Faith & Money: SALT’s Commentary for Twenty-First Week after Pentecost
Twenty-First Week after Pentecost (Year B): Mark 10:17-31
Check out SALT’s “Strange New World” podcast episode on this passage, “Understanding Jesus - Part Five: The Camel and the Needle.”
Big Picture:
1) This is the seventh week of a twelve-week chronological walk through several chapters in the Gospel of Mark.
2) Jesus has been teaching his disciples about what it means to follow him: tapping into the deeper physics of love and humility, being a “servant of all,” approaching friends and enemies with the goal of making peace, viewing cultural institutions (like marriage and divorce) through the lens of serving the most vulnerable — and now, in this week’s reading, sharing economic resources with people in need.
3) Not surprisingly, since it includes Jesus’ directive to “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor,” this passage has been one of the most controversial — and one of the most, um, “creatively” interpreted — in Christian history. Monastics point to it as the basis for a monk’s vow to poverty. Others insist Jesus only meant his advice to apply to the rich man himself; or only to the extremely rich; or only to a special inner circle of disciples. Still others argue that Jesus’ real concern here is “attachment” to wealth, not the mere possession of it; or that the story is ultimately meant to underscore that salvation comes not from human feats of piety, much less from material resources, but rather from God’s grace alone. Each of these options has merit — and yet, as we’ll see below, each fails to do full justice to the story. Indeed, the story resists reduction to any simple formula: it’s a challenging, haunting, and distinctive episode, not least because it’s the only one in which Jesus explicitly calls someone to follow him and gets turned down.
4) Some stories include teachings that are informative and instructive. Others mark out the boundaries of a kind of “squared circle” (an old name for a wrestling ring), a space for grappling with important principles and how they may or may not apply in our everyday lives. This story is a “squared circle” story: its upshot isn’t to settle the issue of how faith relates to money, but rather to provide us with a framework within which we can wrestle it out, again and again, over the course of our lives.
5) One excellent backdrop against which to read this passage is theologian David Bentley Hart’s remarkable short essay on the early church’s economic life, “Are Christians Supposed to Be Communists?” His answer to this question, by the way, is both No and Yes. Worth a read!
Scripture:
1) Jesus is “on the way” (another possible translation of the key phrase in Mark 10:17). Specifically, as Mark later makes clear, he is on the way to Jerusalem, and ultimately on the way to Golgotha (Mark 10:32-34). And more broadly, he’s traveling the path of Christian life, the way of discipleship, bearing in mind that “The Way” was one of the earliest names for the movement (for example, see Acts 9:2; 19:9). In other words, for Mark, the dialogue with the rich man is fundamentally about what it means to follow Jesus.
2) There’s a lot packed in to the man’s question: “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” First, the man runs up and kneels before Jesus, an unusual approach and posture for a theological discussion; in Mark, running-up-and-kneeling is more typical of those urgently asking for healing (for example, see Mark 1:40; 5:6; 5:33) — so we should interpret the man as profoundly struggling in some way. Second, his question presupposes that “eternal life” is inherited by those who have “done” certain things (“What must I do...?”), presumably those whose actions demonstrate that they are “good” and righteous. And yet Jesus rejects precisely this presupposition in his correction of how the man addresses him: “No one is good but God alone.” On one level, Jesus is saying, Don’t call me “Good Teacher” — but his deeper point is to challenge the question’s premise and the man’s preoccupation, as if to say, You’re looking at this in the wrong way: salvation isn’t a sport in which those who are “good” win the prize. Only God is good. Salvation isn’t earned. You can’t rely on your own efforts, your own “doing” (“What must I do?”), your own resources, your own “goodness.” Salvation is a gift from God, unearned, undeserved, and free!
3) “You lack one thing,” Jesus says, an ironic remark to a man who, with his “many possessions,” ostensibly has everything. But what exactly is the “one thing” he lacks? Is it moral virtue, the ethical standing that arguably comes from selling everything and giving the proceeds to the poor? Perhaps…but if that were true, if this selling-and-giving were simply the good and right thing for human beings to do, we might expect Jesus to recommend it not only to this man but to the crowds as well, or at least to his disciples — but Jesus doesn’t do that. It’s true (as Peter rather anxiously points out!) that the disciples do give up what they own, leaving behind their boats and nets by the shore, but they don’t sell everything and give the proceeds to the poor.
4) So if it isn’t moral virtue the man lacks — what is it? Perhaps the clue is the opening exchange about “goodness.” Perhaps the man, preoccupied with “doing good” so as to achieve his own salvation, trusts too much in his own resources, material and otherwise (“What must I do…?”). Perhaps what he lacks is trust in God, who is, after all, the ultimate source of all goodness and salvation. This interpretation would help explain at least two things in the story: first, why the commandments he has followed “since my youth” are the neighbor-oriented commands (5-10 of the famous ten), not the more explicitly God-oriented ones (1-4 of the famous ten), suggesting, perhaps, a lack of trust in God; and second, why relinquishing wealth is the specific remedy Jesus prescribes, since that would help dispel the man’s illusion of self-sufficiency and afford him a more vivid, tangible experience of depending on God.
