The Eye of a Needle
Mark 10:17-31
Proper 23B
October 14, 2012
Proper 23B
October 14, 2012
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
“Go, sell what you
own, and give the money to the poor….It’s easier for a camel to squeeze through
the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter God’s kingdom.” Ouch.
As the noted
theologian Samuel Clemens put it, “It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't
understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”
Put in a rather more
sophisticated way Soren Kierkegaard who, even if he was Danish, was an
important philosopher and theologian,
“The
matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand….We pretend to be
unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand,
we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and
forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will
say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the
world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian
scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the
Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible
coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you?”[i]
So, in the interests
protecting ourselves from being ruined by the Bible, let’s see if some our
“priceless scholarship” can’t come to our rescue.
Jesus and his
disciples were walking along a road, headed generally toward Jerusalem and
Jesus’ coming showdown with the authorities when a rich man came up to him and fell
to his knees. We don’t know that he is
rich, unless we’ve read this story before, but Jesus can tell—probably because
of the Armani suit. The man greets him
and asks him a question: “Good Teacher, what must I do to obtain eternal life?”
The man is kneeling—soiling,
perhaps even ruining his beautiful suit.
It’s a sign of submission to Jesus’ authority, of respect for
Jesus. His greeting is unusual. It’s over the top. It’s flattery. According to the rules of the game that the
man is playing, his self-humiliation and flattery is supposed to put Jesus in
his debt and calls for flattery in return.
It’s notable—and
it’s puzzled the commentators—that Jesus turns the flattery aside and so
refuses to play the game: “Why do you call me good? No one is good except the one God.”
Having brushed aside
the rich man’s game, Jesus moves on to his question: “You know the
commandments: Don’t commit murder. Don’t
commit adultery. Don’t steal. Don’t give false testimony. Don’t cheat. Honor
your father and your mother.”
Wait a minute. Jesus’ has slipped something extra into his
summary of the commandments. There is no
commandment “Don’t cheat.” Jesus is
making that up, but, apparently the rich man doesn’t notice this. “Teacher—just “teacher,” no “good teacher,” he
won’t make that mistake again—Teacher, I’ve kept all of these things
since I was a boy.”
Well, then, if he’s
a faithful Torah-observer, why is he asking the question? He already knows the answer. What is it that he wants? Is there something nagging at his conscience,
something that doesn’t seem to be covered by the commandments? Is this even a good faith question, an honest
question looking for an honest answer? Or
does the rich man’s question betray his bad faith? Is he merely looking for a
comforting and flattering response?
Then Jesus did
something that we hardly ever do when we’re locked in a contest. Jesus looked at him carefully. And saw through all the man’s strategies, even,
I suspect, his defenses against the Bible, constructed and maintained by habit
for so long that the man didn’t even know he had them. “You are lacking one thing”—that is, there is
one thing you don’t own: “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to
the poor. Then you will have treasure in
heaven. And come, follow me”—that is,
become penniless yourself and then you will be qualified to join my band of
penniless followers.
But the rich man
couldn’t get that close to the Bible. The
rich man couldn’t give up his riches. Like
too many people, I suppose, he no longer owned his possessions; his possessions
owned him.
And here is where
the story gets interesting—and uncomfortable.
“It will be very hard for the wealthy to enter God’s kingdom! It’s easier for a camel to squeeze through
the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter God’s kingdom.” The disciples were shocked. This ran counter to everything they had been
taught. The rich were blessed by God, marked
as those whom God had favored, rewarded by God.
But Jesus is saying that the rich don’t have the inside track with God, that
their wealth is not a blessing from God, even that wealth is an obstacle, an
impediment to living as a part of God’s kingdom.
Sounds like it’s
time for a little of the Christian scholarship that Kierkegaard talked about!
Let’s start by
looking more closely at the rich man. If
we can discover how Jesus’ words only apply to him or to his class, then we’ll
be in the clear!
It’s true that the
ancients thought about wealth and class differently than we do. We have three classes. First there are the rich, who are basically
anyone who makes more money than I do. No,
I think I can do better than that. The
rich are those who income is derived primarily from their investments and who
in the long run can watch their investments grow even as they are living on
that income. Retirement complicates
things a little since that is a time when many people who are not rich are
living off the income from their investments.
Still, a forty-year-old who’s living off the income from investments is
rich by any account, so I’ll stand by my definition.
Below the investor
class comes the middle class, people who are earning a living wage primarily
from their job or the business that they own.
The people who are not making a living wage are the poor.
Now, in ancient
times things were defined a little differently.
