[T]he lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent and import our age has not yet begun to comprehend. — Carl Jung

Today on my walk around the Philadelphia neighborhood where I live, I noticed several small garden sculptures: a trumpeting elephant made of stone; a butterfly fashioned from iron; a displaced fountain putto, also of stone; and, at the base of an old oak, a conclave of gnomes! It occurred to me that raw materials – such as stone, iron, and plaster – when given recognizable form, take on meaning, not only for the maker but also for the viewer. The fashioned shape elicits associations, calling to mind earlier events or periods in one’s life. It may provide a connection between past and present, enhancing one’s own unique life narrative. Thus, the form or image calls forth some sense of personal meaning. These garden ornaments did so in a minor, trivial way; nevertheless, they provided evidence that the need for and pursuit of meaning is a strong motive for us humans, one that animates our lives.

That the desire for and pursuit of meaning must be rightly ordered is the primary theme of Mark 10. When wrongly directed, this pursuit can lessen life’s quality and blunt its purpose. Chapter 10 presents our hero, Jesus, thwarting the idolatrous desires of many that he encounters, and often redirecting them toward life’s true, intended meaning.

Social dominance (1-9)

The first interchange in this chapter is with the Pharisees (2). This group assumes that their expert knowledge of their nation’s history and the Law of Moses entitles them to a position of authority within their society. Jesus has threatened their assumption and their social position by drawing the interest and admiration of the people away from them and to himself. Through their expertise, the Pharisees seek to retain their superior social status, which wrongfully gives meaning to their lives. Their intent in approaching Jesus in the beginning story of this chapter is to diminish him by showing that he’s out of keeping with the tradition (thereby alienating those who flock to his teaching). They present Jesus with a question, which if answered either yes or no would ensure their authority and dominance.

Their question was “Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife?”¹ For Jesus to answer yes would have signaled submission to the Law’s authority as well as to the Pharisees whose expertise was knowledge of the Law; to answer no would have put Jesus at variance with Moses and the tradition, thus invalidating him with the people. Either answer would have put the Pharisees in a position of social dominance through authoritative knowledge. Jesus’s answer (“For the hardness of your heart [Moses] wrote you this precept”[5]) skirts their trap by placing the necessity for the precept upon the people’s shortcoming, for which Moses wisely made allowance. Thus, Jesus doesn’t discredit himself by denying Moses and the tradition but allies himself with them, while still noting the precept’s drawback. His superior grasp of the tradition then allows him to pronounce the earlier, holy intent of marriage: “Therefore shall man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). He points to the prelapsarian perfect intent of God, while the Pharisees can offer up only a stop-gap rule for inhibiting ruined humanity’s further decline. Showing his unity with the Source of the tradition, Jesus disrupts the Pharisees’ idolatrous intent to generate meaning through social dominance that is based upon scholarly expertise.

Social attachment (10-12)

Keeping to the same topic of marriage when alone with his disciples (10-12), Jesus dislodges a different error: that life’s meaning is found in having the “right” partner or spouse. This belief often leads to one spouse divorcing the other in order to marry again, behavior that Jesus condemns. Interesting to note, it is not leaving the spouse that is condemned, for he sanctions that act when done “for [his] sake, and the gospel’s” (29). To leave the spouse, however, in order to “marry another” (11) is to believe that one’s well-being depends upon having the right spouse. There are good marriages and there are bad, but neither can the good ones excel nor the bad ones disrupt the essential, primary relationship with Christ Within (another way of saying being within the kingdom of God) wherein true meaning, and thus well-being, are found.

Jesus has now confuted two prominent forms of misplaced meaning (idolatry), both concerned with social relationships: (1) dominance over or (2) attachment to others. Neither yields the meaning we are to find.

The kingdom

As though to present a corrective to the Pharisees’ grab for social dominance and the misguided estimation of spousal attachment, the narrative turns to a short episode in which Jesus responds to young children (13-16).  A young child longs for what it wants without considering barriers, costs, or conflicts. He hasn’t yet developed the ability to weigh, calculate, deliberate upon, postpone, or sublimate his desire: he simply wants what he wants, now and wholeheartedly. When this pure, simple condition of longing for the kingdom of God is known within (Mt. 6:22), entry is provided, to both the Giver’s and the given’s delight.

Riches (17-25)

Riches provide many kinds of power: opportunity, security, comfort, luxury, status, esteem, and influence are some. The numerous material and social goods that riches can provide have always made life more amenable in the many cultures of this world, and therein, acquisition and retention of wealth has widely figured as pre-eminently meaningful. Many have given over their lives to its pursuit. The man who “came running, and kneeled to [Jesus],” though wealthy, would add “eternal life” to his list of life-enhancing possessions (17). Jesus’s first words to him, however, hint that the man needs to discern and prioritize: he states, “[T]here is none good but one” (18). He again emphasizes singularity when he says, “One thing you lack” (21). Jesus is leading the man to realize eternal life is the one essential, and not an item to be grouped with the many worldly possessions already in hand. Eternal life is a separate category of its own²: it is the unique, original Substance, next to which great wealth, with all its advantages, is insignificant and can be relinquished.

Alone again with his disciples, Jesus lists the possessions and relationships in which humanity is prone to place life’s meaning, and he states their combined worth is not to be compared to the one essential that excels them all: eternal life (29-30). To show the error of placing meaning in the accumulation of worldly goods, Jesus offers the maxim “But many that are first shall be last; and the last first” (31). To be “first” in the world requires adopting cultural values and devoting life’s substance to their attainment; whereas to seek and find the kingdom, eternal life, is to receive from God a personal sense of meaning that is beyond that which the world has to offer (30).

