Thanks to Pastor Jim O'Hanlon for the opportunity to preach March 1 at Saint Paul's Lutheran Church.
In today’s Gospel reading in Mark, a rich man asks Jesus for the path to eternal life. Mark says he was so eager to hear the answer that he ran up to Jesus and knelt before him.
But the man is disappointed. He may have been expecting the roving rabbi to tell him he was well on his way to heaven. Instead, Jesus tells him that the best way to close the deal is to sell all he has, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow Jesus.
Matthew adds (19:20) that the man is young, and that is the image most of us have of this unnamed salvation seeker. In North Baptist Church in Port Chester there is a copy of Heinrich Hofmann’s famous picture of “Christ and the Rich Young Ruler” showing the young man turning his head away in disappointment as he places his hand despairingly on his hip. Martha and I like that picture because our daughter Katie often strikes that resentful pose when we tell her she can’t have a second piece of cake. Hofmann captures the universal human reaction when we are told we can’t get what we want – at least not easily.
Both Mark and Matthew report that the salvation seeker went on his way grieving because, we are left to assume, there was no way he was going to give up his temporary luxury for eternal life.
Too, there is Jesus’ famous clincher that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into heaven. (Mark 10:24).
Of course Jesus was kidding. Right?
Scholars have tried for millennia to figure out what Jesus meant, sometimes pointing out that the Aramaic words for “camel” and “rope” sound alike, or that wooden needles used to thread tents were fairly large. I tend to think he was using a preposterous hyperbole to drive his point home, and perhaps he was making a joke. If you read this passage about camels getting through needles to a group that has never heard it before, such as a third grade class, they will laugh.
During my undergraduate years at Eastern University in the sixties and seventies, I recall many spirited discussions between evangelicals and social-gospelers about whether a rich person could achieve a heavenly reward. We shrugged off the camel-through-a-needle analogy as hyperbolic humor on Jesus’ part, and we noted his codicil that “with God all things are possible.” What was harder to explain away was Jesus’ assertion that the rich man had to sell his many possessions and give his money to the poor, because it didn’t sound like he was kidding.
In point of fact, theological issues rarely got solved at Eastern Baptist College. In many ways, the social divisions of the sixties took on an odd confluence at Eastern where the biology department explained creation in the literal terms of the Genesis account, while the religion department insisted God’s creative modus operandi was evolution.
While we undergraduates were arguing camels and needles, we sometimes failed to notice that the bible offers little comfort to the rich. Jesus routinely lambasted persons of wealth.
Especially unpleasant is Luke’s anecdote of the rich man who basks in luxury, scarcely noticing Lazarus, the wretched beggar who is dying of hunger and psoriatic ulcers beneath his table. Lazarus dies and goes to heaven, while the rich man dies and is consigned to the torments of hell. The rich man is condemned because he lived in luxury and never gave a moment’s thought to the suffering poor. (Luke 16:19-31).
Bad news for billionaires. Bad news for Trump and Bloomberg and Steyer. Bad news for Ken Copeland and Creflo Dollar.
And bad news for most of us. Because millions of us who fall far short of the celebrated one percent are nevertheless richer by modern standards than any first century fat cat could possibly imagine.
Worse, many of us in that category are as indifferent to the 45 million U.S. residents who live below the poverty line as the rich man was indifferent to Lazarus.
These are biblical warnings we should keep in mind the next time we wait hopefully in line to buy multi-million dollar lottery tickets. There’s almost no chance we would win, of course, but what if we did win? It would ruin our lives. To be rich would be a terrible fate.
The other-worldly fate of the rich – almost certain hellfire – is sobering, but perhaps it is too finely drawn. Also dubious is the blissful eternity assigned to the poor. It’s too easy to take these verses and design a dialectic that all rich people are hell bound. And it is equally wrong to anesthetize desperately poor people with a promise of pie in the sky when they die.
