What Is Yet Wanting to Me?
A Reflection on the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
Beloved in Christ,
There is actually something quite admirable about the young man who approaches Christ in today’s Gospel.
He does not come to tempt Him. He does not ask a clever question in the hope of catching Him in His words. He is not looking for an excuse to avoid the commandments. He comes with a question which ought to concern every Christian: “Good Master, what good shall I do that I may have life everlasting?”
Our Lord’s answer is straightforward: “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.”
The young man asks which, and Christ names them: do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness; honour father and mother; love thy neighbour as thyself.
Then comes the young man’s remarkable reply: “All these I have kept from my youth, what is yet wanting to me?”
Now, it would be easy to hear pride in those words. Perhaps there was some. But the question itself suggests something more interesting. The young man knows that keeping the commandments is not the extent of the spiritual life. He has done what he knows he ought to do, and yet he senses that something remains. So he asks, “What is yet wanting to me?”
This is one of the most “dangerous” questions that we can sincerely ask God.
We are generally quite willing to ask God what He wants from us when we suspect that the answer will confirm what we are already doing. We ask for guidance while quietly supplying the acceptable answers in advance. We ask to know His will provided that His will remains within certain boundaries. But the young man does something more courageous. He asks Christ to identify what is lacking. And Christ does.
“If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come follow Me.”
Now, there is an important distinction in these words. Our Lord had already told the young man what was necessary to enter into life: keep the commandments. Now He speaks of something further: “If thou wilt be perfect.”
The Church has always recognized here the distinction between commandment and evangelical counsel. Our Lord does not declare private possessions intrinsically evil, nor does He command every Christian in every state of life literally to dispose of everything he owns. Yet neither does this distinction permit us to make the passage harmless or meaningless. We ought not simply observe that this was the particular vocation of this particular young man and then proceed comfortably on our way.
For while the precise demand differs from one soul to another, every Christian eventually discovers an “if thou wilt be perfect.“
There is always something further.
There is always some place in the heart where obedience to commandments must become surrender; where avoiding what is forbidden must give way to freely offering what is ours; where we cease asking merely, “What must I do?” and begin asking, “What may I give?”
For this young man, Christ identifies the obstacle immediately. He has great possessions. And the problem is not simply that he possesses them. The problem is revealed by what happens when Christ asks him to surrender them: “And when the young man had heard this word, he went away sad.”
That sadness tells us more than any inventory of his property ever could.
He keeps everything. He loses nothing that he possessed when he approached Christ. His money remains his. His lands remain his. Whatever constituted those “great possessions” remains safely in his hands. And still, he goes away sad.
There is a peculiar cruelty in our attachments. We fear that surrendering the object of them will make us miserable, and so we cling to the very thing which is already making us miserable. We cannot imagine happiness without it, even when possessing it has plainly failed to make us happy.
The young man is offered an extraordinary exchange. “Thou shalt have treasure in heaven.” More astonishing still, he receives the invitation: “Come follow Me.” He stands face to face with Christ and is invited to follow Him! But there is something he cannot leave behind.
That is why this Gospel cannot safely be confined to a meditation upon money. “Great wealth” is the young man’s attachment; it need not be ours. A man may own comparatively little and nevertheless be as thoroughly possessed by what he has as another man is by a fortune. Indeed, one may be attached even to what one does not possess: to wealth desired, honours imagined, opportunities denied, another man’s prosperity envied.
And there are possessions more subtle than money. We can possess an opinion so tightly that we would rather lose a friend than surrender it. We can possess a grievance which has become so familiar that forgiveness feels almost like losing part of ourselves. We can cling to reputation, comfort, ambition, resentment, control, or some carefully constructed image of the life we believe we ought to have had.
Eventually Christ touches precisely that thing and says, in effect: And this also. That is when the question “What is yet wanting to me?” ceases to be theoretical.
It is easy to desire perfection in the abstract. It is considerably harder when perfection requires something concrete.
Yet the Gospel does not end with the young man’s departure. The disciples, hearing Christ speak of the difficulty of the rich entering the Kingdom, are astonished. “Who then can be saved?” And our Lord does not reassure them by lowering the demand: “With men this is impossible: but with God all things are possible.”
Here the Apostolic reading for this Lord’s Day becomes almost a commentary upon the Gospel.
Saint Paul looks back upon everything that he has become and says: “By the grace of God, I am what I am.”
Saint Paul, too, had been confronted by Christ. Saint Paul had possessed a life, a position, a reputation, a certainty about who he was and what he was doing. The encounter with Christ overturned it all.
But Saint Paul does not merely say that grace came to him. He adds: “His grace in me hath not been void.” And there we find the other possible ending to the story.
Grace may be offered and resisted. An invitation may be heard and declined. Our Lord may point toward the next step and we may go away sad.
Or grace may be received and answered.
Saint Paul continues: “I have laboured more abundantly than all they: yet not I, but the grace of God with me.”
There is no contradiction. Saint Paul laboured, and grace laboured in him. He responded, but the power by which he responded was itself God’s gift. Grace did not render his cooperation unnecessary; grace made his cooperation fruitful.
This is why the Christian life can never be reduced either to passive waiting or to grim self-improvement. We cannot perfect ourselves. We cannot, merely by force of will, tear every attachment from the heart and make ourselves fit for the Kingdom. “With men this is impossible,” our Lord says.
But neither are we therefore permitted to remain where we are, calling our unwillingness to change an acknowledgment of human weakness. God gives the grace by which the impossible becomes possible, and then calls us to act with that grace.
Perhaps, then, the young man’s question is one worth making our own: What is yet wanting to me?
Not: What is wanting in the Church? Not: What is wanting in my neighbour? Not: What ought the world to surrender? But: What is yet wanting to me?
What have I carefully excluded from Christ’s authority within my life? What is the thing I hope He will never ask me to relinquish? Where have I decided that I have obeyed far enough?
We should not ask such questions lightly. The answer may be costly. But neither should we fear the answer.
Christ did not call the young man to holy poverty in order that he should have less. He called him to leave behind what bound him so that he might possess something infinitely greater: “Thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come follow Me.”
Thus, the tragedy of the Gospel is not that the young man had too much. It is that, when offered more than everything he possessed, he could not open his hands to receive it.
May the grace of God in us not be void. And when Christ shows us what is yet wanting, may that same grace give us strength not to go away sad, but to follow Him!
23 August 2026