As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. “Good teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” ^“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother.’ “Teacher,” he declared, “all these I have kept since I was a boy.” Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.   —Mark 10:17-22 NIV

I had my fifteen minutes of fame as an academically trained “classical” composer in the 1990s: a piano trio (piano, violin, and cello) commissioned by a regional ensemble made it onto their popular CD of Christmas music on a well-known classical label. (I’m told the area public radio station still plays my piece every December.) A celebrated New York City choral group performed a piece of mine for choir and strings that had been commissioned by another ensemble the year before. (This was the performance that got my name into the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine; when I cautioned an excited friend that it was only in the calendar listings, he replied, “Scott, it’s the New York Times! That’s like saying, ‘I’m in the Old Testament, but it’s only the Book of Numbers’!”) I won a middling-prestigious prize and was awarded an Artist Fellowship by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. A combination that enabled me to give up temping for a year and fulfill some under-funded commissions. 

But these successes did not give my career the kick-start it needed; the world never beat a path to my door. Nevertheless, I persisted. For decades after classmates had either gone on to stable musical careers or gone into other fields, I continued to photocopy, bind, and mail scores (an expensive and time-consuming undertaking in those pre-PDF days) to every competition and call-for-scores that came across my radar. 

It got to be an addiction, costly in time, money, and emotional stability. Each time I was on the verge of not entering a contest, I’d think, “But what if this is the one I would have won?” As my 35^th birthday loomed—that young, “emerging” composers’ deadline that swept opportunities away like the Berezina River swept away Napoleon’s army—I became frantic, obsessed with winning something before the brutal up-or-out force of that overpopulated field shoved me forever into impenetrable obscurity. 

I’ve never had a barrel of money, but I’ve had an addiction. If Jesus had demanded of me what he demanded of the rich young man, the lifestyle I’d have had to adopt would have been familiar to me from my couch-surfing youth. And yes, I’m aware that people have been trying to explain away this passage since before the ink was dry. But I believe Jesus would have told me to burn my scores, toss my calendar, and follow him because that would have been as much a sacrifice for me as all his wealth was for the rich young man—maybe more since my music was the offspring of my own soul.

I fear that as long as we keep teaching this story as “The Rich Young Man,” it will fail to land. Few consider themselves rich, and those who do often engage in mental origami to “spiritualize” the story, effectively defanging it. This story is about idolatry: clinging to something—anything—from which we expect to gain well-being that Jesus isn’t already offering.

This is what Jesus says to those of us who are attached to wealth, prestige, the form of relationships, making the team, getting cast in the play, or anything else, and believe our happiness is impossible without that thing:

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life. —Matthew 19:29, NIV

To those of us who are certain that if we surrender to God and allow God to swap out the life we have made for the eternal life Jesus offers, we will be the losers, he says,

Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. —John 12:24, NIV

When will we finally come to understand that God is on our side?

Your Father knows what you need before you ask him…But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. —Matthew 6:8, 33, NIV

Jesus demands of each of us that to which we are most attached. It’s a demand not made out of cruelty or exclusionism or spiritual elitism, but out of love to free us from the chains of the things we cling to.