At the top were the rich. They
were about one or two percent of the population. They were major land owners. Land was the form of wealth that people
sought. The rich had enough of it that they
could live well off the income from the land without having to work the land
themselves. The rich were, by
definition, idle. They could devote
themselves to cultivating the good life and, for the rich who were Jewish, that
could well mean that they gave themselves to keeping the commandments, like the
rich man in the story.
The other
ninety-nine or ninety-eight percent were the “poor,” meaning that they had to
work for a living. The poor were divided
into two groups: those who were simply poor, and the destitute who had neither
land nor skills that they could sell and were forced to sell their bodies as
day laborers or prostitutes or, when life and strength were nearly gone, those
who forced to become beggars.
Since land was the
primary form of what we would call capital, we are not so far from the ancient
idea as it seems at first. The rich man
in our story also lived off the income from his investments. It’s just that his investment was in land, not
in stocks, bonds or derivatives.
So, it seems that we
are off the hook, since we are not rich and Jesus’ warnings are to the
rich. Instead of having to hear what
Jesus is saying we can merely overhear it and feel sorry for those poor
rich people.
As long as we only
look at this text and as long as we deploy “Christian scholarship” carefully, we
can get away with that. The trouble is,
this isn’t the only time that the Bible mentions wealth. It’s an important theme in the Hebrew
prophets. It’s the single most common
topic of Jesus’ teaching. It’s not just
the rich who come in for harsh words; it’s wealth itself.
Or rather, the Bible
has two views of wealth. Our culture has
adopted one view and pushed it to its limits, while this morning’s text
represents the other view.
It is true that the
Bible views prosperity as a blessing. The
picture of the good life in the prophet Micah shows this well:
3
God shall judge between many peoples,
and
shall arbitrate between strong nations
far
away;
they
shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and
their spears into pruning hooks;
nation
shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither
shall they learn war any more;
4
but they shall all sit under their own vines
and
under their own fig trees,
and
no one shall make them afraid;
Figs, wine, olive
oil, a good barley harvest, flocks of fat and healthy sheep and goats—these are
the signs of God’s care for God’s people.
These are the blessings of peace that comes from God’s good governance
of the nations. This is the prosperity
that is viewed as a blessing from God.
But of wealth, I’m
afraid, the Bible has little good to say.
Isaiah of Jerusalem represents this tradition well:
8
Ah, you who join house to house,
who
add field to field,
until
there is room for no one but you,
and
you are left to live alone
To sit in peace under
our own fig tree and our own vines is a blessing. To want to own our neighbor’s vine in
addition to our own or to corner the market on fig futures earns the swift
condemnation of both Moses and the prophets: “Do not crave your neighbor’s
house, field, male or female servant, ox, donkey, or anything else that belongs
to your neighbor.”[iv]
Accumulated wealth is invariably viewed as an offense against the
community.
The good life of the
blessed community that Micah described needs more than equality of opportunity;
there must be some reasonable equivalence of outcome as well. That is why the Torah requires that every
seven years all who have been forced to sell themselves or their family members
into slavery be set free and their debt cancelled. That is why the Torah requires that all land
that has been sold must be returned to its original family each fifty
years. Permanent wealth and permanent
poverty threatened the existence of Micah’s blessed community, so the Torah
puts into place ways of keeping that from happening. To try to get around the Torah’s intention is
to cheat by definition.
The disciples grew
up on a line of thinking that saw prosperity as a blessing and concluded that
more wealth meant more blessing with no upper limit. Jesus stood in the long line of the Hebrew
prophets who denounced this view: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have
received your consolation[v]….No one can serve two masters…You
cannot serve God and wealth.[vi]”
When he included a commandment not found among the Ten Commandments—“Do
not cheat”—he was summarizing a long tradition.
So it seems that we
are not off the hook after all, since we don’t have to be rich to
serve wealth. We don’t have to own many
possessions to be owned by them. This
text makes it all too clear that Jesus’ teaching and the way that our culture
thinks about and values money are in deep conflict. Because we are children of this culture as
well as followers of Jesus, this conflict rages in our own minds and hearts. We
have difficult choices to make, even if we are not required to sell all that we
own and give it to the poor as a pre-condition for following Jesus and as a
requirement for entering the life of God’s kingdom.
These choices are a
matter of learning to value differently than the world around us values. While this is a real world issue, it is a
spiritual journey that we are on. The
terrain over which we struggle is difficult.
We are not sure where we are, where we are going, or how to get
there. What we need is a reliable map. I believe this text is at least part of that
map. When we unfold it we discover that we
are not where we thought we were and that the road we are on is not the one we
need to find. We can trace a way, but it
won’t be easy. The trail is hard and at
the trail head is a narrow gate. But at
least now we know what lies before us. Now
we can find our way. That, dear friends,
is good news.
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