Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.
When people think of high-pressure sales, there are a few scenarios that usually come to mind. Time shares, cars, and vacuum cleaners. Unfortunately, some pastors have pressured people into supporting churches financially. A lot of pressure. I know because I used to be one of those pastors. This week’s text was a supporting text for the sales pitch. Reluctant to give some of your money – or a lot of it – to the church? You may be forfeiting the Kingdom of God, which some assume may be heaven itself. How’s that for pressure? I’ve got a handful of ugly stories I could share. Sorry! But I have grown out of it.
There is a whole lot of ugly in interpreting the text in this way (even though it feels like the very thing Jesus is shooting for). Viewing the text as such supports manipulation, and it reinforces a paradigm that more aligns with the human condition than the nature of God. The rich guy clearly had a transactional view of faith: we do our part and God does God’s part; we do the right things, and God will love us. This is not the Good News Jesus taught. God does not love us based on our performance or behavior. God loves everyone unconditionally, longs for people to flourish in their lives, and trusts that as people experience more and more of the love of God, loving behavior toward God, themselves, and others will follow.
Does Jesus’ instruction include us? Are we supposed to cash out and embrace communal living? Good news! No! This direction was specific to this rich guy because it was obvious to Jesus that he had a bit of idolatry at work in his heart. Being rich in that day and age was problematic. It almost certainly meant that he in some way neglected the wellbeing of others around him which, of course, would be to also neglect the call to love God and our neighbors as ourselves. Regardless of what his lips were saying, he worshipped money. The invitation to give full trust to God instead of his money seems extreme to us, but perhaps we should appreciate that Jesus was calling this guy’s bluff and correct bad theology at the same time.
Perhaps, however, we do need to come alongside and make sure we aren’t missing something. Human beings have a love-hate relationship with money. We love money, and we sort of hate that about ourselves because we know that the Bible is right – the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Usually, the ones with the most money work pretty hard to ensure that it stays that way. Culturally, statistics bear this out. Over the last several decades, the average income of the working class has remained flat, while the wealthiest 10% of our population experienced a 20% increase, and the wealthiest 1% a 30% increase during that same time period. And it’s not because those who work aren’t producing. In fact, production is up significantly – today’s worker produces much more than previous generations. What has happened is that those with money and power are able to craft the rules to benefit themselves. This comes via ways to protect their assets and limit their taxes – things which are simply not available to regular, everyday people. So, let us continue to be angry at the top 1%, and pray that Jeff Bezos may one day pay a dollar or two of income tax like the rest of us.
Closer to home, however, there may be a more relevant issue to consider. The intimation of the context is that the rich guy was not known for his generosity toward others, which is why the instruction was too difficult to swallow. Jesus is really teaching into a broader issue: what does it mean to be a person who strives to follow the Way of faith? In short, when we are grounded and founded in the love of God, we more naturally love what God loves. The idea was never that we pick up a long list of ultimatums, but rather that we grow into a way of life that is in lockstep with God. Over the past few weeks, we have seen Jesus standing up for the underdogs. Here, he shines a light on the poor who are almost always powerless to improve their situation. They need those who “have” to help them who “have not”. God draws especially close to underdogs because they often need it most. The question we have been asked is do we care? If so, is that care reflected in the way we steward our money? It turns out God is interested in economics on all levels. How we spend our money tells a story. How much we give to help others is one indicator of our hearts’ alignment with God.
Sometimes we tell ourselves that we would do more if we had more. This makes us feel better. Sometimes, however, this isn’t very honest because there might be areas we can tighten up so that we can do more for those who are vulnerable. Sometimes we are called to sacrifice for others. When it is born out love it is a beautiful thing. When it is born out of obligation or transaction, there is always something lacking.
How are you doing in this area of your life? Do you give thinking it will somehow trigger blessings from God? Do you realize what that implies? How has your love of God and natural love of others made its way into your budget? Are there any areas that need to be addressed?
Related side note... Thank you for the support you provide for CrossWalk. We can be a beacon of hope and help for many people in Napa because of your generosity. We want to move forward, faster, which depends on strong support. We appreciate any help you can give. Yet God will love you – and so will CrossWalk – even if you don’t!
Commentary...
Twentieth Week after Pentecost (Year B): Mark 10:17-31
Check out SALT’s “Strange New World” podcast episode on this passage, “Understanding Jesus - Part Five: The Camel and the Needle.”
Big Picture:
1) This is the seventh week of a twelve-week chronological walk through several chapters in the Gospel of Mark.
2) Jesus has been teaching his disciples about what it means to follow him: tapping into the deeper physics of love and humility, being a “servant of all,” making peace with friends and enemies, viewing cultural institutions (like marriage and divorce) through the lens of serving the most vulnerable — and now, in this week’s reading, sharing economic resources with people in need.
