It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.
Matthew 19:24
In his book, Money and the Meaning of Life, Professor Jacob Needleman, writes:
Theoretically, philosophically, I may be quite willing to accept that there is a higher reality… But when it comes to money – ah, that is usually quite a different matter… Everywhere [money] is still understood, often even more forcibly than in matters of illness and death, as representing the ‘real world’ – the ‘bottom line’.
This is a modern philosopher’s way of saying much the same thing as Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus’ comment quoted above, and the story behind it, are told in three of the four gospels: Matthew 19, Mark 10 and Luke 18. I believe it was therefore important.
A rich young ruler – a man of about the same age as Jesus – approached Jesus with a profound question: ‘What must I do to obtain eternal life?’ As a devout Jew, he was not asking how he might live forever but how he could be confident of going to heaven.
It was probably not the first time he had asked the question and I suspect that he had never received an answer that satisfied him. He may taken the courage to ask again from seeing Jesus’ openness and kindness in welcoming a group of young children, after his disciples had tried to keep them away.
Jesus gave what was probably the usual reply the man had heard before: keep the commandments. (What we would call the Ten Commandments.) The man replied that he had done that since his childhood and Jesus did not seem to doubt it. Again as a Jew, the man was not claiming any sort of moral or religious perfection, free from all sin and wrong-doing, only that he had lived a sincere, moral life. Jesus then said something new, ‘But you lack one thing’, and told him to give away his wealth, so that he would have treasure in heaven, and follow with his disciples.
We will look at treasure in heaven later in this series; today, we focus on what the man lacked. Some have assumed from Jesus’ words that the man lacked poverty and concluded that poverty is the correct situation for ‘true’ Christians. This, however, cannot be correct because the New Testament mentions rich Christians and there is nothing in the Bible to suggest that it is wrong to be wealthy.
The thing the man lacked was trust: unequivocal trust in God. Jesus’ words revealed that the man’s trust in God was incomplete: he could not bring himself to transfer the trust he had in his inherited wealth to God alone by experiencing voluntary poverty.
If we had approached Jesus with the same question, would he have needed to tell us to give away all our possessions, savings and investments to demonstrate what Professor Needleman calls ‘real world’, ‘bottom line’ trust in God?
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Copyright © All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre & Church and Philip Evans 2012.
Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
These Advent Reflections do not teach personal finance skills and where these skills are mentioned the issues have been simplified. Handling money and dealing with money problems and debt can be complicated and neither the author nor anyone else involved in the production of these Reflections is responsible for any action you take, or fail to take, based on what is written here.
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