Jesus wants us to talk about money. I know you don’t want me to talk about money. And you know I don’t want to talk about money. But here we are. Just like I didn’t want to talk about divorce last week, but there it was. Jesus wants us dealing with important stuff.
Jesus is saying we can’t buy our way in
Proper 23B | Mark 10:17-31
So this guy comes up to Jesus asking what it takes. And Jesus says to just get rid of all your stuff and follow me. So the guy runs away balling his eyes out.
This is how we usually hear this story.
And the teaching with the disciples doesn’t help much. What with the wealthy, heaven, eye of the needle stuff. So this sounds just like last week, when Jesus talks about divorce. That’s the passage right before this in Mark. Just like that one, this sounds like a teaching we like to explain away or pretend doesn’t say what it says.
But, also, just like that teaching about divorce, what seems to be the point isn’t really the point.
This man comes to Jesus and kneels down. He kneels like all the people who came to Jesus for healing and the people who come to him for grace. The man is seeking to be healed and forgiven. So he gets down on one knee.
But his words show he only gets it by half.
“Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Like the prodigal sons, he wants to talk about inheritance before it’s paid out. Assurance, perhaps? Like divine insurance — a certain promise of payout?
And he wants to do… the doing for which the receiving is expected.
So Jesus then names the six don’t commandments and the man assures Jesus he has kept them his whole life.
The man’s appeal at this point doesn’t sound like a man who has done anything to deserve eternal life. He has refrained from what he believes would prevent him from passively inheriting it.
So Jesus gives him something to do.
This isn’t an attempt to prove his worth. It’s a chance to do. Just like the man asked (what must I do?).
The first four commandments are about God:
- Love God.
- Don’t make a graven image.
- Don’t use God’s name in vain.
- Keep the Sabbath.
We already know what Jesus thinks about the Sabbath – our keeping it means healing people in a synagogue and feeding the hungry. Regardless of what the laws say. And we’ll see near the end of the journey what Jesus thinks these commandments really mean:
Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
So Jesus gives the man something to do: Go, sell your stuff, give what you gain to the poor, and come follow me to Jerusalem, because we’re almost there.
This is how the story is about money.
Ched Myers points out that when Jesus is listing the six don’t commandments, he slips a new interpretation in there.
Jesus says to the man “you shall not defraud”. The Greek word he uses here is a strange word, apostereō. This word is rarely used outside the New Testament and in all four gospels, it’s only used in this verse.
These few other uses of the word describe an abuse of power to steal from someone. What we’d call wage theft. It’s not just stealing or oppressing, but exploiting other people because you can for your own gain.
And because we know that Jesus has several times now shown his followers not to miss the point of the law to follow the letter of it, we have yet another chance to see it.
This man is standing before Jesus begging to be healed and Jesus loves him. He loves him.
And he invites him to come with him.
It’s another example of the same invitation Jesus keeps offering: to die to yourself, take up your cross, becoming one of the lowest as the lowest become first in line for the kin-dom.
So he’s offering this man this same invitation. Join the ranks of those seeking the kin-dom. Give up your possessions like we have. Help lift the poor out of poverty, and follow the way of Jesus.
And the man walks away.
If this were a different gospel…
This man would show back up at the end, clearly changed. Or if this were a still other gospel, this man would be torn between following Jesus and the welfare of his kingdom.
But in this one, this pious young man is paralleled with Peter. The one who keeps stepping in it. The one who has no things to give up and is already following Jesus. He’s asking for the assurance, that precious signed document from State Farm saying yes, you’ll get your divine payout.
But this isn’t Jesus’s point. And the disciples miss it as easily as we do.
This isn’t about the money and it’s also not not about the money.
It’s about wealth and what wealth does to all of us. Wealth makes us into stumbling blocks and tempters. It draws on our feeble egos and justifies stealing. Wealth encourages wage theft and then excuses it as a cost of doing business. Even blaming the worker for their own exploitation.
At the heart of Mark’s gospel is this vision of the corrupting influence of power and wealth; and Jesus is offering the antidote. He has a vision only a few can see and all the demons fear.
A kin-dom which flips the economy upside down and says children are the only ones who really get it.
This is the challenge of the beloved community.
That this isn’t it! Our rat races and hierarchies; the pursuit of money and taking each other down to get it. A world which excuses the presence of hunger, rather than feeds. Which punishes the poor rather than celebrate their equality.
It sometimes seems like this is a godforsaken world. Because if we’ve got eyes like Jesus, we’d have a hard time seeing the kin-dom in this.
But that’s only when we look at the top of the pyramid. When we look at the people eager to steal the wages of those they employ or justify the persistent cruelty with their own greed.
If we look down, closer to the ground, that’s where we’re likely to see God’s work anyway. The Holy Spirit is flowing through our smallest people, remember. Some of us might be able to reach the top shelf, but this is one way we’re vertically challenged. Being tall means we’re spiritually-challenged!
We can’t buy our way into the kin-dom.
We build it together. Not by some rich benefactor throwing money at it, but by our doing the work together, sharing in Jesus’s upside-down economy. We don’t make people go home or buy their own lunch in town; but take what we’ve got and see what happens.
We aren’t passive recipients of grace, avoiding all the bad stuff, never doing anything wrong, getting perfect attendance at school or always getting straight A’s. We don’t inherit eternal life. And we don’t earn it or win it or steal it or exploit others to grab it. We build it and share in it.
So we sit with each other and play pretend. We build Lego kingdoms and make up silly songs and make macaroni and cheese again because it’s their favorite. And we love them.
And that’s how we can know they will inherit eternal life.
For more thinking on money, check out this timely piece from this week’s episode of On the Media.