The Rich Man's Choice

SPELUNKING

How many here are familiar with the practice of exploring caves or spelunking? How many of you have ever gone spelunking? How many enjoy just saying the word spelunking? It’s like the sound water makes when it drops in a bucket… spelunking. It’s a fun word! And it’s an even more fun activity. Because exploring a cave is like exploring a whole other world. And the wonderful thing about living in America is there are so many great caves you can explore – without any experience or expertise: Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Ruby Falls in Tennessee, and Cave of the Winds in Colorado Springs. There are great caves all over the place! And each has its own unique natural beauty.

Exploring caves like these is a lot of fun, but sometimes you want something a little more challenging, a little more off the beaten path, maybe a little more risky. Now, climbing into a dark, relatively unexplored hole might not be your idea of a good time. And you might be wondering why anyone would do this. Which is OK! In fact, just yesterday I was telling Bill about the time I went bungee jumping at “the bridge to nowhere” outside of L.A. and he asked me, “Why?!” and I suddenly realized that most sane people do things for reasons, a philosophy that honestly hasn’t always informed my behavior.

But for me, exploring the unknown is the reason, and early in our marriage I shared with Marcia how I had always wanted to go cave diving, and so she surprised me on my 22nd birthday with an overnight trip to a relatively unknown cave system with a group of like-minded students from UNI. I know what you’re thinking, this sounds like the set-up to a horror movie. Well, we arrived at the cave early on a Saturday morning and began exploring. This particular cave system was one with plenty of twists and turns, and forks, and even drop offs, and supposedly not all of the different tunnels had been explored. As we descended, we were greeted with beautiful, natural galleries and halls connected with tunnels of all different shapes and sizes. And at one point, we decided to go down a particularly narrow tunnel which kept getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller, to the point where we were basically forced to army crawl at certain places to make it through.

Now keep in mind, I was about 50 lbs. lighter than I am know. But at one point the tunnel made what I can only describe as two L’s facing opposite ways, but with their short end meeting, like a Z with its crossbar straightened out so that it’s perpendicular to the top and bottom, like this [motions]. It basically did that, and if you know anything about human anatomy, our bodies aren’t used to bending that way. Well, I was in the middle of a line of about 8 people, and the first 4 went through fine, so when it was my term, do you know what happened? I got stuck! With my head and arms sort of twisted to the side and hanging down, I couldn’t move forward or back, and we were what felt like a mile into this thing. How would anyone be able to get me out if I needed to be rescued? I had never felt claustrophobic before, but I certainly felt it then and I even feel it a little now just thinking about it! Well with enough freaked-out perspiration and wrangling we were finally able to unwedge me and get me through… only to realize we were going to have to figure out how to get me back out the other way again!

WHAT IS TRULY GOOD

I was crammed in a tight space, and it would have certainly helped if I had prepared for the trip by giving something up that was dear to me ahead of time – the comfort of delicious food. And it’s giving up that which brings us comfort, what we may even think we need, that our passage is really about this morning.

It begins with vv. 17-18 where we read, “As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.’”(1)

We don’t really know where Jesus was going or even the exact sequence of events that led up to this conversation. It may have been early or late in Jesus’ ministry, but what we do know is that this man seems desperate. He sees Jesus from a distance, immediately recognizes him as the Rabbi whose powerful teaching and miracles has brought crowds from miles around and he drops to his feet. We don’t even really know this man’s motives. It may be that he wanted to follow Jesus as a disciple, or that he truly desired to learn the secret to eternal life, or… as we are about to see, he may have wanted confirmation that he already was righteous, that there was nothing he needed to change. It may just be that he wanted to be vindicated for the way of life he had already chosen.