This is a tough gospel lesson. It is tough to understand, and it is tough to follow. Commentators I’ve read this week have varied wildly in their interpretations of the text, and in their suggestions about how to preach it. Since the text claims it is difficult to get into the kindom of God, it could seem like an odd passage for a baptism Sunday, when we celebrate inclusion in the Body of Christ and the shared work of building the kindom of God. I think it is going to work out for us in the end though.

I want to review a few points about the text before looking at it more broadly. The Christian tradition has often referred to the questioner in this passage as the “rich, young ruler” which is a conflation of the three versions from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Mark doesn’t tell us the man was young, nor a ruler, and he doesn’t INTRODUCE him as rich. We do find out that he is along the way though. As Ched Myers points out in Binding the Strong Man, “A possession is used to describe a piece of landed property of any kind… a farm or a field, and in the plural lands or estates.”¹ This puts him in the top 3% of wealth in the ancient world, and likely actually the top 1%.

The big interpretative question of this text is: is it good or bad to be wealthy? Or, more specifically – did the people to whom Jesus was speaking think it was good or bad to be wealthy? As John Dominic Crossan pointed out when he was here last fall, there are two streams of thought in the Bible. One is the “covenant” stream, in which God and the people make a deal and IF the people follow what they’re supposed to do THEN God will bless them with peace and prosperity. If not, God will punish them. The second stream, and it may be good to know that John Dominic Crossan thinks these streams are about the same size, is the stream of Sabbath and distributive justice. In this stream, God does not engage in reward nor punishment, although there remain natural consequences for actions. In this stream, human beings are responsible for their actions – and for taking care of each other. God is, at all times, encouraging resource distribution that maximizes abundant life.

John Dominic Crossan says that the stream of thought you follow in the Hebrew Bible impacts how you hear the New Testament. This seems especially true of how this passage gets interpreted. One school of thought thinks that the people Jesus were speaking to would have thought that wealthy people were wealthy because they were blessed by God, thus the disciples would have worried, “if the rich man can’t get in, the rest of us have no hope!” In this perspective, the end of the passage makes sense. If someone is asked to leave wealth, they’ll be given more of it later to make up for it.

Sakari Häkkinen, Department of New Testament Studies, Faculty of Theology, University of Pretoria, South Africa, helps us with context, “In the ancient world, generosity was directed rather to community, not to the needy, who were rather despised more than pitied.”² and “Those who had no problems with sustenance were altogether at most 10%, whereas in continuous problems of sustenance were living some 90% of the population, more than two thirds of them in severe or extreme poverty.”³

The other school of thought assumes the opposite. It assumes that because wealth was concentrated in the hands of very few, the poor resented them for it. Those who explain this mindset point out that there were a lot of zero sum assumptions at that time. Ancient Palestine and Galilee were part of an honor society, in which it was assumed that honor belonged to families, and if it was lowered – then someone else gained; and if it was raised, then someone else lost it. Thus, they say that people thought that way about wealth too. Ched Myers says,

As we have seen in the discussion of the class structure of Mark’s Palestine, landowners represented the most politically powerful social stratum. With this revelation, the story of the man abruptly finishes, as if the point is obvious. As far as Mark is concerned, the man’s wealth has been gained by ‘defrauding’ the poor – he was not ‘blameless’ at all – for which he might make restitution. For Mark, the law is kept only through concrete acts of justice, not the facade of piety.⁴

Bruce Malina in the Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels says, “In a limited-good society, compliments indicate aggression; they implicitly accuse a person of rising about the rest of one’s fellows at their expense.”⁵ And, compliments came with expectation of reciprocity. That’s why, he says, Jesus got snarky about not being good, he didn’t want the compliment, nor did he want to return one. Malina says , “To follow the discussion here, one must realize that ‘rich’ people were automatically considered thieves or heirs of thieves since all good things in life are limited. The only way one could get ahead was to take advantage of others.”⁶ Yet, it is important to note that a loss of wealth would be a loss of social status, and that would be a loss of HONOR, which would be the ultimate loss in that society.

Those in this view have a good way to make sense of the commandment that Jesus ADDED to his list that otherwise only included ones from the 10 commandments. Did you notice it? He says, “You shall not defraud.” Malina explains, “In the Greek Bible, the verb is appropriated to the act of keeping back the wages of a hireling, whereas in Classical Greek it is used of refusing to return goods or money deposited with another for safekeeping.⁷

I have to admit, I’m not sure which school of thought makes more sense to me. Sure, wealth was unevenly distributed, and those paying attention would have been furious about it. Further, I think Jesus was paying attention, and I think he followed the distributive justice stream. But I don’t know how the peasants in Galilee thought about wealth. It seems plausible to me that they thought the wealthy were blessed by God. It also seems plausible to me that their faith in God helped them see otherwise – if they followed the distributive justice stream. In fact, if I’m really honest, I think the people who listened to Jesus fell into both camps! Likely, not everyone heard it the same way. Likely not everyone who wrote about Jesus’ teaching thought about it in the same way.

Yet, the passage draws us into some really good questions. Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” I believe that he is talking about God’s realm on earth, and not about afterlife. And, I think maybe he is right. While I think the whole point of Christianity is to build the kindom of God, I also think there are a lot of thing that make it hard to make a 100% commitment to it, to live it, to ENTER it. One of those things has always been wealth. The kindom is a cooperative realm- where there is a distribution of justice AND of resources. Thus, anyone who has wealth and hasn’t shared it isn’t entirely living the kindom.

But monetary wealth isn’t the only facet of kindom living. The kindom is a place, a time, of abundance, which means it also requires giving of our energies, our talents, our passions. Further, I believe the kindom is built on healing and wholeness, not to mention authenticity! So, the things that hold us back from fully sharing ourselves, and our passions, and our talents – those hold back the kindom too. And that gives us all challenges to work on. Ultimately, as Methodists following John Wesley, we claim sanctification. That is, we claim that God is working within us to perfect our capacity to love others as God does. What direction is God working with you on right now? How is sanctification happening within you? Sanctification is the building of the kindom. And without releasing the things that hold us back from loving God, ourselves, AND others as God loves us all – we’re holding things that are too big to allow us FULLY enter the kindom. May God help us let go. Amen

1Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998 and 2008, 274. He is quoting Taylor, 1963: 430.

2Sakari Häkkinen, “Poverty in the first-century Galilee” in SciElo South Africa On-line version ISSN 2072-8050http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0259-94222016000400046 Accessed 10/13/18

3Ibid.

4Myers, 274.

5Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) “Textual Notes: Luke 16:1-16” p. 191.

6Malina, 191.

7Myers quoting Taylor, page 272 of Myers, 428 of Taylor.

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Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

October 14, 2018