Supremacy of Goodness.
I. Consider the thought suggested by our Lord's remarkable address in the text. To the courteous and reverential words of the inquirer, His rejoinder sounds at once harsh and paradoxical. "Good Master" "Why callest thou Me good?" But it is only at first sight that there is anything difficult or surprising in the answer, "Why callest thou Me good?" We need not think of an impossible disclaimer of goodness in Himself, of an inconceivable denial of goodness, in some sense and measure, to men. Our Lord saw before Him one who had lightly and with a thin share of thought and self-knowledge asked his momentous question, and whose good intentions far outran his grasp of its meaning, and his power to face the answer. Our Lord did what we have often seen done. "Good Master, do you know what you are speaking about? have you thought of the meaning of your words? Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but one, that is God. You, who use the word so freely, you are wasting, as a mere title of courtesy, what is the highest attribute of God." The answer was addressed to two great deficiencies in the inquirer's character and mind. (1) His standard and level of goodness was too low and too conventional of what was good in himself, of the good to be aimed at, of the distance at which he stood from the fountain and model of goodness. And (2) his sluggishness of will and effort was unequal to the task on which he had entered, and the race which he professed to be running; and his mind and conscience had to be disturbed and alarmed by presenting before it the call that a real estimate and sense of what goodness means, would make upon it. To be what he proposed to be, to be what he asked about, to have that which he supposed he saw in our Lord, was nothing less than to aim at being perfect, as the Father in heaven is perfect.
II. But the Lord's words have a more general interest, and it lies, I suppose in this: that they are one of the numberless ways in which he enforced the same great lesson, of the supreme value in His eyes, of goodness, above everything else that man can aim at, or know, or have; above every other principle or endowment of our human nature. We see in these words the characteristic of his teaching, the broad, unqualified, unvarying assumption, that the measure and standard of everything in man's life and actions is that goodness by which, at however great a distance, he approaches the moral nature, his God and Father in heaven. And as with our Lord's own teaching, so with those great ideas and ruling principles which He implanted in the society which He set up to carry on His work in the world, and which that society was to develop and apply. As far as they relate to the estimate and conduct of human life, they revolve, so to say, about the idea of goodness, of sanctity. The idea of goodness had in Christianity a clear, sharp, decisive primacy, which it never had in any other system, and which surprised and perplexed the world. It had a very strongly marked pattern and standard, the life and mind and self-sacrificing love of the Son of God.
III. "Why callest thou Me good?" is the strange word by which our Lord awakens our attention to what we are too ready to think a truism. He who amid all that He was not of what men admire in this world was the unique and unapproachable example of goodness, speaks to us in it still, amid the absorbing interests of our busy and eager times. Our safeguard in the dazzling and amazing world of discovery in which we live is loyalty to goodness, loyalty to its supreme claims, loyalty to its Lord. Never let us allow ourselves in the thought that being clever and having knowledge makes up for not caring to be good. And let us remember, too, that the pursuit of goodness, the building up of character and life in that goodness which our Master meant, is as hard a thing as true intellectual discipline. It is as much a thing of patience and time. It is as much a thing which costs trouble and tries resolution. If goodness were merely the qualities which men are born with, brilliant and lovely, the qualities which each man without trouble and with pleasure exercises gentleness, love of truth, courage goodness would not be a thing which rises, by mistakes and falls and painful self-correction, to whatever may be its degree of attainment. But if it be the direction of the will to whatever we are sure is right and good, whether congenial or not, whether we like it or no, the student who means to be a master of knowledge may as well take his task easy, as the servant and soldier of the Crucified, in following his Master.
R. W. Church, Human Life and its Conditions,p. 1.
References: Mark 10:17. Expository Sermons on the New Testament,p. 57; J. H. Thom, Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ,p. 164.Mark 10:17-22. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. ii., p. 558. Mark 10:17-25. GoodWords,vol. i., p. 92.Mark 10:17-27. H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xvii., p. 124.Mark 10:17-31. H. M. Luckock, Footprints of the Son of Man,p. 220. Mark 10:20-22. J. Martineau, Endeavours after the Christian Life,p. 265.