3) Not surprisingly, since it includes Jesus’ directive to “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor,” this passage has been one of the most controversial — and most, um, “creatively” interpreted — in Christian history. Monastics point to it as the basis for a monk’s vow to poverty. Others insist Jesus only meant his advice to apply to the rich man himself; or only to the extremely rich; or only to a special inner circle of followers. Still others argue that Jesus’ real concern here is “attachment” to wealth, not the mere possession of it; or that the story is meant to underscore that salvation comes not from human feats of piety, much less from material resources, but rather from God’s grace alone. Each of these options has merit — and yet, as we’ll see below, each fails to do full justice to the story. Indeed, the story resists reduction to any simple formula: it’s a challenging, haunting, and distinctive episode, not least because it’s the only one in which Jesus calls someone to follow him and gets turned down.
4) Some stories include teachings that are informative and instructive. Others mark out the boundaries of a kind of “squared circle” (an old name for a wrestling ring), a space for grappling with important principles and how they may or may not apply in our everyday lives. This story is a “squared circle” story: its upshot isn’t to settle the issue of how faith relates to money, but rather to provide us with a framework within which we can wrestle it out, again and again, over the course of our lives.
5) One excellent backdrop against which to read this passage is theologian David Bentley Hart’s remarkable short essay on the early church’s economic life, “Are Christians Supposed to Be Communists?” His answer to this question, by the way, is both No and Yes. Worth a read!
Scripture:
1) Jesus is “on the way” (another possible translation of the key phrase in Mark 10:17). Specifically, as Mark later makes clear, he is on the way to Jerusalem, and ultimately on the way to Golgotha (Mark 10:32-34). And more broadly, he’s traveling the path of Christian life, the way of discipleship, bearing in mind that “The Way” was one of the earliest names for the movement (see, e.g., Acts 9:2; 19:9). In other words, for Mark, the dialogue with the rich man is fundamentally about what it means to follow Jesus.
2) There’s a lot packed in to the man’s question: “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” First, the man runs up and kneels before Jesus, an unusual approach and posture for a theological discussion; in Mark, running-up-and-kneeling is more typical of those urgently asking for healing (see, e.g., Mark 1:40; 5:6;5:33) — so we should interpret the man as profoundly struggling in some way. Second, his question presupposes that “eternal life” is inherited by those who have “done” certain things (“What must I do...?”), presumably those who have acted in “good” and righteous ways. And yet Jesus rejects precisely this presupposition in his correction of how the man addresses him: “No one is good but God alone.” On one level, Jesus is saying, Don’t call me “Good Teacher” — but his deeper point is to challenge the question’s premise and the man’s preoccupation, as if to say, You’re looking at this in the wrong way: salvation isn’t a sport in which those who are “good” win the prize. Only God is good. Salvation isn’t earned. You can’t rely on your own efforts, your own “doing” (“What must I do?”), your own resources, your own “goodness.” Salvation is a gift from God, unearned, undeserved, and free!
3) “You lack one thing,” Jesus says, an ironic remark to a man who, with his “many possessions,” ostensibly lacks for nothing. But what exactly is the “one thing” he lacks? Is it moral virtue, the ethical standing that arguably comes from selling everything and giving the proceeds to the poor? Perhaps…but if that were true, if this selling-and-giving were simply the good and right thing for human beings to do, we might expect Jesus to recommend it not only to this man but to the crowds as well, or at least to his disciples — but Jesus doesn’t do that. It’s true that the disciples do give up what they own, leaving behind their boats and nets by the shore, but they don’t sell everything and give the proceeds to the poor.
4) So if it isn’t moral virtue the man lacks — what is it? Perhaps the clue is the opening exchange about “goodness.” Perhaps the man, preoccupied with “doing good” so as to achieve his own salvation, trusts too much in his own resources, material and otherwise (“What must I do…?”). Perhaps what he lacks is trust in God, who is, after all, the ultimate source of all goodness and salvation. This interpretation would help explain at least two things in the story: first, why the commandments he has followed “since my youth” are the neighbor-oriented commands (5-10 of the Decalogue), not the more explicitly God-oriented ones (1-4 in the Decalogue), suggesting, perhaps, a lack of trust in God; and second, why relinquishing wealth is the specific remedy Jesus prescribes, since that would help dispel the man’s illusion of self-sufficiency and afford him a more vivid, tangible experience of depending on God.
5) On the other hand, however, it’s worth noting that Jesus doesn’t call the man to simply walk away from his possessions, or to burn them in a bonfire, but rather to share their value with neighbors in need. Accordingly, perhaps the “one thing” he lacks is generosity: the joyful sharing of blessings with others. Indeed, one of wealth’s hazards is that it can cut people off from genuine, kind-hearted participation in community, which is to say, from living a fully human life.
