Camels, Needles and Such
Mark 10:17-31 Good News Translation (GNT)
17 As Jesus was starting on his way again, a man ran up, knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to receive eternal life?”
18 “Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked him. “No one is good except God alone. 19 You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not accuse anyone falsely; do not cheat; respect your father and your mother.’”
20 “Teacher,” the man said, “ever since I was young, I have obeyed all these commandments.”
21 Jesus looked straight at him with love and said, “You need only one thing. Go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor, and you will have riches in heaven; then come and follow me.” 22 When the man heard this, gloom spread over his face, and he went away sad, because he was very rich (Greek, literally, “owned much property”).
23 Jesus looked around at his disciples and said to them, “How hard it will be for rich people to enter the Kingdom of God!”
24 The disciples were shocked at these words, but Jesus went on to say, “My children, how hard it is to enter the Kingdom of God! 25 It is much harder for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.”
26 At this the disciples were completely amazed and asked one another, “Who, then, can be saved?”
27 Jesus looked straight at them and answered, “This is impossible for human beings but not for God; everything is possible for God.”
28 Then Peter spoke up, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.”
29 “Yes,” Jesus said to them, “and I tell you that those who leave home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and for the gospel, 30 will receive much more in this present age. They will receive a hundred times more houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and fields—and persecutions as well; and in the age to come they will receive eternal life. 31 But many who are now first will be last, and many who are now last will be first.”
While we were in WestPac late winter, early spring 1970 the screw, the ship’s propellor, had been found cracked and we were sent home to Hunters Point Naval Shipyard for repairs. It was a delightful month in San Francisco during the week, and weekends of flying home to San Diego on the ship’s helicopter Friday afternoons and back Monday mornings. One of the things I loved doing in San Francisco was driving to the Japanese neighborhood in my VW bug, buying sushi and a Kirin, and taking it to Lincoln Park to enjoy the park and my supper. Sitting on a bench there one afternoon I heard chanting a distance away and coming in my direction. As they drew near I saw a dozen or so girls, college age, in a group, all dressed and coiffed for that era of Americana, which is to say, hippies. A leader would chant, “The Lord Jesus!” and the group would chant in response, “Amen!” And they chanted any number of equally unusual (again for the era) things. The hippie age could be wonderful, especially in San Francisco, and those folks together with their parades and their near-riots, and their music and song heroes, helped move a president out of office early, and the nation out of Vietnam and into an age of conscience, caution, and self-awareness.
Sadly, tragically, our elected leaders forgot Vietnam and as a nation we failed to learn its terrible lessons, and we are morally worse off than ever ... ever ... and face a promise of descending immeasurably deeper into worse and worst. And having grown up in a past-century age of a horrifying salute, this image from NYT this morning is really, really disturbing:
But this is not a political blog, is it, and today’s posting started with our challenging gospel for this coming Sunday and me remembering those hippie girls marching and chanting that beautiful San Francisco afternoon over forty years ago.
In a day and age when, and in a nation where, so many are comparatively well off, we might consider this gospel a hard saying. Few of us are inclined, as was Saint Francis of Assisi whom we celebrated last week, to sell out and give the proceeds to charity like a nation of hippies. So what Jesus says is unsettling. It was actually shocking for those who heard Him say those things two thousand years ago, because in that day and age people regarded wealth as signifying God’s pleasure and poverty as a sure sign of one’s sinfulness and God’s punishment. So, to choose poverty was unthinkable.
Just so today, eh? It would be easier for me to squeeze through the eye of that needle than to give away my house and become a homeless hippie strolling around McKenzie Park chanting “The Lord Jesus! Amen!” all day and sleeping on a park bench. Not happen.
And the theology of making myself righteous by giving everything to the Church so that I will reap enormous wealth a hundredfold in return and earn a place in Heaven -- popular with some very wealthy preachers in some mega-churches these days -- is -- σκύβαλον -- to use the ess word of the New Testament Age. In fact, some scholars suggest that the part of Mark’s story at Mark 10:29-30 may have been constructed in a day when some new Christian communities were demanding that all their members sell everything and pool resources so everyone would share equally, a social, economic, political system mentioned at Acts 5:1-11 and a concept proved not popular during the twentieth century -- though perfect communism was never tried, it always degenerated into oppressive, dictatorial tyranny and greed.
Anyway, when we read Mark chapter 10 we know that Jesus has finished his ministry in Galilee and is on his journey down to Judea and Jerusalem. That’s the situs im leben.
TW+