Every time I read this passage about the camel and the eye of a needle, I think of an essay about it by the writer Mary Gordon. When she was a girl, she read this story in her children’s Bible one evening and immediately jumped out of bed, found her mother, and cried, “Mom, Jesus says rich people won’t go to heaven!”
To which her mother said, “We’re not rich. Go back to bed.”
(You realize, parents; putting a Bible in the hands of a child can be dangerous.)
We’re not rich - go back to bed. Many would argue--and are arguing from pulpits right now--that we are all rich. Some here definitely are. All of us in this room are, by the world’s standards.
But even if you insist on not counting yourself among the rich, there’s something for you in this reading. It’s about not only the stumbling block that possessions pose in the pursuit of a meaningful life, but also the stumbling block of pride, and the delusion of thinking we’re more morally mature than we really are.
The story starts when a man approaches Jesus and asks him a question: Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Now, a lot of us read that as referring to getting into heaven, as in, a place (not in this world) we go to after we’ve died. That’s importing into this 2000 year-old story a lot of stuff that came later in the Christian tradition. The original meaning of the question would have been more like the way one commentary paraphrases it: “The man asks Jesus about the way of life associated with God’s coming kingdom.”
He’s just one more person asking a timeless question: What’s the best way to live?
Jesus’ first response is to correct him for calling him--Jesus--good. “No one is good but God alone.” It’s worth pointing out that neither of the other two Gospels that relay this same story, Matthew and Luke, include that line. In Mark, being the oldest of all the Gospels, you’ll sometimes see Jesus distance himself from any divine claims, from too close an association with God.
But he’s also setting us up for what comes next in this encounter. Jesus asks the man if he’s followed various of the commandments. He has, he says--all of them. From his youth! Jesus may not count himself among “the Good,” but this man certainly does.
It’s telling that great spiritual leaders, the ones we see as having arrived, are the ones that talk of how much farther they have to go. Whereas the quickest way to prove yourself a spiritual novice is to sound like you’ve got it all figured out.
This is one of those moments in Gospels where I’m reminded what a deep, and thus quick thinker Jesus could be. Because had this man replied differently to this point--admitted, for example, that he struggled with being good day in and day out, I doubt Jesus would have said what comes next: “You lack just one thing. Sell all your possessions, give them to the poor, and then, come follow me.”
Not surprisingly, this is too great an Ask for this man, and so he shakes his head, and walks away. Prompting Jesus’ teachings to the disciples about the difficulty of the rich being able to follow the way of life associated with God’s kingdom.
Jesus’ attitude towards this man is sometimes contrasted with his encounter with another rich person in the Gospels, Zaccheus. Zaccheus was a tax collector, whom everyone knew to be a cheat, a rogue. He wouldn’t have denied that of himself. One day when Jesus was passing through town Zaccheus climbed a tree to get a look at Jesus over the crowd. Soon the two men, Zaccheus and Jesus, were sitting together for a meal. By the end of the evening. Zaccheus was so moved that he gave up half his possessions to the poor. Jesus praised him. Zaccheus was neither law-abiding nor willing to part with everything he had--only half. And yet, he comes out well in this story--better than the man in our reading for today.
My take on it is this: Jesus asks this man for so much because he wants him to have to say, I can’t do that. I don’t measure up. Because this man isn’t going to learn anything or get anywhere spiritually if thinks he’s fulfilling every commandment just fine. It’s only once he’s forced to say he’s powerless or unable to do something; it’s only once he can’t help but see his shortcomings, that he’ll begin to grow--really grow--in the spiritual life.
“He who says he has done enough has already perished.” That’s from a sermon the saint Dorothy Day once heard preached at the Lower East Side mission where she worked.
“He who says he has done enough has already perished.”
Yes, this man’s weakness was having too many possessions. Was not being able to part with them and put them to better, fairer use. There’s no getting around the fact that this reading calls him, and us, to do with less. To go home even today and part with what we don’t need, or be more generous with the money just sitting there in our accounts when it could be making a huge difference in a life right now. You do that, and you’ll be living a life more associated with God’s kingdom, as we all want to be.
But this man’s weakness was also counting himself among “the good,” claiming (improbably) that he never erred from the commandments, until finally Jesus asked something of him that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do. Until Jesus asked such a radical thing of him, he could have gone on thinking of himself as virtuous and just. And there’s no real spiritual growth that comes of that. Humility is where it begins. Knowing your deep faults. Knowing we’ve never done enough, and we’ve only (ever) just begun. Amen.