Scripture: Mark 10:17-23
There is a teaching of Jesus in the scripture reading for this morning. The question is: What is it? It’s not stated directly. It comes in the form of a story, and although stories do have messages and teachings in them, they are very often not unambiguous ones. Stories are open to interpretation. This story in particular, I think we would have to say, is open to interpretation.
I often think of this passage when someone seems to be arguing that we should take the Bible literally, that the plain meaning of the words of scripture ought to be binding for Christians. Well the plainest thing in this story is when Jesus tells a man who comes to him with questions to “go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
I have some books in my library that deal with what the authors consider to be troubling texts of the Bible or the difficult teachings of Jesus. To my amazement, this is not one of them. To me, this is a troubling text, troubling enough if you don’t take it literally, which I don’t. It seems to me it would be deeply troubling to anyone who thinks the Bible, in this case the words of Jesus himself, should be taken literally. Unless, of course, you are willing to divest yourself of all earthly possessions, which some few people in human history have been willing to do. That does not apply however to the vast majority of people who argue that we should take the Bible literally, or the vast majority of the rest of us, for that matter.
Now, of course, Biblical literalists could argue, and often do argue, that we are only supposed to take literally those parts of the Bible that are meant to be taken literally, and so they could say that Jesus never meant for his words to be taken literally or as binding on the rest of us. Maybe he meant them literally for the man he was speaking to but didn’t mean them to apply to us. Maybe they were a prescription for the particular dis-ease that person was feeling, not a general teaching for everyone. Or maybe he didn’t mean them literally even for the man in the story. Maybe he was simply saying that to make a point, to help the man understand just how deeply he was tied to his possessions. Maybe…well, maybe all sorts of things, but of course once you get into all these maybes, you are involved in interpreting the scripture and not just taking it literally. I would say that that’s always true when we read the Bible. It’s impossible to read it without interpreting it in some way. To me, this story makes that point rather plainly.
So what about this story? I should say that I chose this passage for a combination of reasons. It’s commonly agreed that Jesus spoke frequently about money. Some people say it’s the topic he spoke the most about. That’s debatable, I’m sure, depending on how you read various passages. He spoke pretty often about topics like faith and love, as well, but no need to quarrel over such things. Money, wealth, possessions came up often in Jesus’ preaching and teaching, and I have known from the beginning that if I was going to do a number of sermons on the teachings of Jesus, I would not be able to avoid what he had to say about money. I’d need to deal with that sooner or later. I decided on sooner. Partly because we’re heading into stewardship season here at church. You’ll be receiving a letter in the mail shortly, and in November there will be talk during worship about pledging and church finances and so forth, and committees have already been working on budgets for next year, and a few weeks ago we had conversation in a congregational meeting about a capital campaign for next year. I guess money is sort of on my mind these days. Maybe that has something to do with what’s going on in the world as well. Money is probably on a lot of people’s minds these days, much more even than usual.
But then recognizing that November is going to be among other things a stewardship month here at Sojourners, I decided there was some urgency to preach on this topic before we got there, before we got into our stewardship campaign. I’m all in favor of giving to the church. I hope everyone who is part of this community of faith will do so thoughtfully and prayerfully and generously. But this sermon is not about that. Jesus’ teachings about wealth are not an argument for giving to the church. They are not even an encouragement to be generous with our possessions in general. Looking at what Jesus has to say about wealth is not a sly excuse on my part to give a stewardship sermon. So I wanted to do this sermon, at least this one sermon, before we got into the month of November, stewardship month, to try to avoid as much as possible any such confusion, in your mind or in mine.
Which brings me to another thing I want to say in the way of a general comment on this scripture. So ok, we’re not going to take this scripture literally. We don’t really think that Jesus’ teaching is that we should all go out and sell everything we own and give the money to the poor. So what does he mean? It can be awfully tempting to just assume that Jesus didn’t really have anything very challenging in mind. After all, Jesus says elsewhere that a person’s life does not consist in the abundance of one’s possessions, and that’s not too hard to hear, and maybe that’s all Jesus was getting at in this story as well. He just said it in a little bit of a confusing way.
Or maybe he was saying here, as he does say in other places, that we should be thoughtful about how we use our wealth and that we should put it to good purposes like helping those in need. Or maybe our interpretation is along the lines that all Jesus really meant to say was that we shouldn’t hang on to our possessions for dear life, and so selling all you have and giving to the poor can be translated as be generous and giving with what you have, as opposed to hoarding. Maybe that was the simple point that Jesus was making, even though he made it in an extreme sort of way, maybe to get our attention. It’s tempting to interpret the passage in a way that allows us to feel comfortable with what Jesus says. It’s tempting and it’s natural.
Only trouble is we’d be kidding ourselves if we thought that’s what Jesus was saying here. He may talk other places about how life is more than the things we possess or about the virtue of generosity, but here he’s saying something more and different. This is a story with a definite edge to it. We can choose to interpret the edginess out of the story, but if we do, I believe we will not be taking the story seriously. Not taking the Bible literally doesn’t mean that we can’t take it seriously, and here taking what Jesus has to say seriously means not watering it down into some rather ordinary sayings about not being too acquisitive or trying to be generous or make good use of what we have.
I intentionally ended the reading this morning in the middle of verse 24 so that it would end, “And the disciples were perplexed at these words”. As well they should be, and as well we should be. After the incident where Jesus tells the man to sell everything he has, which ends by the way with the man going away grieving—he had not heard Jesus say something easy like, “don’t forget now life is more than possessions”—after this incident Jesus turns to the disciples and says, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God.” That’s when it says the disciples became perplexed. And then Jesus goes on to say—we didn’t hear this earlier—his well known words about how it will be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. At that point the disciples went from being perplexed to being astounded.
