The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

 

All things are possible for God

 

           I grew up with this Bible story of the Rich Young Man's entreaty for eternal life. Sadly, the Young Man cannot part with his possessions.  Jesus then uses this as a teaching moment, not to excoriate the rich, per se, but to show how powerful we cling to that which impedes us from entering the Kingdom.
           There is a popular story that attempts to deflate the hyperbole of a camel struggling to go through the eye of a needle. Without any historical evidence, some claim that there was a lesser gate in the wall surrounding Jerusalem that was opened at night, and to be able to move a camel through it, the camel had to crouch and kneel; it becomes inconvenient, but far from impossible. The rich feel better.
            Both the Jerome Biblical Commentary (Catholic commentary) and the Interpreter's Bible (Protestant) dismiss this "urban legend". What is telling isn't that this myth of the "eye of a needle" has had so much traction. This parable, however, isn't a story about the rich, but a story about the nature of faith.

The power of hyperbole is essential for this parable. It is more comfortable to believe that God rewards Christians who "do their duty", who obey the ordinances of the institution; however, Jesus is asking us to live this impossibility of dispossession---to get rid of anything that stands in the way of living the gospel.

Sometimes this can be rather a spectacular grace, but often, it is "whispering grace", grace that comes through a "chance encounter" with a stranger, or a growing sense of being loved by others who have experienced God's grace.  We then enter the Kingdom. We breach the impossibly narrow gates we've constructed to keep God's riches out.

Later in this gospel passage, Jesus declares to his disciples: "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God".  The nature of the Kingdom isn't an earthly institution we can control or enter through our wits to gain an advantage.  The Kingdom is ubiquitous.  It is all around us.  The Kingdom is revealed when we open our eyes to the grace of our poverty in Christ.  There is no greater act of downsizing than committing oneself to following the way of Christ rather than the commands of the Church. 

The wealth we need to jettison is the wealth of the false faith that is too often the false security of the institutional Church rather than the will of God.  When the institution doesn't reveal the Good News, we must live the Good News, not by fighting the church, but by modeling to the church what the Good News looks like.  We must live for the sake of Christ and the gospel, not the institutional grace of following rules and spending time trying to enter the Kingdom with what we mistakenly believe is essential.