Movement Three: The Proposal and Surrender · Mark 10:17-27; 1 Corinthians 3:5-9
Discover what Jesus does when the answer is no: he tells the truth, he loves the man, he does not negotiate, and he lets him walk. Then discover from St. Paul what our actual job description is, in a passage that says we are nothing and that we are God’s fellow workers within five verses of each other.
The act of faith is of its very nature free, and Christ invited people to faith and conversion but never coerced anyone. And God, who could accomplish everything alone, grants his creatures the dignity of being causes for one another. Tonight is where this study answers the question it has been carrying since Session 1.
Three things happen tonight: the study’s central question gets answered, the sealed page opens, and the room meets the first outright failure in the New Testament material we have looked at. Plan your minutes and do not let the sealed page get squeezed into the last four.
Last week you deliberately left Thread B unresolved. Tonight you resolve it, and the resolution has to come out of the text rather than out of you.
Verse 17: he runs up and kneels. Nobody makes him. He is eager, respectful, sincere, and he asks the best question in the Gospel: "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
And in verse 20 he says he has kept the commandments from his youth, and nothing in the text suggests he is lying. Mark does not present him as a hypocrite or a fool. He presents him sympathetically, and records the man’s own claim about the commandments without endorsing or disputing it.
That matters, because your group will want him to have been secretly insincere. He was not. St. Mark presents him sympathetically and gives us no reason to think he is lying, and he still said no.
Verse 18 has been read several ways, and you should give the range honestly rather than pick a winner. The Church has always confessed the divinity of Christ, and has never read this verse as a denial of it.
One traditional patristic reading is that Jesus is pressing the man to follow his own words to their conclusion: if no one is good but God, and you have just called me good, then work out what you have said. A second reading takes it as Jesus turning attention toward the Father, which he does throughout the Gospels. Both are available; neither is required.
What is not available is treating this as evidence that Jesus denied being God. If someone raises that, say so plainly and give the two readings above.
Verse 21: "And Jesus looking upon him loved him, and said to him, You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me."
This is the only place in Mark where we are told that Jesus loved a particular individual. And the love and the demand are in the same sentence, with the love first.
It is worth saying to your group in exactly these terms: an extraordinarily radical and personal demand is made out of an affection Mark stops the narrative to report.
Verse 22: his countenance fell, and he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.
Now list what St. Mark does not report Jesus doing. St. Mark reports no calling after him, no softening of the terms, no smaller version, no following him down the road, no "think about it and come back".
The most important verb in this session is the one that is missing.
Verses 23 to 27. He turns to the disciples and says how hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom. They are amazed, and then exceedingly astonished, and they say, "Then who can be saved?"
And Jesus looks at them and says: "With men it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God."
That sentence lands immediately after a man walked away. Rather than closing the file, he turns to what God can do; he does not say the man is lost and he does not say the man will be fine. Signal the inference when you apply it: the passage invites us to put even such refusals inside our hope in God’s power.
1 Corinthians 3:5-9 gives your group the sentence they will carry out of this study. "I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth."
And then, four verses later in the same argument: "He who plants and he who waters are equal, and each shall receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers."
Both. We are nothing, and we are fellow workers, and our labor earns wages. St. Paul does not experience these as a contradiction and neither should we. The Catechism says the same thing in its own register at CCC 306: God, who could do it all alone, grants his creatures the dignity of being causes and principles for one another. And St. Augustine, quoted in the Catechism, puts it in one line: God created us without us, but he did not will to save us without us.
Participants sealed a page in week one with three names and one honest line: what they thought actually stopped them from speaking about Jesus. Tonight it opens.
It opens here on purpose. Session 6 already dealt with "I do not know enough." What is left, for most people, is the fear of the answer being no, and tonight is the session where a man says no to Jesus Christ himself and the sky does not fall.
Read the discussion guide section carefully. The rules are: they open it privately, they read only their own, and nobody is asked to share. Say all three rules out loud before anyone unfolds anything.
Tonight’s live discovery is Isaiah 6:9-13, which is the passage immediately after the one your group read last week. Read it yourself first. It is harder than people expect and it is exactly what this session needs.
Ezekiel 3:16-21. The watchman is held responsible for sounding the warning and is explicitly not held responsible for whether anyone listens. Verse 19: if you warn the wicked and he does not turn, you have saved your own life. Two different obligations, and most of us confuse them.