5) On the other hand, however, it’s worth noting that Jesus doesn’t call the man to simply walk away from his possessions, or to burn them in a bonfire, but rather to share their value with neighbors in need. Accordingly, perhaps the “one thing” he lacks is generosity: the joyful sharing of blessings with others. Indeed, one of wealth’s hazards is that it can cut people off from genuine, kind-hearted participation in the wider community, which is to say, from living a fully human life.
6) Whether we interpret the “one thing” the man lacks as trust in God, communal generosity, or both (since these “lacks” are often two symptoms of the same ailment: self-centeredness), one temptation here is to let ourselves off the material hook. The point of this story, we tell ourselves, is really about trust and generosity, not about actually selling everything we own! So yes, by all means, let us become less self-centered — but when it comes to our possessions, well, there’s no need to get carried away... But again, the story resists this kind of rationalization. If possessions are a corrupting barrier for this man (and indeed for the disciples, who also left everything behind in order to follow Jesus) — why wouldn’t they also be corrupting barriers for us? If this man lacked trust in God, or generosity to his neighbors — are we really so sure we don’t lack these things, too? In short, if Jesus framed the life of first-century discipleship in startlingly material terms, as a way of life with concrete economic implications — why would twenty-first-century discipleship be any different?
7) In the ancient world (as in many circles today), wealth was widely considered a sign of divine blessing, which is why the disciples are so taken aback when Jesus declares that it’s “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25). “Then who can be saved?” they incredulously ask, as if to say, If even they, the apparently blessed, cannot be saved — who can be? Jesus’ reply makes two points at once: first, that the apparent blessings of wealth are actually more like hazardous obstacles; and second, that while such obstacles can seem to put entering the reign of God out of reach, “for God all things are possible” (Mark 10:27).
Takeaways:
1) Jesus’ call to “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor” isn’t a one-size-fits-all command meant for everyone — if it were, he would have announced it more broadly, starting with his disciples. Instead, there’s something about this particular man that gives rise to Jesus’ advice: perhaps the man’s preoccupation with his own efforts and resources, betraying a lack of trust in God as the source of goodness and salvation; or perhaps his lack of generosity with regard to others in need; or indeed, perhaps both. Pious and earnest as he is, he’s nevertheless self-centered, oriented away from both God and neighbor.
2) But if the call to “sell and give” isn’t for everyone, it could still be for us. We shouldn’t be quick to declare immunity; the rich man’s malady may be a condition for which we, too, require healing. And in any case, for Jesus (and for Mark), discipleship has significant economic consequences that demand to be taken seriously. Peter’s contention that the disciples have done at least part of what the rich man refused to do (Hey, we left everything and followed you!) is evidence enough that the economic consequences of the Gospel apply to more than just this one rich man (Mark 10:28-31).
3) But there’s plenty of other evidence as well: as the Book of Acts has it, the earliest Christian communities sold their assets, pooled the proceeds and “held them in common,” distributing them “to each as any had need” (Acts 4:32-35). Mark’s community shared a similar ethos, valuing a communal form of economic life for which many “left everything” in order to follow Jesus (Mark 10:28). Private wealth, then, had no place in this form of life, and significant private wealth was for many — here the rich man is Exhibit A — an impediment to joining the movement. Accordingly, for Christians today living in a world riven by increasing economic inequality, this challenging, haunting story pushes us to confront just what the economic dimensions of the Gospel might look like in our lives. In short, the church is called to be not just a “holy” community, not just a “moral” community, but a decidedly economic community as well, a movement following a savior who insisted again and again that faith and money are sides of one coin, not two.
4) The good news of the Gospel in this week’s passage is that God’s grace, not our own efforts at being “good,” is the true source of salvation; that Jesus “looks at us and loves us” (Mark 10:21), and so invites us to move beyond concerns with our own inheritance and focus instead on sharing our resources with others in need; and that God seeks to transform even and especially our economic lives into beautiful, humane, generative patterns of love and grace. In the end, human beings are economic creatures; we are more than economic, of course, but not less! And so it only makes sense that God’s salvation would include definite effects on our economic forms of life, just as it did for the earliest disciples. As we struggle together to figure out what those economic effects might be, we can take heart that Jesus sees us, and loves us, and calls us to step forward — and above all, that “for God, all things are possible.”
Check out SALT’s “Strange New World” podcast episode on this passage, “Understanding Jesus - Part Five: The Camel and the Needle.”