As he 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: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.’” He said to him, “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!” And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how hard it is 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.” They were greatly astounded and said to one another, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.” Peter began to say to him, “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 for 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 10:17-31)
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“… go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor ...” Wait a minute here. I mean – hang on for one second. Did he really mean – everything? Seriously? Everything? I mean – surely not. Because – well, everything would mean a lot of things. It would be – I guess – everything! He couldn’t have meant everything. Could he?
That’s what really makes this a tough passage for a lot of people to deal with. “… go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor ...” Let’s face it – even the most hardened fundamentalist who insists that the Bible has to be taken absolutely literally is going to start looking for some escape clause on this one. Jesus was talking to someone who was apparently a man of wealth. So, maybe that’s our out. I’m not rich. Not me. So, sure, Jesus wants the wealthy to sell all that they have and give the money to the poor. But I’m not wealthy so I don’t have to worry about this one. Right? That’s a relief. Except. When we were in China in 2005, people on the streets constantly asked us for money. We had been warned by our guides never to give money to anyone who asked for it. It’s heart breaking, because they would send little children out of the shadows (3 and 4 year olds) to approach our group to beg for money. You wanted to give – but we were told that if we gave to one child, there were dozens of others watching and we would be immediately swarmed by others demanding money, and by their parents, and things would get out of control, and the police would have to be called to restore order, and – as we were told – “you don’t want to get involved with the police in Beijing.” I said to one of our fellow travelers that people must think that we were rich. My friend (who had been to China before) said “We can travel from Canada to China and back. To them we are rich.” And I thought about the fact that every morning I was going down to the front desk of our hotel and cashing $100 or $200 in travelers cheques without a second thought, being greeted by someone earning about $15 a month. So I have to wonder - who’s rich and who’s poor? The reality is that we here are a tremendously blessed people indeed, by any measure, and Jesus wants us to share our blessings with those who have less. But, still - “… go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor ...” It seems a bit extreme. It grates on us. At the very least Jesus is reminding us that whatever we have, none of it is ours. Everything comes from God. John Wesley once said that “if I die with ten pounds to my name, I’ll have stolen it.” And he was making the same point – nothing he had was his own. It came from God and God expects us to use our blessings in order to be a blessing to others. Some people talk about “tithing” - the idea that we should give 10% of our income to the church. I don’t talk much about tithing – for two reasons. First because it’s easy for tithing to become a form of legalism, so that I do it grudgingly, only because I have to. Secondly, it gives the impression that actually only 10% of what I have belongs to God and the other 90% is mine to do with as I please. But Jesus seems to say “no.” Whatever we have and everything we have is God’s and our overarching God-given purpose is to use what God has given us to be a blessing to others.
Part of the problem in this story was the rich man himself. He thought he could earn his way into God’s good book. He thought that if he just did enough things, everything would be fine and dandy and God would be so proud of him. But – maybe deep down inside – he seemed to realize that something was lacking. So he went to Jesus. “I’ve kept all the commandments. But I still don’t feel it. So what more do I have to do?” And Jesus basically said “everything.” So if you’re going to try to earn your way into God’s favour then you better leave no stone unturned. You better be willing to give everything and to do everything. So this rich man had a problem because he was willing to do things, but he had a lot of stuff, and he wasn’t willing to give his stuff away. You see stuff – whether money or any other possession – can easily replace God; it can become an idol; people can live for their stuff rather than for God; they can live to get more and more and more rather than to give abundantly and be a blessing. The rich man had done a lot of things – but most of what he had done hadn’t cost him anything. “Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t cheat, honour your parents.” Those things don’t “cost” us anything. In fact they come with a reward. We’re admired for doing those things. The rich man was admired because of all he had done, but now because he had been pious enough to gain all that admiration from people he expected to be admired by God as well. But he hadn’t really done anything for God. He had all the trappings of religion, but nothing particularly life-changing and he couldn’t figure out why that hadn’t given him any assurance. Gandhi, in a book called “The Seven Dangers To Human Virtue,” identified one of those dangers as “religion without sacrifice.” If our faith calls us to give up nothing (or as little as possible, or only so much that we don’t notice that it’s missing) then there’s a problem in our relationship with God. That, I think, is what Jesus was getting at. When he said to the rich man “… go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor,” I don’t think he was calling so much for a material sacrifice but for a spiritual change of heart that would cause the rich man to understand that what he possessed was really God’s and that he needed to be constantly aware of opportunities to serve God by using what he had for the benefit of God’s people, regardless of the costs involved. That’s the point.
We shouldn’t be too hard on the rich man of the story. At least he understood that something was wrong; something was missing. That’s why he went to Jesus. “I’ve done it all,” he said. “So what more is there?” In a sense this was a confession – a moment of blinding self-realization as much as anything. He realized that for all the stuff he had, he actually had nothing. He had been blessed, but he had missed out on the fact that God by blessing him wanted him to be a blessing. And there’s the challenge for us all: to live in such a way that not only acknowledges that all that we have is God’s (which is easy) but also to live in such a way that acknowledges that all that we have is God’s (and that’s hard because it calls us to make sacrifices.)
Put this story into the context of where Mark places it in relation to Jesus’ life. By the next chapter of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus would be making his entry into Jerusalem, being hailed by the crowds as Messiah, and then rejected by them mere days later but then confirmed with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead. Think about that story for a moment, and then think back to this story. We don’t actually know what happened to the rich man. Did he ever find the secret of eternal life that he was looking for? Jesus explained that secret to him rather well: “… go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” I think what Jesus was saying was that those who follow him have to be willing to give up everything – to give of themselves and their very being for the sake of the gospel and for the sake of sharing good news with the world and for the sake of being the good news to the world by how we give of ourselves for others. As I said, we don’t know what happened to the rich man, but I’d like to think that perhaps he followed Jesus into Jerusalem and saw – on the cross just a few days later – what Jesus really meant when he told the rich man to “… go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” It’s not just the material things – Jesus does mean that we have to be prepared to give out of that which God has given us for the sake of others, but there’s more. Jesus, I think, wants a change in our attitudes; a change in our perspectives; a change in our hearts. Jesus wants us to live each day knowing that, if necessary, we can give everything because we really possess nothing – it’s all God’s.
So, let me ask you one more time: Did he really mean ‘everything’? Yeah. He did. Because ultimately he did it himself.
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