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.
