There are standard notions abroad about the story of The Rich Young Ruler. Actually, it is hard to call all such notions "standard" since the story is recounted differently in each of the synoptic gospels--even the phrase "rich young ruler" has to be pasted together from an amalgamation of the accounts. However, there are a few notions about this story that we can expect to encounter (and we can expect them on account of the agendas of the speakers) that are notions important to an overall understanding of Jesus' teachings.
First, as one would expect to hear from "faith alone" ideologues, there is the notion that the part about "selling all you have, and giving to the poor" is merely about the saved person storing up additional merit in heaven. This is insupportable. Each of the accounts begins with the man asking about obtaining "eternal life," and each of the accounts ends with the disciples, as regards the stumbling-block of wealth, asking, "Who, then, can be saved?" The story is about what the man needs to do to save his soul from damnation--and neither Jesus' answers nor the crestfallen departure of the man give any warrant to conclude that the stakes are any less dire.
It should be noted that ''faith alone" Protestantism is not alone in squirming away from the plain meaning of the story--both mainline Protestantism and Catholicism will exert themselves to the effect that renunciation of wealth is not a requirement of salvation. Of course, both the simple architecture of the story and the undeniable architecture of Jesus' universal requirement of his followers (unsurprisingly, to "follow Jesus") would seem to necessitate a default predisposition and a default process among believers of leaving wealth behind. (Although a definite and final renunciation might not seem to be required--though we will visit again later the prospect of what "seems" to be required.)
A certain "deeper" meaning to the story is kicked about in this interpretive process by the theologians. This is the meaning of Jesus asking in regard to being hailed as "good teacher," "Why do you call me good," or "Why do you ask me about what is good?" Jesus' follow-up statement that "There is but One who is good, that is, God," is unsettling to many interpreters, and I have known it to be said that it is dishonorable to Jesus to see him as a trick-player, especially when confronted by such a direct request as this from the man in question. It would seem unfair that Jesus does not simply say to the man, "You are making of me a request that one might make only of God, and you need to understand that it is God who stands before you in the flesh."
Unfortunately, the indignant defense of Jesus as not being a trick-player is a great misapplication of thought. To say that a Jesus who warns his disciples against "the yeast of the Pharisees and the Sadducees" is a Jesus who does not play tricks is, at best, a statement the boils down to a quibble about the word "tricks." The Jesus who asks Philip, when there are a good five thousand people to be fed, where the disciples are to buy food for them (and the text of John itself says that Jesus asks this as a test of Philip), is a Jesus who is not reluctant to mess with his followers.
So the story of The Rich Young Ruler (for want of a better name) is a story about salvation versus damnation, and the story involves a person who asks a question of Jesus and gets a puzzling answer that ends with a harrowing requirement. I say "harrowing" because it has occurred to me that, firstly, realizing that the story is about salvation rather than post-salvation (or para-salvation) merit, and, secondly, realizing that Jesus routinely sets about with--numerous, actually--tacks of flummoxing questions, are two realizations that must be set aside promptly in delving to the substance of the story. The substance of the story has to do with trusting and testing, and here--and in the broader scope of Jesus' teaching--the notions of "trust" and "test" will leap out when the text is confronted forthrightly.
The harrowing requirement that Jesus has of The Rich Young Ruler is no different from what he requires of us. The depth and breadth of this requirement of all of us is no less (and more manifold) than Jesus' instruction of the man to sell all he had--because this effectual divestment was implicit in the requirement to follow Jesus. And the presumption that he was going to follow Jesus--even if Jesus had not said, "Follow me"--was present in the man's very realization that he had to go to Jesus for instruction. Jesus was not laying out an individualized plan of salvation (much less of "Christian growth") for the man--Jesus was spreading out a portion of the anatomy of salvation itself. The rest of the gospels are a veritable tapestry of the innumerable aspects of life from which we must divest ourselves.
