A reflection for Monday of the 20th Week in Ordinary Time.
The rich young man comes to Jesus with a sincere question: “What good must I do to gain eternal life?”
He seems earnest. He has kept the commandments. He wants to go further. And yet when Jesus touches the one thing he cannot imagine surrendering, the young man walks away sad.
That sadness has always stayed with me.
It is easy to read this Gospel as a warning about money, and certainly it is that. Wealth can give us the illusion of security and make dependence on God feel unnecessary. But I think the deeper question is broader: What is the thing I cannot bear to lose?
For one person, it may be money. For another, reputation. Control. Comfort. A relationship. A plan for the future. The approval of others. Even a certain image of what a faithful life is supposed to look like.
We can obey God in many areas and still quietly say, “But not this.”
The first reading from Ezekiel is much harder to sit with. Ezekiel is told that his wife, “the delight of his eyes,” will die, and even his mourning becomes part of the prophetic message he must carry. It is a severe and painful passage, and I would never want to reduce personal grief to a tidy spiritual lesson.
But placed beside the Gospel, it makes me think about attachment in a different way.
Love itself is not the problem. The people and gifts God gives us are meant to be cherished. The danger comes when a gift becomes something we cannot imagine entrusting back to the Giver.
That is where faith becomes costly.
I know how easily my heart reaches for control. I want to love God, but I also want reassurance that the people I love will be safe, that the future will unfold in a recognizable way, that the things I treasure will remain in my hands.
The Gospel reminds me that discipleship eventually reaches those places.
Jesus looks at the rich young man and asks him for freedom. Not because possessions are evil, but because they have become the boundary of his trust.
And the young man leaves sad.
Perhaps one of the most important questions in prayer is not simply, “What do I love?” but, “What do I fear losing so much that I struggle to place it in God’s hands?”
That question can reveal a great deal.
The answer is not to become detached in the sense of becoming cold or indifferent. Christian surrender is not lovelessness. It is learning to receive every gift with gratitude while remembering that God himself is our deepest security.
This kind of surrender rarely happens all at once. Often it begins with a small prayer:
Lord, I love this deeply.
I am afraid to lose it.
Teach me to hold it without clinging.
Teach me to trust you more than I trust what I can keep.
The rich young man went away sad because he could not yet imagine that what Jesus offered was greater than what he was being asked to surrender.
That is the question placed before us too.
Do I trust that Christ is still enough when he asks me to loosen my grip?