Perhaps the message Jesus was conveying to the rich young ruler is that his good deeds and his meticulous following of God’s law are not the path to salvation.
The path to salvation was his faith, which he could not earn and could not buy. Faith is not something you ask for; faith is something God grants to each of us through God’s loving grace. As Luther put it, faith is the act of believing God’s promises.
The young man who came to Jesus could not be saved by his good works or his obedience to God’s law; and Jesus reminded him he had no need for earthly riches, either. God who loved him unconditionally would take care of him.
Martin Luther systematically excised biblical books he didn’t like, declaring them “Apocrypha”. In particular, Luther didn’t care for the letter of James, which he called “an epistle of straw.”
Luther objected to the church’s habit of extorting “good works” from its beleaguered congregations for its own profit, and he declared that a gospel of works was a tool of the devil.
Given the corruption of the church in Luther’s day, it’s hard to disagree with him.
In our day, however, James seems to be raising urgently legitimate questions:
“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” (James 2:14-17.)
That’s another way of saying that if one truly has faith, good works must follow automatically. There can be no good works in the absence of faith. And if faith is present, good works cannot be stifled.
That’s a sobering thought for any faithful Christian who has stepped over a sleeping homeless person or brushed off a hungry pan-handler, as I have done and so many do.
But most of us ignore human needs far greater than that and assuage our guilt in precisely the fashion James warns us about: by praying for the desperate, as if to invite them to “keep warm and eat your fill.”
But for persons of faith, this good work should have been automatic. Naturally we have been praying earnestly for poor and endangered people, but some Christian leaders propose direct action – faith-based good works that can save lives. Pope Francis opened the doors of the Vatican to shelter families of refugees “fleeing death,” and he has called in Catholic parishes, convents, and monasteries across Europe to do the same.
There are, of course, an abundance of crises at home and abroad that cry out for us to prove the bona fides of our faith through good works.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 45 million persons in the U.S. live below the poverty line, and most of them need more than our advice to keep warm and eat their fill.
A 2012 speech by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon could be both a prayer list and a call to action for persons of faith:
“Projections indicate that in 2015 more than 600 million people worldwide will still be using unimproved water sources, almost one billion will be living on an income of less than $1.25 per day, mothers will continue to die needlessly in childbirth, and children will suffer and die from preventable diseases. Hunger remains a global challenge, and ensuring that all children are able to complete primary education remains a fundamental, but unfulfilled, target that has an impact on all the other Goals. Lack of safe sanitation is hampering progress in health and nutrition, biodiversity loss continues apace, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to pose a major threat to people and ecosystems. The goal of gender equality also remains unfulfilled, again with broad negative consequences, given that achieving the MDGs depends so much on women’s empowerment and equal access by women to education, work, health care and decision-making.”
Most of the world’s churches have endorsed the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals that were originally set to alleviate these problems by 2015.
Some economists, including Dr. Jeffrey David Sachs of Columbia University, point out that a nation as rich as the United States has within its means the ability to wipe out all poverty on earth.
But a good work of that magnitude will require a lot more faith than we can muster by ourselves.
We don’t need the parable of Lazarus and the rich man to remind us that God expects God’s people, saved by God’s grace, to be alert to the needs of the poor and suffering peoples around us.
You and I may not be essential parts of God’s plan to end the poverty that kills in our nation and around the world. And you and I may not be called to sell all we have to aid the poor.
But God does expect us to heed Jesus’ invitation to the rich young ruler: “Follow me.”
Because Jesus has already paid the price of the sin that causes us to be indifferent to the suffering around us.
Jesus called upon the rich young ruler to remember: God does not need his good works, but the young man’s neighbors do. And if he follows Jesus, he will discover he can stop obsessing about himself and his personal needs; and he will discover on his own what he needs to do to help the poor around him.
It may seem like a tall order to accept that kind of grace.
But, as Jesus said, “With God, all things are possible.
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