Isaiah 55:10-11. Rain and snow come down and do not return without watering the earth and giving seed to the sower; so is the word that goes out of God’s mouth. Note what the passage does not promise: it does not say you will see the harvest, or that it will happen on your schedule.
The Council taught that a person’s response to God in faith must be free, that nobody is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will, and that the act of faith is by its very nature a free act.
And it grounded this not in modern sensibilities but in Christ’s own conduct: he invited people to faith and conversion, and never coerced them; he bore witness to the truth and refused to impose it by force on those who spoke against it. The Catechism gathers all of this at CCC 160. Mark 10:22 is what that looks like in practice.
Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae 10 and 11 (1965), as gathered at CCC 160.
God created us without us, St. Augustine said, but he did not will to save us without us.
That sentence is the answer to the question this study has been carrying since Session 1. Our existence required nothing from us. Our salvation is entirely initiated and enabled by grace, and it is not applied to us over our heads: even the free response it asks for is itself grace-assisted. The Catechism thought this important enough to quote it directly.
St. Augustine, Sermon 169, quoted at CCC 1847.
St. Augustine records in his Confessions that his mother pressed a bishop with her weeping and her requests that he argue with her son, until the bishop, a little displeased at her importunity, told her to go her way and said that it was not possible that the son of such tears should perish.
Augustine adds that she took those words as though they had sounded from heaven. He was not converted for years afterward. Note the timeline: she prayed, and wept, and waited, and it was a very long time, and she did not know when or how it would come.
St. Augustine, Confessions III.12.
These paragraphs are the Church’s answer to Thread B, and they are more satisfying than either half of it on its own.
Thread B, "Whose work is this?" RESOLVES TONIGHT. The resolution has three parts and all three come from the texts: Mark 10:27, that what is impossible for men is possible with God, spoken directly after a refusal; 1 Corinthians 3:6-9, that we are nothing and we are fellow workers whose labor earns wages; and CCC 306, that God grants his creatures the dignity of being causes for one another. Do not deliver this as a lecture. Get it out of the group in Build 6 and Build 7 and then say the Augustine line once.
Thread A, "With him, and sent." Quiet tonight. The rich man was invited to both, "come, follow me," and took neither.
Thread C, "The room you are afraid of." Resolved last week in Ananias. If it surfaces, tie it to the sealed page rather than reopening it.
Callback to Session 1. Judas was on the list of the Twelve, and this man knelt in the road. Nearness and eagerness are both real, and neither overrides freedom. If someone in the group makes the connection, let them make it.
Sealed sheet opens tonight. Protect it. See the discussion guide.
1. Have the group see that Mark presents this man as sincere and good, so that his refusal cannot be explained away.
2. Land verse 21: the love and the demand are in one sentence, and the love comes first.
3. Have the group list what Jesus does not do in verse 22, and feel the absence.
4. Resolve Thread B out of Mark 10:27 and 1 Corinthians 3:5-9, in the group’s own words before it is in yours.
5. Read Isaiah 6:9-13 and let it stand without softening it.
6. Open the sealed page safely, with all three rules stated out loud first.
7. Send everyone home praying for someone who has already said no.
Minutes | Movement |
0:00-0:04 | Opening prayer. Keep it short tonight; the minutes are tight. |
0:04-0:10 | Field report on rung eight, the errand. |
0:10-0:16 | Win questions. |
0:16-0:20 | Read Mark 10:17-27 aloud. |
0:20-0:32 | Build 1 to 3, the man, the question about "good," and verse 21. |
0:32-0:42 | Build 4 and 5, the demand and what Jesus does not do. |
0:42-0:52 | Build 6, verses 23 to 27. Thread B begins to resolve here. |
0:52-1:02 | Build 7, 1 Corinthians 3:5-9. Read it aloud first. Thread B resolves. |
1:02-1:10 | Live discovery: Isaiah 6:9-13. |
1:10-1:18 | Build 8, the build-then-press on letting people go. |
1:18-1:28 | The sealed page. Ten minutes, protected. Do not let this get compressed. |
1:28-1:30 | Live It This Week, take-homes, closing prayer. |
Somebody in your room is carrying a child, a sibling, or a spouse who has walked away, and tonight is either the most consoling session of the study or the hardest. Watch for the person who goes very quiet during Build 5. Do not draw them out. Find them afterward.
If the room concludes that the rich man was damned, stop it. The text does not say what became of him, and the Church does not declare any particular person to be damned. Be precise about the asymmetry, because it matters: by canonization she does declare particular people to be in heaven, and she has never once declared anyone to be in hell. Then point at verses 23 to 27, which hold a grave warning about riches together with the hope that what is impossible for men is possible with God.
