I. A reflection upon the terrible danger of riches is the first moral of this incident. The disciples, indeed, more experienced some of them in the opposite perils of poverty, with its mean, foils and down-dragging cares and ready envyings, exclaim in astonishment, "Who then can be saved?" If the rich, with their tranquil days and easy fortunes, with every facility for the two virtues of honesty and of thankfulness, can hardly enter God's kingdom, how much less, surely, they whose whole life is trial trial of patience, trial of rectitude, trial of faith. Thus it is that each rank and each age and each character regards its own as the very chief of all difficulties and all hindrances, thinks any other class or condition better off for salvation, and asks in despondency, if not in recrimination, If that other, that opposite, can scarcely be saved, how can I?
II. But there was one disciple who, in those days of his ignorance and self-reliance, was ever ready to compare himself advantageously with other men, and who saw, in the example of this young ruler going away sorrowful, an opportunity of vaunting the opposite conduct of those who, like himself, had counted all things loss for Christ. "Peter began to say unto Him, Lo, we have left all, and have followed Thee." Our Lord begins His reply to this boast by a warm and generous recognition of the greatness and blessedness of their self-sacrifice. There is no man who has done what he has done, who shall not here and hereafter have his reward. "Now in this time a hundredfold in the world to come eternal life." We have here then, before us, as the principal subject, a magnificent view of the compensation of discipleship. Work done for Jesus Christ done in sincerity, done in simplicity, done in love shall not lack its reward. "A hundredfold now in this life, and in the world to come" who shall speak it?
C. J. Vaughan, Oxford Undergraduates' Journal,Nov. 1st, 1877.
An Hundredfold now in this time. We have here, as the principal subject, a magnificent view of the compensations of discipleship.
I. Some have talked slightingly of the sacrifices made by Peter and his companions. They are supposed to have had little to give up. A crazy boat or two, a few tattered nets that was their all. On the other hand, it does not appear that, at the time of this occurrence, their abandonment of home or employment was either final or absolute. After the resurrection the disciples are found in Galilee, resuming, at least occasionally, their old occupations. Nevertheless, they rightly regarded the call to follow Jesus as a call to give up everything for it. Never, again, would they be their own for a single hour. It was a true instinct which made Peter combine, in consecutive clauses and as equivalent phrases, the "left all," and the "followed Thee." An entire detachment from all that had made and been the old life was the very condition and meaning of the new.
II. This is the discipleship. Now for its compensations our Lord divides them. There is a compensation in the present, "now in this time." The nature of it is remarkable, "He shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands." The very language shows the promise figurative. We have read it, perhaps, as quite vague "Shall receive something instead, something which shall reconcile him to the loss of all these." An inward peace, suppose a sense of God reconciled an appreciation of the littleness of things temporal a growing, deepening apprehension of things invisible and eternal. Is there not something besides something more precise and more peculiar in this promise? Brothers, sisters, mothers, children an hundredfold each and all of these, now, in this time no mere equivalent, in the dim shadowy future, for the sacrifice of them here. There is a family no man can number it in earth and heaven, of which a man becomes a member when he becomes a Christian. God is its Father, Christ is its Head; holy angels are its elder brothers; saints, martyrs and apostles, all good men, dead or living, are its intimates and its kinsfolk; earth is its compass, heaven is its home; and whosoever believes in Christ, whosoever has the Holy Spirit in him, enters at once upon the affections and the sympathies of all these; extend, expand this kinsmanship through all time and all space, and you will see why Jesus Christ should say that the man who gives up, or is willing to give up, the natural wins a hundredfold in the spiritual.
C. J. Vaughan, University Sermons,p. 371.
References: Mark 10:29; Mark 10:30. Homilist,3rd series, vol. i., p. 321; Expositor,1st series, vol. ii., p. 245.Mark 10:30. Ibid.,vol. iv., p. 256.