“As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments….’ The man said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.’ Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me. When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions. Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!.....It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ Peter said, ‘Look, we have left everything and followed you.’ Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age – houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions – and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.’” Mark 10:17-19a, 20-23, 25,28-31
The “Occupy” movement added the phrase “the 99% and the 1%” to our vocabulary. The phrase refers to the increasingly inequitable distribution of wealth in our country. The “1%” are the very rich, that 1% of the population who are said to possess or control much of America’s wealth. The large political donations of the wealthiest “1%” are used to persuade both political parties to serve the priorities of the “1%”. The 99% are…..the rest of us.
In the Gospel passage above, Jesus is accosted by a member of the “1%” of his day. “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” the man asks. Jesus reminded the man of the commandments, which the man affirms he has kept faithfully from his youth. Jesus tells the man, “You lack one thing; sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” As it turns out, it was not what the man lacked – apparently he lacked for very little - but what the man possessed, that was his problem. The rich young man saw eternal life as one more possession to be possessed, one more commodity to be purchased. But following Jesus meant traveling light, and the man’s possessions and his concern for them would endlessly be getting in the way and slowing down their mission. Jesus gently, lovingly gives the man an ultimatum – “You can keep all that stuff, or you can follow me. You can’t do both.” And the man made his choice, a choice that revealed his true priorities.
Care for the poor and dispossessed and condemnation of extreme and unjust wealth are recurring themes throughout Scripture. Those with land were told not to harvest every last piece of fruit or vegetable from their fields, but to leave some around the edges for the poor to glean (Leviticus 19:9-10). In effect, the wealthy were commanded to provide a social safety net for those less fortunate. The prophets denounced those who “sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals, they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way….they lay themselves beside every altar on garments taken in pledge, and in the house of their God they drink wine bought with fines they imposed (Amos 2:6-8).” James, whose epistle we read in worship during September, writes, “Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you…..The wages of your laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out!” (James 5:1,4) According to Luke’s Gospel, Jesus not only taught, “Blessed are you who are poor” but “Woe to you who are rich.” (Luke 6:20, 24) And in the passage above, Jesus made it clear to the rich man that his personal piety and scrupulous religious observance would not save him.
By contrast, Jesus tells Peter, “There is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age.” Jesus was building a new kind of community, the Reign of God, in which Jesus’ followers would act as brother and sister and mother and father and children to one another, sharing all that they possessed among one another. In the spirit of the saying, “Mi casa es su casa” (my house is your house); the followers of Jesus shared their possessions – houses, fields – so that many houses and many fields were available to all members of the community. Paradoxically, in the reign of God, if we grasp tightly to what we consider ours, we lose it and it helps no one; if we open our hands and share what is ours with others, blessings are multiplied, for others and for ourselves. May Emanuel Church be a place where the lonely can find mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and children aplenty; a community of open hands and open hearts.
See you in church –
Pastor Dave
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