"Then Who Can Be Saved?"

Mark 10:17-31

October 14, 2018

I.

This story of the rich man who comes to Jesus lays out most comprehensively Jesus’ attitude towards wealth and the wealthy.  Anyone hearing this, especially if they have any wealth at all, has to be at least as disturbed as the disciples who incredulously ask him, “Then who can be saved?”  If the wealthy and pious don’t make it into eternal life, who does?    

I mean, they meet a man who has scrupulously kept the letter of the Torah.  He has led what is by any measurement a good, upright, religious, maybe even humble life.  He knows enough to come to Jesus in the first place and ask about eternal life, unless he’s just fishing for complements.  He seems to perceive some emptiness in his life.  Or maybe being rich in worldly possessions isn’t good enough, he just wants eternal possessions too?

But when Jesus asks him about whether he has kept the Jewish laws, he slips one in that is not in the ten commandments.  He adds “you shall not defraud.”  He does this for a reason.  Defrauding or cheating, basically conniving to take what isn’t yours from someone else, is the whole basis of a market economy.  If you paid your workers fairly you’d only break even.  Profit is what happens when you pay them less than their work is worth.  This is how people have always become rich, by paying for resources less than they are worth, and selling them for more.  Buy low, sell high, as they say.

Jesus loves the man enough to show him the way to salvation.  Not everyone gets this chance!  Not everyone has it spelled out for them in such direct and simple terms what they need to do to have eternal life!  “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

But the man goes away grieving, for he owns a lot of stuff.  Apparently, the Lord has asked too much of him.  Jesus finally uses the grotesque image of a camel, the largest animal in that part of the world, trying to squeeze through the eye of a needle, which of course is about a millimeter wide.  He flatly concludes that rich people simply cannot enter the Kingdom of God.  Period.  End of story.

Jesus answers the disciples’ astonishment by saying, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”  This does not mean that God will make exceptions for really nice rich people, so they can bypass the eye of the needle, as if the privilege they enjoyed on earth will be extended into heaven.  He means that God can change the human heart and move rich people to actually do what Jesus says the man needs to do here: give away their possessions to the poor, and follow him.  This divestment of possessions appears to be a condition of discipleship.

Jesus understands that there is nothing inherently commendable about being wealthy.  Indeed, it’s just the opposite.  People get and keep wealth mainly by exploiting other people, mainly the poor.  Like the story of Zacchaeus, the tax collector in Luke, before this man can be admitted into God’s Kingdom, he has to make restitution to those whom he has defrauded.  The command to the man to give to the poor is to make up for what he withheld from others and kept for himself. 

II.

Often in Mark’s gospel, when Jesus says something of particular importance that challenges the disciples, he takes them aside and offers a further explanation to them.  That’s what happens here after the man goes away sad and in grief.

This is where he informs them of the other side of this teaching, which is that what we lose as individuals, we gain in community.  Peter says that they, the disciples, have left everything to follow him.  Jesus replies: “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.”

Notice that the only thing on the first list of what we lose that is not on the second list of what we get back is the “father.”  Instead of fathers, the second list has “persecutions.”  

In that society, fathers were often, like the rich man, the privileged, powerful, owners, movers and shakers.  They controlled everything in their domain and were to be obeyed.  Households, like the economy, were engineered for their well-being and prosperity, and to preserve, protect, and serve their interests.  Jesus insists that there’s not going to be anybody like that in the Kingdom of God, where God is the only father, and the rest of us are all equals togeher.  

Because of that, his disciples should expect to be persecuted by those who are offended by this because they stand to lose their power, their privilege, their status, and their wealth, and that never happens very easily.

This is the point at which everyone who has been paying attention starts to get nervous and frustrated.  It sounds ridiculously demanding.  For 2000 years preachers have tried to talk their way around this passage, finding ingenious ways to water it down, qualify it, soften it, and so forth.  Usually we just shrug and place it in the category of “stuff Jesus said that I don’t get,” and move on with our lives.  At best, we consider it to be “aspirational,” a lofty goal that cannot be reached in this life, though we do our best to follow it in the meantime, however partially.

But it is highly important, even central to what Jesus is about.  If we lose this component, we lose everything.  Which is why the Lord concludes with a particularly powerful nugget of teaching: “Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

III.

I have come to believe that the key to the gospels and what Jesus is talking about is found in community.  Our fear and assumption about a teaching like this is that if we just give away our possessions to the poor, we will be living with them in a cardboard box under an overpass somewhere.  That business about receiving back “houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and [land],” doesn’t compute except as some vague promise of heavenly treasure, which is to say, something we get after we die.  And if the giving up Jesus is talking about remains just an individual, private act, that is probably true.  In a zero sum economy, that is true.  

But remember that when Jesus tells the man to give up his possessions, he concludes by inviting him to “come and follow me.”  In other words, join my movement; join my group of people who have given up exactly what I am asking you to give up — though perhaps not as much.  Join my little alternative economy where the rule is give what you have and receive back what you need.

That is still not attractive to someone who lives in a big house full of expensive possessions.  He is still going to have to lose, big time.  But the choice is not have everything or have nothing.  It is more like learning to have nothing yourself as an individual in competition against others, in order to have everything in community together with others.

Jesus says that we receive those “houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, now in this age”!  What if it is a hope, not for heaven or for the end of time, but for now?  What if “the age to come” is really at hand and within us, as Jesus says elsewhere?  What if Jesus is not condemning the rich man to simply becoming a poor beggar on the street, so much as inviting him into a new way of life in a new kind of community?  A community of generosity and sharing, mutuality and forgiveness, equality and compassion?  

What if the Lord is calling his church to be the “houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children,” of and for each other?  What if he is calling us to live more intentionally in community?  What if he knows that we can only together handle the persecutions that will necessarily come when we live in such a counter-cultural way?

The new community that Jesus is forming will be realized in the Book of Acts, where the disciples hold all things in common and support each other.  It is a kind of radical economic equality that he is going for, and it has to include restitution like what he is telling the rich man in this story.  For it is not equality to simply forget the injustices of the past and pretend that now everyone is equal when they are not.  That would just lock in the head start some have and he handicap others have.  Jesus says that those who are first have to be last so those who are last can be first.   

It is interesting to me that Jesus does not say to the man, “Use what you have.”  He doesn’t say that he should invest or even donate his wealth to help others.  He says to give it up.  Don’t use it, lose it, he says.  That is the only way to break the inequality in power and privilege.

IV.     

What Jesus says here is challenging and even offensive.  I say that as a person who has not been very good at following this particular teaching of his.  I can invent excuses and rationalizations.  I leave myself open to the charge of hypocrisy.  I give myself unjustified credit because I compare myself to others who do worse.  I get all that.

And yet here is Jesus, loving us with the same intense love with which he loves that rich man, a love that offers an open door to eternal life for us.  Sometimes it serves only to expose our own addictions to possessions and ways of thinking and acting that oppress others and cripple ourselves.  But even that is good for us to know about ourselves.  It is a precondition to our being able to take the first step of realizing that our lives are unmanageable and we have done much harm to God’s creation and people.

At the same time we are at least here, listening to his Word and opening our hearts to his new Way.  We are at least allowing his Spirit to infuse us and change us.  We are at least becoming more self-aware, conscious of how far we have fallen into ego-centricity and violence.  And so we gather together here,  seeking to follow Jesus with all our hearts, learning how live into the world to come, God’s new heaven and new earth of justice, peace, forgiveness, equality, and joy, which emerges when we have the courage and the faith to give up all we have for the sake of those we have harmed, make ourselves last of all and servants of all, learning how true it is that “for God all things are possible.”

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