And yet, of course, we are scarcely able to act in the all-encompassing trust that should characterize a follower of Jesus. The man in the story wanted to be a follower of Jesus, and while it might not be important that he is once called "young," and while it might not be crucial that he is once called "ruler" or "aristocrat," nonetheless both of these notions are attached to the fact of his being rich. The rich had cause in those days to expect to outlive the bulk of the poor, and to have holdings was--as the power structures of the time presumed--to be effectively a member of the nobility, and infused with the powers thereof. The interpreters are quick to opine on The Rich Young Ruler's motivations (the better to be able to claim that Jesus' responses were limited to being therapeutics for his certain case), but unsurprisingly the interpreters seem to have little concern for the breadth of Jesus' requirements of the man. Jesus was not simply asking the man to do without wealth--Jesus was asking the man to undergo the test of trust.
To have given away his wealth would not have put the man simply in a condition of want or risk of want. To have given away his wealth would have put the man at risk of innumerable hazards of the day--violent robbery (even of what little he had or was thought to have), indiscriminate violence (scarcely punished with any regularity when the poor were thus victimized), liability to false accusation of crime, imprisonment for debt, exposure to disease or occupational hazard, to name a few. And this particular man would have perhaps borne the additional risk of the inevitable usurpers of his temporal power fearing he might wish to regain it. And this particular man would have perhaps feared simply making a fool of himself by giving up his wealth (and influence) for a religious cause.
Jesus was not merely asking the man to give up some things. Jesus was asking the man to take on a life of incalculable burdens--and to give up the avocation (to which we are all drawn) of trying to calculate what burdens we will face, what risks we will endure. Jesus was asking the man to undergo the test of trust, and that is neither more nor less than what is required of us all. Exposure to the story of this man's particular case, and exposure to how it has been interpreted through the ages, can make plain the ways in which we are most prone to squirm away from charges laid upon us by Jesus.
The pairs of disciples sent out by Jesus were directed toward the occupation of trusting. They were sent out to find houses of good repute, and to stay in them however they turned out. They were sent into villages and towns to which they might finally extend blessing or condemnation. They were not--as a matter for our consumption--told how to do any of this. They were sent out to risk. They were sent out to test circumstances. They were sent out to be tested.
With the notion of risk central to what is required of us, it is therefore unsurprising that Jesus counsels us against unnecessary risk. Careless talk is an unnecessary risk. Condemnation of one's fellows is an unnecessary risk. Reliance on a store of good works is an unnecessary risk. Procrastination against any presumption of time or opportunities is an unnecessary risk--against all of these things Jesus warns us. What is more, Jesus makes plain that even the business of attempting to understand our plight or our place in the order of things is a business of unnecessary risk. Jesus tells us that we don't know where we come from--as the wind--and we don't know where we are going--as the wind.
When we see our existence as an existence of trusting and testing, then we open the Gospels and see Jesus putting his disciples through things that we must strive to embrace themselves. John opens with Jesus bemused by his followers' misapprehension that they understood things, and John closes with Jesus chagrined by his followers' misapprehension that they understood things. In this vein we can begin to understand the vanity and the tragedy of the last two thousand years.
Christianity has seized upon a notion of understanding what Eden was like, and aims to get there in the future on top of a Babel-tower of presumptions. On the other hand, the follower of Jesus and of the Gospels, shot through with admonitions about trust and risk, finds the Eden-path receding into the mists of the past and is willing to dare the shedding of all that humanity has collected to itself, shedding all of it in order to return we know not where. We are simply to ask, and to trust that the answer is in the asking.
Christianity has seized upon a vision of the narrow gate, as an all-but-impossible entry to find--an entry seen as within a wilderness of false paths. On the other hand, the follower of Jesus and of the Gospels finds that straying is a matter of trying to go somewhere. As tendrils of the Maker's vine, the followers of Jesus reach out in a course that is definite until it is not, making way this way and that, more defined by the supportive strength of the vine than by the substance of any destination. We are simply to seek, and to trust that the answer is in the seeking.
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