If someone weaponizes "God gives the growth" to justify never speaking again, take them back to 1 Corinthians 3:9 and to CCC 306. The same passage that says we are nothing says we are fellow workers whose labor is paid.
At the sealed page, if a person is visibly upset, let them keep it folded. Nobody has to open anything tonight. Say that as part of the instructions rather than as an exception granted afterward.
If someone’s sealed line turns out to be about a specific painful relationship rather than a general fear, do not process it in the room. Acknowledge it in one sentence and follow up during the week.
Mark 10:17-27; 1 Corinthians 3:5-9
Lord Jesus, you looked at a man who had done everything right, and you loved him, and you told him the truth, and you let him walk away. Give us the nerve to do all three. Free us from thinking we can save anybody, and free us from thinking that means we can stop. Amen.
Six minutes. Two or three people.
Last week you did the one small errand you had been avoiding. Did you?
Leader: if someone did not, do not let the group encourage them. Say that tonight’s session is largely about exactly that, and move on.
▸ Think of someone you love who has said no to something you were sure was good for them. What did you do next?
▸ When has doing the right thing produced no visible result at all? How long did you keep doing it?
Read Mark 10:17-27 aloud, all the way to verse 27. Do not stop at verse 22, even though that is where the story feels finished. The last five verses are why this session exists.
1. Verse 17, and then verse 20. Describe this man. Is he hostile? Is he insincere?
He runs, and he kneels. Nobody made him do either. He calls Jesus Good Teacher and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life, which is the best question anyone asks in this Gospel.
And in verse 20 he says he has kept the commandments from his youth, and nothing in the text suggests he is lying or self-deceived. St. Mark does not present him as a hypocrite, a fool, or a trap.
Push the group here, because they will want him to be secretly bad. St. Mark gives no hint of it. He presents the man sympathetically, and the man still said no. Note that Mark records his claim to have kept the commandments rather than certifying it, and that Jesus has just said something pointed about who is good. If your account of why people refuse Christ requires them to be insincere, this man breaks it.
2. Verse 18. Jesus asks why the man calls him good. What is he doing, and what is he not doing?
Give the range honestly. One traditional reading among the Fathers is that Jesus is pressing the man to follow his own words to their conclusion: if no one is good but God alone, and you have just called me good, then work out what you have said. A second reading has Jesus turning attention toward the Father, which he does throughout the Gospels.
What he is not doing is denying that he is God. The Church has always confessed his divinity and has never read this verse as a denial. If someone raises it as one, say that plainly and offer the two readings above.
Both readings are available and neither is required. Say so rather than picking a winner for the group.
3. Verse 21. St. Mark tells us something about Jesus’s interior state. What is it, and where does it sit in the sentence?
"And Jesus looking upon him loved him." It comes before the demand, in the same sentence as the demand.
This is the only place in St. Mark’s Gospel where we are told Jesus loved a particular individual. Not the Twelve, not Peter, not the crowds. This man, who is about to refuse him.
Say it in these terms: an extraordinarily radical and personal demand is made out of an affection St. Mark stopped the story to report. Mark also records the universal demand to deny oneself and take up the cross, so avoid ranking this as the hardest thing he asks anyone. Love was not what he offered instead of the demand. It was what the demand was made of.
4. Verse 21 again. What does he actually ask for? And does he negotiate any part of it?
Sell what you have, give to the poor, and come follow me. He names one thing lacking and then asks for everything.
And there is no negotiation, no staged plan, no percentage, and no probationary period. He does not say "start with a tithe." He does not say "keep the house."
Ask the group how they would have handled this conversation. Most of us would have found a smaller ask. Then ask what a smaller ask would have given the man.
5. Verse 22. The man leaves. Now make a list: what does St. Mark not report Jesus doing?
Give the group a minute to build the list before anyone speaks. The absence is the lesson, and lists make absences visible.
St. Mark reports none of it: no calling after him, no softening of the terms, no smaller version offered, no following him down the road, no "take some time and come back", no disciple sent after him, no explanation to the crowd. What we have is the account’s silence, and it is deafening.
The most important verb in this session is the one that is missing.
And notice that Jesus, who could see the man’s heart, and who loved him, and who was right, still let him walk. If anyone ever had the standing to override another person’s freedom, it was him, in that moment, and he did not.
