Only very recently I have started to do weddings, and I’ve been very lucky that the three wedding couples I have been meeting with are such wonderful couples, who are ready to leave the life of being two individuals and step, in the presence of God, into a new single shared life. 

So, I have to completely imagine the marriage conversation in which as we are talking about marriage and the love, trust and loyalty that are so important that one of the couple says to the other: ‘So, what would be the minimum for me to keep this marriage going?’

And rightly, the other person would be offended. It is not only unromantic, it completely misses the point of marriage. Marriage means to enter a new life together as husband and wife, for better, for worse, in good and bad times, in sickness and in health, till death us do part. It means to let go of all Plan B’s and C’s that we may have and solely devote ourselves to this one person, and to stick with them not only when things are easy but also when things are hard. Because a relationship, and especially marriage, is not a to-do-list. To say, ‘how do I do enough to get all I want’ is missing the point that marriage is not a transaction, an economic agreement, but about an active relationship of love. Even though it is good and beneficial for us, if marriage always needs to be beneficial to us individually, we have missed the point of what love, marriage, a relationship is.

It is something like this that is happening in our Gospel reading about the rich young man who comes to Jesus and asks, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’

It’s a good question, but it is also a question that completely misses the point.

The whole Bible is the story of the God who loves the people who He has made, so much that even when they turn away from Him he keeps on sending prophets to tell people what He is like. And when people refuse to listen to the prophets, John 3:16 says, God so loved the world that He sent His only Son Jesus Christ, so that we may have eternal life.

The whole Bible is telling the story of the God who made us, who loves us, and who longs to be in an active, living relationship with us.

And then the rich young man comes to Jesus, and asks what he must to do to inherit eternal life. What is the minimum I need to do to get all I want and need out of my relationship with God? How much do I need to do to get to heaven?

Notice especially the three following things in this story:

• Notice that this young man is the only one in the whole New Testament who addresses Jesus as Good Teacher, which may explain Jesus’ puzzling response that only God is Good. Because of course, Jesus is God. But perhaps Jesus is emphasising that admitting he is a supreme teacher of morality is not enough, but to see Him as good must also lead to acknowledge Him as the Son of God.
• Notice also that the commandments quoted in this passage are negative ones, with the exception of honouring your father and mother. They are things not to do, they describe essentially someone who is a decent bloke, what we might call a good person. But again, to draw once again from the analogy of marriage: Do we want our spouse to be a decent spouse who doesn’t cheat on us or do we want our spouse to be actively in love with us? Does God intend us to be decent people or to live actively in a loving relationship with Him and with those around us?
• And notice the detail that as the rich young man says that he has kept all these laws, it says that Jesus ‘looking at him, loved him’. In Jesus we see that love of God that longs for a response from us. Jesus is challenging the rich young man because He loves him and because he longs for the rich young man to enter into a relationship with Him, to love and follow Jesus himself, and not just his moral teachings.

So, Jesus challenges the rich young man. Give up all you have, give up all those comfortable things and wealth that make it so much easier to be a decent bloke, and come and follow me.

The rich young man was a lovely man, and chances are that he was morally a far better man than most of us. But he was not prepared to give up his plan B and plan C. He was not prepared to give up everything He had and to rely solely on God.

When the living God tells us he loves us and wants to enter into a relationship with us, do we say ‘yes’ to God and do we let that relationship change our life or do we keep God at arms-length because we don’t want to give up plan B and we don’t want our lives to change? 

I remember when I just began exploring my call to become a vicar, I went for a week on a silent retreat in a monastery in Belgium, which was just three weeks before I would marry Rosemarie. And I remember going on that retreat and worrying, what if God speaks very strongly to me to give up my marriage and to live solely for him, maybe as a hermit somewhere? No doubt the immature thoughts of someone in his early 20s, but this feeling of fear of what we might be called to give up, or what we might be called to give – is what stops the rich young man from following Jesus, and is what may hold us back from entering in a relationship with the living God more fully, and experience his love in a deeper sense. 

If you take anything away today, may it be that God loves you and me deeply and longs for us to respond to his love. To love him.

The great theologian of the last century, Karl Barth, was asked towards the end of his life whether he could summarise all his work and theology in one line. And he said, it can all be summed up in the song my mum sung to me when I was sitting on her lap: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so?’

It is an indication of the depth and intimacy of the relationship God wants with us that the Bible constantly speaks of it with the two deepest experiences of love that we know. That between a parent and a child and that in marriage. 

And as we come in that relationship of love with God, he brings us in relationship also with the Church, and as a church we become members, brothers and sisters, of the same family. We may not always like all our siblings, but they remain family nonetheless! So please do stay for a cup of coffee or tea after the service to get to know and meet the members of your family, maybe especially those that you don’t know very well.

God shows us what love is in Jesus dying for us on the cross, and longs for us to accept His love and to live in that love and to share that love, God’s love, with others. May we be a community that does just that.

Amen.