28th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Proper 23), Year B

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.
~Mark 10:17-19
 
Do you ever find yourself in conversations in which you feel you are talking past each other? The rich man walks up to Jesus and asks him a question about salvation…or about self-justification. And Jesus seems to fixate on a single word: Why do you call me good? Who is good, but God?
 
Job seems to be good. At least he is blameless. He sticks to his claim that his suffering is not justified. It has not been earned. He is, to use the biblical sense of the word, “righteous.”.It is not the result of some sin or failure on his part. And, according to the story, he appears to be right, or, to use a biblical word, “righteous.” Mark’s rich man may be as well. And it appears—at least for Job, and the rich man too—not really to matter or, at least, not to be the main point. Job laments. “[His] complaint is bitter” (Job 23:2).The rich man, when confronted with a life-shifting challenge “went away grieving.”
 
Maybe Jesus has a point. Maybe our (relative) goodness—as hard as we try to maintain it—isn’t the main thing, in suffering or in salvation. There is a turn to be made here, a discovery or recovery that holds out hope for our ultimate well-being and wholeness. Can we find it together in these times?
 
Enter into worship.
 
Readings: Job 23:1-9, 16-17 † Psalm 22:1-15 † Hebrews 4:12-16 † Mark 10:17-31
 
 
About the Art: Repin, Ilʹi︠a︡ Efimovich, 1844-1930. Job and His Friends, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57620 [retrieved October 8, 2024]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Job_and_his_friends.jpg.

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