This Week: Proper 23B
Gospel: Mark 10:17-31
This passage is about money. Wealth. And everybody knows it.
How we feel about that, however, can get us riled up. And it can reveal what we really think of it. And I think that is a big part of what Jesus is talking about.
Money as evil
We are familiar with the idea that money is the root of evil and most of us recognize the corrupting influence of it—from gaining it to worrying about losing it.
Many also enjoy pushing back against this seemingly all-or-nothing approach to something they prefer thinking of as a “tool” that is fundamentally neutral. While literally (mostly) true, this kind of abstraction is deceptive in both intent and substance. Because we aren’t demonizing money neutrally—we are demonizing corruption and its favorite tool.
Another way we parse this conversation is to speak, not about the currency itself, as if we’re talking about the corruptibility of a quarter we find on the ground against the corruptibility of a $75,000 bribe to a Supreme Court justice. This parsing of the meaning is absurd. The problem, then, is wealth, not the money—which actually is a way of pretending that bribe of a justice isn’t even real anyway.
What we’re avoiding is what the Hebrew people were taught about money and wealth; what Jesus means about these things; and what it means to deal with letting go of our own love of money.
Wealth as ill-gotten
The Hebrew people predated capitalism by a couple thousand years, so they aren’t thinking about wealth as its own thing, floating free. It isn’t personified or taxed or circulated.
Wealth was defined by the Hebrew people as theft.
People who have money are, by definition, people who stole it.
That is wealth.
Wealth as exploitation
How one obtains wealth, for the Hebrew people, is by taking it from someone else. This is the reason tax collectors were demonized. Not because the Hebrew people are libertarians who hate taxation, but because an oppressive occupying country employed tax collectors to demand taxes—and the only way for tax collectors to get paid is if they charged the people they were taxing more than Rome was asking for.
Today’s skeptics like to depict the modern state as embodying this same character, which is as quaint as it is disingenuous. But they are missing the point as easily as everyone else: the state isn’t the all-consuming problem. It is the wealth and the people’s relationship to it.
For Jesus, exploitation is the great connecting sin of the Hebrew tradition. It is what binds the Ten Commandments, what the Sabbath and the year of Jubilee are designed to eliminate, and what a message of freedom is intended to evoke: freedom from oppression, exploitation, slavery.
There are three great sins with the exploitative character of wealth:
- It eliminates the equality and dignity of every human being
- It centralizes power in the figure of one person.
- The pursuit of that power is an idol for anyone seeking wealth.
Wealth as Mammon
The ancient word for the Hebrew people for this love of power through wealth: Mammon. They gave it a proper name, personified it, so that it could be taken as a rival god to G-D. That is how we are supposed to take love of wealth—not as morally dubious, but as idol-worship. It is a rejection of the grace of God.
It would be hard for someone to enter the kingdom of God if they are worshipping another god, right?
Wealth as present/future obstacle
The idea of seeking to “enter the kingdom” as Jesus describes it is a both/and, for the Kin-dom of God is both/and. It is now and in the future. So Jesus is naming this as a challenge to both concepts.
Seeking or possessing wealth in our world makes it difficult to be a part of the Kin-dom in our midst. Because we are (essentially) worshipping another god who excuses exploitation and presents inequality as just something that happens in life, is no big deal, and besides, if we dealt with it, then the wealthy might have to cut into their bank accounts, and who really wants that, I thought we were trying to be fair, here?
The problem is not just being wealthy: condoning wealth accumulation is also anti-Kin-dom behavior. The Kin-dom, remember, is about ensuring everybody is fed their fill daily—not saying “sucks to be you” to people who can’t feed themselves. Nor is it only feeding the person next to you. We are called to expose the evil of inequity. To be part of a way of living that feeds, serves, and equalizes.
Wealth also is intended to be seen, as we might more readily take it, as a litmus test for the future. To participate in the great eternal balancing of the world, we will want to be on the side of the ledger that has done the will of God when we had the chance—which is to say, maybe we cared about people more than money throughout our lives.
The absence of wealth as discipleship
The thematic move in the story is never stated directly, but demonstrated clearly in the action of the passage.
- A learned and pious man seeks advice from Jesus—and he is told to ditch his wealth for faith and devotion.
- Jesus teaches that it is hard to love wealth and be a disciple.
- Peter freaks out because he wants to be a good disciple.
The funny turn, in the end, in which Peter names all of this sacrifice they have made, wanting to prove something to Jesus, has a slight tint of comedy. Like a saint talking about wanting to be a good person or a pro athlete wanting to be a good player. The ironic twist is that they already are doing it. They are embodying it already. And Peter still doesn’t see it.
And the reason he doesn’t see it is that he is trying to have from Jesus the very same thing that pious man approached Jesus for: certainty.
This, of course, is what wealth is really about. It is what people long for. They want certainty that they can have luxury or safety or pleasure. And if we don’t have money, we don’t know where the next meal is coming from or how we’ll pay the electrical bill. We lose that security.
First the man, then Peter, ask for certainty from Jesus. A promise that they are good. That they are perfect/safe/great/whatever. And Jesus suggests that they should already know the answer. How? Because the pious man has a lot of wealth he doesn’t want to lose and the disciples gave up the certainty of money and handed all of that trust to God.