“If you wish to be perfect, go sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” (Mt 19, 21)
This was the reply of Christ to that young man who, despite being faithful to God’s commandments, still felt something was missing for him to gain eternal life, that is, the perfection of man, the fullness of his humanity.
We know what the reaction of the rich young man was. “He went away sad, for he had many possessions.” (Mt 19, 22) What a pity that this young man failed to understand what Christ was proposing to him! What a missed opportunity he had! It was already Christ who gave him the clearest and surest answer to his question.
But his attachment to his many possessions blinded him from the truth of the highest order that Christ himself told him. It is this attachment that we should be most wary of, because it can truly lead us to the worst of what is now known as cognitive distortion.
In fact, Christ himself lamented against this crazy tendency of ours that would lead us to stick to things that perish in exchange for what will last forever and will bring us to our eternal life. “It is easier for a camel,” he said, “to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God.” (Mt 19, 24)
Yes, like the rich young man, we may be following the general indications of God’s will as expressed in the commandments. But we have to understand that this obedience to God’s commandments that specify what is naturally good for us, still needs to be perfected with our total self-giving to God which is shown also in our self-giving to others.
Such total self-giving to God and to others is when we start entering the supernatural character that our life is supposed to have, since we are the very image and likeness of God, children of his, meant to share in God’s very life that obviously is supernatural.
We are not meant to live a purely natural life. There is no such thing. Our nature opens us to make a choice between a supernatural life with God or an infranatural life. But make no mistake. Our supernatural life with God does not eliminate or suppress what is natural in us. What it does is to purify and elevate to the supernatural order what is natural in us.
And so we can say that what Christ meant when he told the young man about selling everything and giving everything to the poor and then to follow him is that we of course should have things or possessions for the simple reason that we always need things. But we just have to make sure that we are completely detached from these things.
That complete detachment is not just a matter of emptying ourselves completely. That detachment and self-emptying should lead us to be completely filled with love for God and for the others. In other words, the acquisition, use and enjoyment of things in this life should be a function of our love and total self-giving to God and to the others.
That part of Christ’s reply about giving everything to the poor precisely refers to our love and self-giving to the poor. That’s because our love for God always involves our love for the others who can be described as poor since they will always be in need of God. Christian poverty has nothing to do with emptiness and nothingness, but rather with filling ourselves with God.
It’s when we manage to live this kind of poverty that we actually would be enriched and perfected, as we make ourselves truly identified with Christ, turning ourselves as God’s image and likeness which is what God wants us to be./PN