Sit in the silence for a beat before moving on. Do not rescue the room. The next question is the rescue.
6. Verses 23 to 27. What does Jesus say next, and what is he doing with what just happened?
He turns to the disciples and says how hard it is for those with riches to enter the kingdom. They are amazed, then exceedingly astonished, and they ask, "Then who can be saved?"
And Jesus looks at them and says: "With men it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God."
Notice when he says it. Immediately after a refusal. He does not treat the man’s departure as the end of the matter and he does not pronounce him lost. He turns to what God can do. Signal the inference when you apply it: the passage invites us to put even such refusals inside our hope in God’s power.
Ask the group directly: is that a comfort or a dodge? Then let them argue about it for a minute, because the next question is where it gets settled.
7. Now read 1 Corinthians 3:5-9 aloud. Find two statements in these five verses that look like they contradict each other.
This is the question the whole study has been building toward. Give it real time.
First: "neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth" (v7). Second: "we are God’s fellow workers" (v9), and in between, "each shall receive his wages according to his labor" (v8).
Neither the planter nor the waterer is what produces the growth. And they are God’s fellow workers, and each will receive wages according to his labour. St. Paul puts all three in one paragraph and shows no sign of noticing a problem. Note that verse 7 is a comparison with the God who gives growth, not a statement that we are nothing in ourselves.
Here is the answer to the question this study has been carrying since the first night. You are not the principal cause, and you are not decoration. The Catechism calls creatures genuine secondary causes, which is exactly the standing you have here. Those are not in tension once you see that your working is itself something God is doing, and that he arranged it that way on purpose rather than out of need.
The Catechism says it at CCC 306: God, who could accomplish everything alone, gives his creatures the dignity of being causes and principles for one another. And St. Augustine says it in one line, which the Catechism quotes at CCC 1847: God created us without us, but he did not will to save us without us.
Say the Augustine line once, slowly, and then stop talking.
Do not preview this. It is harder than the group expects.
Remind them what they read last week: Isaiah 6:5-8, ending at "Here am I! Send me."
Now have someone read Isaiah 6:9-13, which is what comes next.
Then ask: what is Isaiah being sent to do?
What they should find: he is sent to a people who will hear and not understand, see and not perceive, and he is commissioned knowing it. Do not reduce this to a mission that fails; the passage speaks of judicial hardening, of devastation, and of a surviving holy seed. And when he asks "How long, O Lord?" the answer is not encouraging: until the cities lie waste and the land is desolate.
Then read the very last clause aloud yourself: "The holy seed is its stump." After all of it, a stump, and in the stump a seed. Ask the group what that does to their definition of a successful ministry, and let the answers be slow.
8. Someone says: if God gives the growth, then persistence is presumption. Jesus let him go, and so should we. Praying for the same person for twenty years is not faith, it is refusing to accept an answer. Are they right?
Work the build-then-press below. The objection is protecting something real, and it draws the wrong line.
What became of him? The text does not say, and St. Mark never mentions him again. The Church has never declared any particular person to be in hell; note the asymmetry, since by canonization she does declare particular people to be in heaven. Either way, we are not in a position to pronounce on this man. The passage gives no verdict on his final fate. What it gives is a grave warning about riches and a word of hope in God’s power.
A callback to Session 1. Judas was on the list of the Twelve, and this man knelt in the road. One had every advantage of nearness and the other had every advantage of eagerness. Neither overrode freedom, and neither is presented as a failure of Christ’s.
"Sell what you have." The Church has never read this as binding on every Christian in the same form, and has read it as a call to a specific man and, in the tradition of the evangelical counsels, as a genuine vocation for some. What is binding on everyone is that nothing may be held back from Christ. If the group wants to argue about this, note the distinction and move on; it is a different session.
Build the objection at full strength:
Build it at full strength. The person raising this has usually been on the receiving end of the alternative.
Jesus let him go, with no follow up recorded, and he is the one person in history who would have been right to chase.
Religious pursuit destroys families. Every person in this room can name a household where the faith became a weapon, where holidays became ambushes, and where an adult child eventually stopped answering the phone. The pursuing was done out of love and it did real damage.
And 1 Corinthians 3 seems to be on the objector’s side. If God gives the growth, the anxious over-functioning of the evangelist starts to look like a failure of trust rather than an excess of zeal.
There is also a hard question underneath: at what point does continuing to pray for someone’s conversion become a refusal to accept them as they are?
Then press, from the text:
Now press, from the text.