6) Whether we interpret the “one thing” the man lacks as trust in God, communal generosity, or both (since these “lacks” are often two symptoms of the same ailment: self-centeredness), one temptation is let ourselves off the material hook. The point here, we tell ourselves, is really about trust and generosity, not about selling everything we own! So yes, by all means, let us become less self-centered — but when it comes to our possessions, well, there’s no need to get carried away... But again, the story resists this kind of rationalization. If possessions are a corrupting barrier for this man (and indeed for the disciples, who also left everything behind in order to follow Jesus) — why wouldn’t they also be corrupting barriers for us? If this man lacked trust in God, or generosity to his neighbors — are we really so sure we don’t lack these things, too? In short, if Jesus framed the life of first-century discipleship in startlingly material terms, as a way of life with concrete economic aspects — why would twenty-first-century discipleship be any different?
7) In the ancient world (as in many circles today), wealth was widely considered a sign of divine blessing, which is why the disciples are so taken aback when Jesus declares that it’s “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25). “Then who can be saved?” they incredulously ask, as if to say, If even they, the apparently blessed, cannot be saved — who can be? Jesus’ reply makes two points at once: first, that the apparent blessings of wealth are actually more like hazardous obstacles; and second, that while such obstacles can seem to put the kingdom of God out of reach, “for God all things are possible” (Mark 10:27).
Takeaways:
1) Jesus’ call to “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor” isn’t a one-size-fits-all command meant for everyone — if it were, he would have announced it more broadly, starting with his disciples. Instead, there’s something about this particular man that gives rise to Jesus’ advice: perhaps his preoccupation with his own efforts and resources, betraying a lack of trust in God as the source of salvation; or perhaps his lack of generosity with regard to others in need; or indeed, perhaps both. Pious and earnest as he is, he’s nevertheless self-centered, oriented away from both God and neighbor.
2) But if the call to “sell and give” isn’t for everyone, it could still be for us. We shouldn’t be quick to declare immunity; the rich man’s malady may be a condition for which we, too, require healing. And in any case, for Jesus (and for Mark), discipleship has significant economic consequences that demand to be taken seriously. Peter’s contention that the disciples have done at least part of what the rich man refused to do (Hey, we left everything and followed you!) is evidence enough that Mark believes the economic consequences of the Gospel apply to more than just this one rich man (Mark 10:28-31).
3) But there’s plenty of other evidence as well: as the Book of Acts has it, the earliest Christian communities sold their assets, pooled the proceeds and “held them in common,” distributing them “to each as any had need” (Acts 4:32-35). Mark’s community shared a similar ethos, valuing a communal form of economic life for which many “left everything” in order to follow Jesus (Mark 10:28). Private wealth, then, had no place in this form of life, and significant private wealth was for many — here the rich man is Exhibit A — an impediment to joining the movement. Accordingly, for Christians today living in a world riven by increasing economic inequality, this challenging, haunting story pushes us to confront just what the economic dimensions of the Gospel might look like in our lives. In short, the church is called to be not just a “holy” community, not just a “moral” community, but a decidedly economic community as well, a movement following a savior who insisted again and again that faith and money are sides of one coin, not two.
4) The good news of the Gospel in this week’s passage is that God’s grace, not our own efforts at being “good,” is the source of salvation; that Jesus “looks at us and loves us” (Mark 10:21), and so invites us to move beyond concerns with our own inheritance and focus instead on sharing our resources with others in need; and that God seeks to transform even and especially our economic lives into beautiful, humane, generative patterns of love and grace. In the end, human beings are economic creatures; we are more than economic, of course, but not less! And so it only makes sense that God’s salvation would include definite effects on our economic form of life, just as it did for the earliest disciples. As we struggle together to figure out what those economic effects might be, we can take heart that Jesus sees us, and loves us, and calls us forward — and above all, that “for God, all things are possible.”
Mark 10:17-31 (MSG)
As he went out into the street, a man came running up, greeted him with great reverence, and asked, "Good Teacher, what must I do to get eternal life?"
Jesus said, "Why are you calling me good? No one is good, only God. You know the commandments: Don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't lie, don't cheat, honor your father and mother."
He said, "Teacher, I have—from my youth—kept them all!"
Jesus looked him hard in the eye—and loved him! He said, "There's one thing left: Go sell whatever you own and give it to the poor. All your wealth will then be heavenly wealth. And come follow me."
The man's face clouded over. This was the last thing he expected to hear, and he walked off with a heavy heart. He was holding on tight to a lot of things, and not about to let go.
Looking at his disciples, Jesus said, "Do you have any idea how difficult it is for people who 'have it all' to enter God's kingdom?" The disciples couldn't believe what they were hearing, but Jesus kept on: "You can't imagine how difficult. I'd say it's easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for the rich to get into God's kingdom."
That set the disciples back on their heels. "Then who has any chance at all?" they asked.
Jesus was blunt: "No chance at all if you think you can pull it off by yourself. Every chance in the world if you let God do it."
Peter tried another angle: "We left everything and followed you."
Jesus said, "Mark my words, no one who sacrifices house, brothers, sisters, mother, father, children, land—whatever—because of me and the Message will lose out. They'll get it all back, but multiplied many times in homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and land—but also in troubles. And then the bonus of eternal life! This is once again the Great Reversal: Many who are first will end up last, and the last first."
