Rosemary Theobald, a member of St Mary’s R C Church, comments on Mark 10 v 17 - 21:

As with last week’s passage, we need to read these teachings of Jesus through a lens which matches the heart of Jesus, a heart of love. Mark, the Gospel writer, says as much: “Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him”. This was in response to the wealthy young man’s putting a question to Jesus: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

He knows that he has kept all the rules and wants to know if there is anything more he needs to do. Jesus reads his heart and chooses the one thing that the young man will find really difficult – to think about the needs of the poor people he would see all around him if he opened his eyes. The young man walks away and Jesus uses the incident to give a teaching.

Jesus recognises how hard it is for us relatively wealthy people to live in right relationship with the demands of the Kingdom, particularly with regard to money.

Peter is always the one to voice the concern of the other disciples: “What about us? We have left everything to follow you”. Again, those compassionate eyes look steadily at him, and he gets the reassuring reply that no-one who has left house, brothers, sisters, father, children, or land for my sake and the sake of the Gospel who will not be repaid a hundred times over – in this life and the next.

Then, on the subject of persecution, he begins to outline for them what he knows will eventually happen to him; that he will be arrested and put to death. It is the fate of all the prophets, and Jesus is no exception.

Remember, a prophet is not a soothsayer, predicting the future, but one who ‘speaks out’, usually with something which challenges the status quo, something the powerful do not want to hear, and therefore, as Jesus knows, they have killed all the prophets before him, and now, eventually, they will kill him.