The Rich Man
Mark 10:17-31 and Job 23:1-7
October 11, 2009
A cringe. A shudder. A twinge of disbelief. Perhaps these feelings coursed through your body as the story of the rich man from Mark was read. This event in the life of Jesus has developed its own heartbeat, it has taken a life of its own and seems to have perpertually taken up residence in the backs of the minds of many individuals and peoples of faith.
In particular, in the context of our American society today—a society abounding in wealth even in the midst of a deep recession—this passage should, if our faith is a serious one, disturb and unhinge us. Because for most of us sitting here this morning, we are the rich man.
A video the youth watched at Montreat this past summer, called “The Miniature Earth“ put the relative abundance of the United States in perspective by shrinking the world down to 100 people.
If there were only one hundred people on the earth:
- 6 out of 100 people own 59% of all the world’s resources.
- 13 people of the 100 are hungry or malnourished. In a sense, if you have regular access to food, you are the rich man.
- 93 would not have a secondary level education. If you went to high school, you are the rich man.
- Only 12 people have a computer. If you have a computer, you are the rich man.
- If you have a bank account, you are one of the thirty wealthiest people in the world.
- If you keep food in your refrigerator, your clothes in a closet, have a bed to sleep in and a roof over your head, you are richer than 75% of the world’s people.
- 53 of the 100 people live on less than $2 a day.
We, as individuals and as a country, are the rich man.
Now, I realize that many of us have mortgages to pay. Many of us have more debt that we do assets. For many of us we have economic concerns that trouble us; for instance, we have to pay for the education of our children and save for retirement. Some of us may be living from paycheck-to-paycheck. These are realities in our lives that are significant and important.
Yet, we still must confront the fact that when compared with God’s children all around the world, our lives are quite peachy. We even have programs in our governement that help us get by if we lose jobs, that provide healthcare and pensions in our old age, that support many of us going through difficult times. Our lives, for the most part, are rich—both figuratively and literally.
And as wealthy people, we must confront this passage head on, we must be brave, we must ask how does this passage apply to me, even though the history of interpretation of the rich man story might tempt us to sidestep it and tell ourselves that the rich man is someone else, somewhere else, someplace far off.
Indeed from almost the beginning of Christian history there has been a strong tendency to deny the claims this passages places on our faith and life. One of the earliest Christian interpreters, Clement of Alexandria, who was born only 150 years after Jesus, said that Jesus wasn’t speaking literally when he instructed the rich man to sell all his possessions and give them to the poor. Rather we should view the story allegorically—Jesus meant that we should only give up our passions and anxieties about wealth so that riches are not a stumbling block to a generous faith. It may be informative to know the Clement himself came from a rather wealthy family.
And Martin Luther, a hero of the Reformation in the 1600’s, proclaimed that Jesus‘ instructions only applied to the rich man himself and not to other people. The rich man had a particular greed that Jesus was sorting out; thus, the instructions don’t really apply to us.
And what of that memorable phrase “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God“? I’m sure all of you have heard by now the interpretation that the eye of the needle was simply another name for a gate in Jerusalem, and the only way for a camel to go through it, was for it first to get down on its knees. This explanation that is pure fabrication. There was no gate with a name similar to “needle“.
In one early Christian worked called the Acts of Andrew and Peter, Peter is trying to convince a rich man by the name of Onesiphorus of Jesus‘ power. So Peter tells him the camel and the needle story and then asks for a needle with a small eye to be brought to him. The story continues: “When [a needle] was brought, Peter saw a camel coming and stuck the needle in the ground and cried: In the name of Jesus Christ crucified under Pontius Pilate I command thee, camel, to go through the eye of the needle. The eye opened like a gate and the camel passed through…at Peter's bidding.”
Church historian Bede minimized Jesus‘ instructions here by saying that the story is pure allegory—Jesus is the camel and the needle is the suffering and death he must undergo.
Some early Christian scribes even changed the letter “e“ in the Greek word for camel, kamelon, to an “i“ to create kamilon, which means rope. A rope going through a needle is much more believable that than a camel, is it not? Surely Jesus and Mark made a mistake in transcribing this story.
Magic, wordplay, allegory, metaphor, word change—Oh, how many ways we have tried to remove ourselves from any responsibility to this story.
