God Save the Rich

Sermon for Sunday, October 18

Luke 18:18-30

“Suffer the children to come unto me,” Jesus began, “for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Amen, I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a little baby will never enter it.”

“Ahem, excuse me good sir,” the mayor interrupted, “we all know that I’m going to inherit eternal life, but tell me how I get my hands on it.”

This “ruler” makes an assumption in coming to Jesus. He thinks he’s got salvation in the bag. After all, he has diligently kept the commandments since his childhood, he has a prosperous business, and the people respect him as a fair-minded official. He is “too blessed to be stressed,” certainly about something so trifling as his relationship with God. He approaches salvation as one more task to put on his to-do list. 

The ruler also reveals himself to be almost exclusively concerned about the hereafter; Jesus has been talking about the kingdom, but he’s only concerned about eternal life. Can you imagine an applicant coming to a job interview, without any clear idea what the qualifications or expectations are, and just asking questions about the salary and retirement package? You’d probably put that resumé on the bottom of the stack, or perhaps in the trash can. And yet that’s how so many of us come to Jesus, isn’t it? So concerned about eternal life that we forget to ask about his expectations. Or if we get the expectations, like the ruler we want them laid out in simple steps. And it’s got to be fair! And it’s got to be something that we can look at and say, I have accomplished that!

We preachers have spent a long time fretting over this passage. As early as the eleventh century, somebody tried to get it out of the way for us. “Ah no you see, the ‘Eye of the Needle’ was a low gate into Jerusalem that, in order to get through it the camel had to be unloaded, and then had to crawl on his belly to get through.” Never mind that no such gate existed, and never mind that Jesus’s audience doesn’t interpret the task as merely hard, but actually impossible. In reality this teaching of Jesus is harder than we have let ourselves believe, not easier. 

Our Bibles translate it “how hard is it for those who have wealth. . .” and we can excuse ourselves. Sure, I get by, but I don’t have wealth. Wealth is for, well, wealthy people. But that’s not what Jesus actually says in Greek. In Greek he says “How hard it is for those who have stuff to enter the kingdom of God!” It’s harder to say I don’t have stuff. If that doesn’t make you anxious at this point, you’ve got a stronger stomach than me.

Imagine the crowd looking from Jesus to the ruler, respected in the town, who had followed all the commandments since his youth. If that guy can’t get himself in, who can? And Jesus says, that guy may not be able to— he won’t be able to, but God can get him in. Nothing is impossible for God! That’s the good news for today: we can’t save ourselves, but God is able to save us! Indeed, the story right before this was about how you need to be like a baby to get in. A baby is totally dependent. All that a baby can do to help herself is to let us know she has a need. She can’t even tell us which need. The ruler’s problem is that he wants to do it for himself. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The question he should be asking is, “What is God going to do with me?” Jesus wants to transform our lives, and it starts with transforming our concerns.

Jesus’s answer to the ruler is straightforward, “Sell all that you own, distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” It’s important to remember that Jesus isn’t being theoretical here. The poor are right there. Maybe Jesus pointed at them. But it’s also not theoretical in that he’s talking specifically to this man. He knows that this is the next step for this man. He’s already in a pretty good place; we’d call him a good person. After all, he doesn’t commit adultery, murder, steal, or lie, and he respects his parents. But he can’t imagine a good life without his stuff.

Jesus reframes the ruler’s question, just as he is reframing all of our concerns. We want eternal life, life after death. Jesus gives us life now. Jesus calls this process of transformation “entering the kingdom of God,” and in the first three gospels he talks a lot more about entering the kingdom than he talks about eternal life. But it amounts to the same thing. In John’s gospel eternal life is defined as “knowing... the only true God... and Jesus Christ” whom God has sent (John 17:3). We talk about salvation as “inviting Jesus into your heart,” but I think we know that he doesn’t stay there; living a saved life means letting Jesus into your hands and feet. That’s how we enter the kingdom. Do we want the Kingdom enough to let Jesus take control of our lives?

The first step toward the Kingdom is in recognizing our total dependence on God. We can’t get there if we think we are secure in anything else. The ruler isn’t only secure in his money; he’s secure in himself. His money is an idol he can control. If we have resources, they often ensure that we can secure the best life we can for ourselves, but the thing that makes money so tempting an idol is that it’s predictable. So often we know it’s there. We make safe investments, we leave some in savings, secured and insured by a bank that is too big to fail. Oh, we might risk some on unsure investments, but we count on having enough to get us through.

Like in the parable of the man with the barns, the problem is that we who are rich have a hard time storing up treasures in heaven. Jesus tells this man how to do it; invest his money in the bellies of the poor. These poor folks. That one, there. But we can’t bring ourselves to do it. My temptation is to suggest that we all do it today, but then I want to add, y’all do it first. We can’t bring ourselves to do it. We can’t trust each other to take care of us. So let’s do it. Let’s sell all that we have and give the money to the poor. Y’all go first!

We can’t liberate ourselves from our stuff. Our possessions own us. Who will free us from this body of death? Why, Jesus Christ, the carpenter from Nazareth, God’s son. Here’s the thing; if we trust Jesus, he will transform us. And if we trust him enough not to question, he’ll do it so we don’t even notice it happening! Peter says, “Look, we have left our homes and followed you.” At first I thought Peter’s response to Jesus was a bit of boasting or complaining. But then I had an amazing thought; I think just now Peter is realizing what Jesus has been up to all along! The transformation has been so subtle, and Peter’s been about Jesus’s work, and so he is just now noticing that his whole life has changed.

Have you ever seen one of those art projects where a person takes a picture of themself every day for a year? You don’t notice the changes every day, but over time they can add up to radical transformation. That’s how it is with Jesus. Once we start to follow him, he molds us and moves us and changes our wiring so that we can be about his business. It takes time, but one day, we realize the day everything changed. Peter started following Jesus after a fruitless night on the job. Levi left his tax office, a seat of exploitation. Mary Magdalene had seven demons cast out of her and decided to stick with the guy who fixed her life. But none of them could have imagined what leaving their comfort and security to follow Jesus would mean, or what it would wind up costing them.

What keeps us from being transformed? Jesus says property, family, and responsibilities are all things we might have to leave behind. But he says that when we do, we will be given so much more. Some preachers have interpreted that to mean that if you give the preacher all your money, you’ll get it back several times over. Now that’s not what I think the passage means, but if any of y’all want to give it a shot, meet me in the parking lot after church! 

No, what Jesus means is that life in the kingdom, in this age, takes you from your old structures of dependency. Sometimes that means leaving behind a family who won’t go into the kingdom with you. But living brings you into a new community, that loves you like family. That provides space for you when you have nowhere to rest your head. Church is meant to be the place where the kingdom of God breaks into the world, where Christians see that there is no need among them. Where when you hear that a brother or sister is in need, you reach out and help them.

What’s at stake in this kingdom life? Without it, we are all just sitting around waiting. So many times we act like our salvation is all about what’s happened and what will happen. I prayed the prayer, I walked the aisle, and now I get to go to heaven when I die. For those of us who believe, our eternal life has already begun! We don’t need to take and take and take and save and save and save to make sure that this one life we have is as fun and secure as we could want it to be. Live like you are going to live forever! Who will go first?