NOTES for Mat 19:24

The dialogue between Christ and the rich young man is one of the best-known passages in the New Testament. It stirs strong emotions in most people, because we instantly become afraid that such a call may be addressed to us too, and that fulfilling it will be as difficult for us as it was for this young man. No logic works at that moment. It is pointless to explain that this call is not addressed to everyone, since in that case ideally there would simply be no one left to buy the property everyone was selling. It is pointless to recall that the Lord Himself says that the one who follows this path gains incomparably more than he loses. Fear of parting with possession seizes us to the tips of our fingers. We so stubbornly see in property the source of our being and dignity...

This is exactly what the people of Israel experienced after leaving Egypt. Slavery guaranteed a "minimum subsistence," and therefore it proved more desirable than such difficult freedom. We too remember cheap sausage, if we are old enough to have encountered it, not because it was good, for it was remarkably bad, but because it was a ghost of reliability, when one could quietly vegetate in a tiny burrow and not labor to trust God.

This is why Christ's call is so important for us. Even if He is not calling you personally at this very moment to sell your property, this is still a call to you. A slave differs from a free person in that he cannot part with the one who enslaves him. If you cannot part with the ghost of security, with the possession of property, then you are its slave, that is all. So before us is a particular case of the call to freedom in Christ that sounds throughout the whole Gospel.