One of my favorite movies is "The Hunt For Red October." It is set at the height of the Cold War and involves a new Soviet nuclear submarine, with a design that can almost-completely evade American detection, carrying nuclear warheads. It is the ultimate first-strike weapon. The captain of the boat, a man named Marco Ramius, is horrified at the idea of deploying this new technology and decides he will defect with the submarine to the US. He gets his officers to go along with the plan, since they share the same revulsion at the use to which the submarine could be put. Before the ship sails on its maiden voyage, and without telling the other officers, Ramius posts a letter to the Minister of Defense of the USSR, telling him of the plan to defect. Ramius mails the letter so it will arrive after the ship has been at sea for a day or two. When the boat is out at sea Ramius tells the officers what he has done, and they are predictably angry, realizing that alerting the Soviet Navy to their plan will make it much more difficult to get to the US. They demand to know why Ramius has done such a thing. Ramius response: "When Cortez got to the new world, he had his men burn their ships. That way they knew there would be no going back." Perhaps that is what is going on in today's Gospel (Mk 10: 17- 27) when Jesus tells the rich young man to sell everything, give the proceeds to the poor and follow Him. The young man has obeyed the commandments, and Jesus loves Him for that. But Jesus demands more than just obeying commandments, something which the rich young man apparently has been able to do without difficulty. Jesus wants a relationship with us, not just obedience. He wants that relationship to be central to our lives, the most important thing in our world. That's what He is asking of the rich young man. The man's wealth is a problem not because wealth is per se bad. The wealth is a problem because it lets the rich young man be something other than fully comitted to Jesus. With his wealth the young man can follow Christ and, if things don't work out, or get dangerous, the young man can go back to his old life without a problem. He has no skin in the game. He can try out this following Jesus thing and, if it doesn't work, oh well. That's not the sort of relationship that Jesus wants with us. He wants us to be all in, with no plan B. He wants us to be believers, not just "we'll give it a try" sort of folks. And that's the problem with wealth-- it permits us to try things out, always reserving the possibility that we can do something different if we decide to do so. The more wealth we have, the more we have trouble "burning the ships" because we have more to lose-- the flip side of the lyric from the Bob Dylan song, "Like a Rolling Stone," that goes "when you ain't got nothing you got nothing to lose." It is important for us to free ourselves from worldly attachments so that we can have a relationship with Christ because Christianity is not a religion of rules, much as it might seem so. If it were all about rules, the rich young man would have been just fine-- he'd obeyed the rules since his youth. That wasn't enough for Jesus-- He wants more, all of us in fact. And that is why we have to burn our ships.