sided with Jesus. Certainly, at the first hearing, the words startled him; one of the evangelists notices his sudden change of countenance; but he went away sorrowful. Not angry, as he would have been if the demand of Jesus had been a mere impertinence; but sorrowful, because he felt that Jesus had touched the secret infirmity of his character, and that he had not courage to face the cure. Could anything be more melancholy than to see a man whom Jesus loved, a man with a yearning after eternal life, drop his eyes under that loving, searching glance, and go away sorrowful — go away, although he wished to stay; go away, because he loved money better than the life of God; go away, with a more poignant ache in his heart than when he came to the Great Physician? It is one of the saddest things in the gospel, and how much sadder when we think of the look with which Jesus followed him — a man who, when it came to the point, counted himself unworthy of eternal life.
Let his very sorrow speak to us in Christ’s name. It is the only experience in such cases. No one is ever glad that he has turned his back on Jesus. The things we prefer to Him lose their value the instant they are so preferred. The possessions of the ruler would never again be to him what they had been. The brightest sun that ever shone would never lift from his fields the cold shadow of that great refusal. He knew now what he lacked and how much it was. And if we want a companion picture to inspire, as this to awe us, let us look at St. Paul as he writes to the Philippians: "Howbeit what things were gain to me, these have I counted loss for Christ. Yea verily, and I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may gain Christ, and be found in Him.” That is the life in which there is no misgiving more — the life that only God can give, in Jesus Christ His Son; the life, too, that every one has to buy, at the cost even of his money.