Persecution (30-34)

Nestled within the list of abundance promised to those who forfeit worldly pursuits for the sake of the gospel is a sharp spike of warning: “[they] shall receive . . . persecutions” (30). Jesus expands upon this warning to his disciples on their walk toward Jerusalem, detailing the assault upon his dignity and person that will occur there. It will be an attack upon his power to sustain himself in the world; his human vulnerability is to be thoroughly exposed and compromised in every way: he is to be humiliated, mocked, scourged, and spat upon,³ and he is to be killed (34).

Jesus’s work is to present the way we humans are to gain meaning that withstands and overcomes the humiliation of being vulnerable creatures, driven by fear and desire. His teaching contradicts the ways and means by which societies fabricate meaning by lessening the mental impact of vulnerability and mortality. These societal ways simulate true, personal meaning in that they make tolerable the intolerable consciousness of weakness, temporality, and inevitable death. Jesus attacks these false formulations of meaning that man has imaged, constructed, and subjected himself to in worship. They hobble Man in his short spell of time upon the earth by waylaying and dulling the anxiety of having been created mortal: his anxious awareness that he, the man of sin,⁴ is not the uncreated, eternal God.

Exercising authority (35-45)

This chapter began with the Pharisees bid to gain social dominance, and, as if to show the stranglehold this particular idolatry has on humanity, the problem again presents itself: now within the small circle of disciples. The sons of Zebedee seek social status and authority: to sit one on each side of their leader “in [his] glory” (37), and the other disciples resent the two brothers’ request for privileged status (41). Unlike in the earlier confrontation with the Pharisees, Jesus here finds it worthwhile to explain rightly ordered social interaction. After acknowledging the worldly (Gentile [42]) way of hierarchical exercise of power, he explains the new order, which is its inverse: “whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister” (43), and then applies the maxim to himself (45).

The healing (46-52).

In both the previous and final passages of this chapter, Jesus has asked petitioners what they would have him do for them (36, 51). The sons of Zebedee sought worldly gain in exalted social position, and they were denied. The blind beggar asked to receive his sight. Bartimaeus knows he’s blind; knows he’s a dependent beggar; knows Jesus is the son of David (the Messiah); and deeply, simply longs for wholeness. Though bullied (48), he refuses to be silenced, mollified, or co-opted. He continues to cry out for mercy: for sight, for wholeness, for well-being.

Bartimaeus’s admission of need exhibited his faith in the truth. It is this faith that made him whole: “Go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole” (52). In seeing the truth of his condition; casting away the garment that covered him (50), that symbol of worldly goods; and rising in response to being called (50), Bartimaeus expressed faith that the Creator intends goodness and truth for his creatures, for Creation. All who have been made whole through the same excruciating process know that to “go thy way” (as Jesus commands the now sighted) is to continue, as did Bartimaeus, to follow Jesus. “And immediately he received his sight, and followed Jesus in the way” (52).⁵

Longtime suffering awareness (“soul-sickness”) would teach us that we ourselves cannot heal our inward ills. Idolatry is humanity’s attempt to do so. Human beings cannot construct for themselves authentic meaning, in which all the divergent aspects of the self coherently integrate and rest upon a single, solid foundation, resulting in felt wholeness and peace. Truly meaningful life is gained only when the Light of Christ enters and integrates one’s being by means of his singular power and glory.

¹ The King James Version of the Bible is used throughout this essay.

² That “eternal life” is in a separate category apart from worldly goods is indicated by the phrase that precedes and separates it from the list: that is, “and in the world to come” (30). This phrase does not refer to a state to be known following the death of the body, as traditions other than Quaker would have it. Rather it refers to that state in which, having received inward knowledge of God – the Light of Christ – the recipient’s worldview is changed so dramatically that he appears to have entered a different world. That is the “world to come” to which Jesus refers in verse 30. 

³ “Humiliate” comes from its Latin root “humus,” meaning earth or ground. To be humiliated is figuratively to be returned to the ground: to be put in mind of our mortality, our vulnerability. Note that Jesus ends this description of his humiliation with the words “and the third day he shall rise again” (34). This rising again affirms the superiority of the Way that he teaches and performs over the worldly way of attempting to gain meaning through elevating oneself over others. The rising from the dead (from the earth) seems impossible to the worldly, but those who have been raised to know eternal life can testify to its reality, as Jesus does at the end of verse 34.

⁴ “the man of sin . . . [w]ho opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God . . . so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God” (2 Thess. 2:3-4)

⁵ To “follow” or imitate “Jesus in the way” does not mean to use as one’s primary guide the words he spoke and the acts he performed while he walked upon the earth. Rather the phrase should be interpreted “in a deeper sense,” as Jung does in his book Alchemical Studies: “The imitation of Christ might well be understood in a deeper sense. It could be taken as the duty to realize one’s deepest conviction with the same courage and the same self-sacrifice shown by Jesus.^” (I would add that for the Quaker, the “deepest conviction” is found in coming into unity with Christ Within.) The epigraph is from Jung’s work The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. I came across both of the quotations used in this essay in a YouTube video from Academy of Ideas.

Healing, 1311, Duccio