What I hear Jesus saying here, and what I believe the disciples heard and what the man in the story heard, is that wealth itself, not greed, not selfishness, not a luxurious lifestyle, not a lack of generosity or a materialistic attitude, but wealth itself is a problem in our relation to God and in our relation to the kingdom of God.
I should make clear that I am not saying, and in no way suggesting that Jesus is saying, that having wealth makes someone a bad person, that it somehow automatically makes a person immoral, that it makes God want to punish people by closing the gates to eternal life to anyone who is “wealthy”. None of that is the point here. In fact the story goes to great pains to tell us, and I think we have to take it at face value, the story tells us that this man was a good man, even a very good man. He kept all the commandments. Jesus took him at his word on that. He wanted to do the right thing, and even after he had satisfied himself that he was living about as good a life as you could expect any human being to live, he came to Jesus wanting to know if there was something more he was supposed to be doing.
This man already had lots of things: possessions, we are about to find out, a good reputation, a clear conscience. Now he wanted to see if he would also have eternal life. And he was, we presume, sincere in all this. Mark makes a point of saying that “Jesus, looking at (the man), loved him.” Loved him. OK, so maybe to your taste or mine this fella was a little bit too sure of his own righteousness. But as I say, Jesus didn’t question him on that score. He loved him. The man was not bad or unlovable, not unlovable to other people, not unlovable to Jesus, certainly not unlovable in the eyes of God. None of that is the issue here.
What is the issue for Jesus is the kingdom of God, the coming reign of God, the coming reign of God on earth. We should be clear that the kingdom of God, the reign of God that Jesus spoke of so often, that was at the heart of his message, that was at the heart of his being, that was in his heart all the time, this reign of God was probably different from the eternal life that the man in the story was asking about. I don’t know what was in the man’s mind. I don’t know what he meant by eternal life, but probably, I’m thinking, some after-death reward that he would enjoy because of the way he had lived his life on earth.
Jesus means something different when he talks about the kingdom of God. He means a new order of things, a new creation for this life. “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” For those who follow Jesus, they are involved in bringing a whole new order of things into being, a whole new way of people living together. In the afterlife, there may also be the promise of a banquet of the people of God, but Jesus and his followers are involved in bringing something like that to earth as well. The disciples who follow Jesus are involved in ushering in that reign of God and in beginning to live now as if that reign of God were here already. For them it is at hand. They follow a man who preaches about little else and whose heart and soul is devoted to this new order of things.
The trouble with wealth is that it gives you too great a stake in the way things are, in the old order of things. The trouble with wealth in Jesus’ eyes is not that it makes you any less a child of God, any less beloved in the sight of God. The trouble with wealth is that it ties you in too deeply to the way things are. Small adjustments in the way things are, that’s ok. But a whole new way of living? To be open to the reign of God means being open to giving up the old regime entirely, giving up the advantages and possessions you have so carefully put together under the old way of doing things, just as surely as if you were to go out and sell everything you have and give to the poor. A redistribution of wealth? Emphatically, yes. The kingdom of God is about that. The trouble with wealth is that it ties you in too deeply to the way things are, and that it ties you down and keeps you from giving yourself completely to following Jesus. Those who are carrying their wealth around with them are not really free to follow Jesus wherever he would lead them.
Wealth in this story represents two things. It represents wealth, which Jesus does say in itself represents a significant impediment for people being truly open to the idea of a radical reordering of society. Wealth itself, even in our terms rather modest wealth, even wealth that is diminishing every day because of the stock market, wealth does do that to people. But then wealth also stands for everything that can get in the way of our being open to this whole new Way of living, this reign of God, everything that keeps us from devoting ourselves completely to the coming of that kingdom, which I believe is what Jesus meant when he said, “Follow me.” And there are lots of things that can stand in our way besides possessions, so wealth in this story is symbolic of everything that stands in the way of God’s reign among us.
This is a perplexing teaching because there is no way I can go out and try to apply it in my life as it is. A teaching like “love your neighbor” is not perplexing. I can go out this afternoon and try to find some way to love my neighbor. But this teaching seems to ask me or invite me to cut myself loose from my too tied down and tied in life in a way that I am frankly just not going to do. I can’t speak for everyone here, but I can speak for myself, and I can be pretty confident saying as a general statement that most all of us here are pretty well tied in to the present order of things. We are not, few if any of us are going to sell all we have, give the money to the poor and go off and follow Jesus, whatever that might mean to us. We are not going to give up our jobs as fishermen, tax collectors, ministers, or whatever, or any life we have carved out for ourselves in retirement in order to devote ourselves heart and soul to the coming of God’s kingdom.
I have long ago made my peace with the fact that I am going to be only some very rough and distant approximation to the kind of follower Jesus had in mind when he told the man to sell all his possessions. Because I am a person of wealth in the terms of this story, I am inevitably a very, very partial and part-time follower of Jesus. I say I have made my peace with that, and in some ways I have, but in some ways I also know that I need to stay perplexed about it. Maybe all I can really hope for is to be a little bit freer from the encumbrances of my possessions, but I can at least hope for that. And I can continue to read this story and to be moved by Jesus’ vision of God’s reign among us. I know without that vision my soul would be drier, would have less of God in it. Since I am tied in to the present order of things in so many different ways, anything I can do to keep that vision alive, to keep that prayer—“thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth—to keep that prayer and that hope alive, is something I need to do. I give thanks for this story, perplexing though it may be. Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 26, 2008