Walter Brueggemann describes two ways many Christians attempt to shape the Bible for their own purposes. One is “thinning to control.“ We thin the text by only focusing on passages that fit our frame of reference and belief system. The other temptation is “trivialization to evade ambiguity.“ We say to ourselves, “Oh that text isn’t really important. It’s just a by-law. It’s not central to a Christian life.“ We are tempted to control the text to align it with our beliefs and we don’t want to acknowledge any ambiguity that frustrates us. But our text today forces us to view a world of faith that we can‘t control and that is full of ambiguities.
The story of the rich man should haunt us. It should not provide us consolation. It should cause us pause. It should make us reconsider where our resources go, how they are used, how our monetary uses are influenced by our faith. It should open our eyes to the desperate poverty of billions of people on God’s earth and force us to reflect on what we are doing about it.
This is a hard text. This is a difficult text. And this is a vitally important text. It is not to be pushed aside, trivialized, or controlled. It should be deeply embedded within us. It should force us to question, reflect, be concerned, and ask what more can we do?
Pertinent to our thoughts here this morning is the broad American concept of Christianity. When researchers ask Christians in our country what their favorite Bible verse is, or a verse that they know by heart, one of the most popular responses is “God helps those who help themselves.“ The problem is, this phrase isn’t in the Bible. It’s from Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard Almanac in 1757.
This American perception that God works by granting people the ability to grow in wealth and status may lead us to feel sorry for the rich man. He worked hard didn’t he? He was careful with his resources, wasn’t he? He used what God gave him to accrue and invest, why should he give away what God granted him?
One of the secrets to the text is found when Jesus asks the man if he has kept a list of six of the Ten Commandments found in the law of Moses. Perhaps you notice a subtle change: “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.“
Did you catch that? Did you hear that interloping commandment: “Do not defraud.“ Both Matthew and Luke, when they repeat this story of the rich man in their gospels leave out “Do not defraud.“ So why would Mark use this phrase?
The Greek word used here (me apostereses) means to withhold wages from a hired worker or to illigetimately gain wealth. We also read later in the passage that the rich man had “many possessions.“ Again the Greek word here is instructive because possessions is not money in the bank but refers to multiple pieces of property or real estate.
In Palestine at the time Mark was writing it was not an uncommon practice for large, wealthy landowners, like the rich man, to withhold wages from their workers and exploit the laborers, making huge profits for themselves. Jesus and Mark are most likely criticizing this oppressive economic system. So while the rich man claims to have obeyed the entire law of Moses, and although his actions may not have been strictly illegal according to the laws of the day, he was taking advantage of his workers and treading upon the lives of the poor. Thus Jesus and Mark instruct the rich man to give back what he has improperly taken.
But, although the rich man was not free from sin as he claimed, we must not let this fact obstruct us from taking the passage seriously in our lives. In fact, the rich man’s folly should open yet another pathway in how this passage impacts our faith.
If Jesus and Mark are condemning ill-gotten gains and carrying the banner of the poor, then we should be asking whether we are doing the same, should we not? What are the obligations of the wealthy in our world? How are the poor being treated by us?
While I trust that none of us are intentionally defrauding laborers as the rich man was doing, I do wonder if we realize the shattering impact welathy consumers have in the global marketplace when we purchase products.
Do we realize that when we buy things cheaply, there is a reason they are inexpensive and that poor labor conditions and shady environmental practices may be the root of our saving a dollar? Do we have the courage to investigate if the wood products we buy are harvested illegally from poor countries, or if the gold and siver and gems we buy are from mines that keep their laborers in practical slavery, or if the food products we buy are grown and formed in conditions we would never want our own children to work in? T-shirts, shoes, clothes, oil products, cabinets, food, paper, electronics—do we realize how we as consumers are the rich man in the creation and distribution of all these products?
Is the goal of our lives, like the rich man, to hold on to what we have, to make decisions based purely on monetary expense, and leave out the human expense of our actions? Do we realize how far a simple purchase goes in unintentionally recreating God’s good world for the worse? And as participants in a frequently unfair economic system, are we, like the rich man being asked to sell all that we have and give it to the poor?
These are the questions that our passage from Mark leaves with us this morning. They are not easy ones. They are hard ones. And quite honestly, they are questions that we really don’t like. But they are the questions of our faith this day. And easy questions are never the promise of a serious faith.
The Acts of Andrew and Peter, http://wesley.nnu.edu/biblical_studies/noncanon/acts/actpna.htm. Accessed October 9, 2009.
