In the Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius of Loyola proposes a meditation often called “The Three Classes of Persons.” Ignatius asks the one making the exercise to imagine three scenarios, in each of which a person has acquired a large sum of money “but not purely or properly for the love of God.” In the first case, the person wants to break the attachment but simply does nothing, at the price of their own salvation. In the second, the person wants to break their attachment to the money, but on their own terms rather than God’s, thus, they try to make God’s will conform to theirs rather than vice versa. In the third case, the one which Ignatius wants us to imitate, the person is completely open to whatever God wills, whether that be keeping the money or getting rid of it.
Perhaps we can interpret today’s first reading and Gospel as an application of Ignatius’s meditation. The exiled Judeans in the first reading—about to experience the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple—are like the first class of persons, whose attachments (to sin, to their own vision of Jerusalem, etc.) simply rule them. And in the Gospel, the rich young man is like the second class: he is willing to serve God up to a point, but he is attached to his possessions and so does not want to give them up, even though this would lead to a greater love and service of God.
To enter heaven—in other words, to “be perfect”—we will have to embrace the attitude of the third class of persons, even if this means going through a time of purification in purgatory before we attain such an openness to God’s will. Perhaps, then, we can meditate on our own attachments today, whatever they may be, asking God to open our hearts to that greater freedom which must be ours one day if we desire to truly enter into the fullness of life.