Years ago, in a fit of typographical enthusiasm, I readied for the press Msgr. Ronald Knox’s “The Rich Young Man.” I came across the proof pages. In my propsed edition, which I planned to have bound in vellum and embossed in gold, the article goes to barely twenty pages. The story opens with the protagonist going “down the hill-side with the slow, easy step of a man accustomed to deference from his fellows. A light breeze caressed him, like a ripple on the surface of the sunshine; he was well content,” even though he had buried his father but a few weeks before.
As he walked down the hill he noticed a knot of people gathered at the lake side. They just finished listening to a preacher. As the man got closer, he saw his scapegrace brother approach the preacher and ask him to tell his brother to divide the estate with him. The effrontery!
As the preacher passed through the crowd, the man took pace with him and, taking a cue from a snatch of conversation he had overheard, asked what he had to do to receive life everlasting. The preacher told him to keep the commandments. He had, the man replied. What else did he need to do? The preacher gave him a penetrating look and told him to sell everything, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow him.
What! To end up like his good-for-nothing brother? This made no sense. The man walked away unhappy.
The scene shifts to the inside of a jail cell. The prisoner ponders his run of bad luck. First it was the creditors who took away the estate his father had left him. He had no choice but to turn to robbery. How was he to know that the banker that he and his accomplice stopped would be so unreasonable as to put up a fight? Whose fault was it, really, that the banker died?
Now here he was, being led out with his companion to the gibbet. His guard told him that a troublemaker also would be executed that day. The prisoner gave that no thought until he found himself with arms tied to a crossbeam. He glanced to one side and saw a long-forgotten face. Further off was his companion, who cursed the third victim. The prisoner rebuked his one-time friend, saying that the two of them deserved their fate, but the third man was innocent.
Remember me when you come into your kingdom, he asked the preacher, who turned to him the same eyes he had seen at the lake side. This day you will be with me in paradise, came the reply. And then the prisoner “looked down, and saw two soldiers coming toward him with clubs, and the centurion resting on his lance.”
This conflation of the Prodigal Son’s brother, the Rich Young Man, and the Good Thief was not meant by Knox to be factual, only suggestive. I take his fantasy as a reminder that what we did—or failed to do—yesterday underlies what we have become today. We are all Rich Young Men in more ways than we care to admit.