First: read past verse 22. Jesus does not shrug and change the subject. He turns to the disciples and says that what is impossible for men is possible with God. He treats the refusal as an occasion for hope in God rather than as a closed file. Letting someone go is not the same as writing them off, and the difference usually shows up in whether you are still praying.
Second: 1 Corinthians 3:9. The same five verses that say we are nothing say we are God’s fellow workers, and verse 8 says each will be paid according to his labor. If the growth being God’s made our labor pointless, St. Paul would not have mentioned wages.
Third: Ezekiel 3:16-21. The watchman is responsible for sounding the warning and explicitly not responsible for whether anyone listens. Those are two different obligations, and most of the exhaustion in this room comes from confusing them. The watchman is accountable for the warning and not for the outcome. Read it as the illuminating analogy it is: the duty of the baptized to bear witness rests on CCC 900 and 1816, and it does not require repeated confrontation of any one person.
Fourth: Isaiah 6:9-13, which you just read. A prophet was sent knowing in advance that the people would hear without understanding, and he was not thereby excused from going.
Fifth: St. Monica prayed for years without knowing when or how it would come. Nobody told her the ending in advance, and if she had accepted the first answer she got, the Church would be without the Confessions.
And give the objector their due, because they have earned it. Coercion and manipulative pressure can be sinful; nagging and treating a person as a project are at the least a failure of charity and prudence, and this study has said so since Session 1. The correction is not to stop praying. It is to stop pushing, and to stay.
▸ Who has already said no to you? Not a stranger. Someone who knows exactly what you believe and has decided.
▸ What would change this week if you truly believed you were not the cause and also not optional?
Leader: say all three rules out loud before anyone unfolds anything. One, you open your own page and read only your own. Two, nobody will be asked to read theirs aloud. Three, if you would rather not open it at all tonight, do not; keep it folded and nobody will ask why.
Nine weeks ago you sealed a page with three names on it, and one honest line: what you thought actually stopped you from speaking about Jesus to those three.
Open it now. Read your own line, silently. Take a minute; there is no hurry.
Then the question, and it is the only one that matters tonight: were you right?
Underneath your original line, write what you now think the real answer is. Do not cross out the old one. Leave it where you can see it.
Then look at the three names. Are they the same three? Has anyone been added? Has anyone dropped off, and do you know why?
Leader guidance. Give this a full ten minutes and let a lot of it be silent. Then ask for volunteers only, with a question shaped like this: "Did anyone find that their guess was wrong?" Most people who guessed "I do not know enough" in week one will now write something closer to "I am afraid of what happens if they say no," and that is precisely why this page opens tonight and not in week six. Session 6 answered the first fear. Tonight answered the second one, because a man said no to Jesus Christ in front of us and the Gospel did not end.
Do not process anybody’s specific relationship in the room. If something painful surfaces, receive it in one sentence and follow up during the week.
Rung 9 of the ladder. Pray for the one who has already said no. This rung has no visible action in it at all, and that is the point of the session.
▫ Keep praying for the three by name, daily.
▫ Add one more this week: someone who has already heard, already understood, and already declined. Pray for them by name every day.
▫ Do not contact them about it. Not this week.
▫ Write your new sealed line somewhere you will see it. The real fear, now that you have named it.
▫ Once this week, say to God in plain words: I am not the cause, and I am not optional. Then go and do the small next thing anyway.
Lord Jesus, you looked at him and loved him and let him go, and then you turned around and said that with God all things are possible. Teach us to hold those two together. Take from us the burden of being anybody’s savior, and do not let us put down the work you have actually given us. We plant and we water. Give the growth in your own time, and let us not need to see it. Amen.
Every passage used in this session, in the order it appears.
Passage | Where and why |
Mark 10:17-27 | Primary text, read aloud through verse 27 rather than stopping at 22. |
1 Corinthians 3:5-9 | Build 7. Read aloud. The resolution of the study’s central question. |
Isaiah 6:5-8 | Live discovery, the setup. Read last week in Session 8. |
Isaiah 6:9-13 | Live discovery. The commission to a mission that will not succeed, and the holy seed in the stump. |
Ezekiel 3:16-21 | Old Testament Roots and the press. The watchman, responsible for the warning and not the outcome. |
Isaiah 55:10-11 | Old Testament Roots. The word that does not return empty, with no promise that you will see it. |
Mark 3:19 | Dig Deeper. Judas on the list, from Session 1. |
Mark 10:23-27 | Build 6. With men it is impossible, but not with God. |