October 14, 2012
Prudent preachers tend to avoid
today's Gospel.
The wise will preach on wisdom:
"I called upon God, and the spirit of wisdom came to me. . . . I accounted
wealth as nothing in comparison with her" (Wis 7:7-8).
Or they will leave the last half
of the Gospel passage alone, and focus on the rich fellow whom our Lord looked
on and loved.
But a homily on "It is easier
for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of God" ?
That's difficult!
But the issue has to be faced.
But to face it intelligently, I
suggest we do three things:
(1) recapture some biblical
background, to put the passage in context;
(2) uncover what Jesus himself had
in mind when he spoke this way about riches;
(3) ask what all this might say to
us today.
First, some biblical background.'
Little wonder that "the disciples were amazed" at Jesus' words, were
"exceedingly astonished" (vv. 24, 26).
Not only because it seemed from
his words that no one could enter the kingdom. What complicated their effort to
understand was a powerful Jewish tradition, part of the air they breathed:
Wealth was a mark, a sign, of
God's favor.
Remember how "the Lord
blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning"? God gave him
"fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen
those He loved.
Wealth was part of life's peace,
life's fulness.
Now what did Jesus say to that
revered tradition?
He reversed it rudely, brutally.
"You cannot serve both God
and mammon".
Jesus also said: "Anyone of
you who does not bid farewell to all he has cannot be a disciple of mine"
. This is raw language indeed.
It's hard to nuance that.
There is another side to it—a side
to Jesus that makes us hesitate about his harsher words.
As far as we know, he never told
Lazarus and his sisters, Martha and Mary, or Zacchaeus, or Joseph of Arimathea
to give up all they had.
Well now, will the real Jesus
please stand up?
Which is it to be, no riches or
some?
I'm afraid the real Jesus,
especially in Luke, is more complex than the TV preachers suspect.
On riches, there is the radical
Jesus and there is the moderate Jesus.
There is the Jesus for whom wealth
is "totally linked with evil," and there is the Jesus who counsels a
prudent use of possessions to help the less fortunate.
There is the Jesus who tells some
people to give it all away, and there is the Jesus who advises others to share
what they have.
There is the Jesus who stresses
how selfish and godless the rich become, and there is the Jesus who experiences
how generous and God-fearing his well-to-do friends can be.
There is the Jesus who forces us
to choose between money and God, and there is the Jesus who loves a rich man
who keeps both his wealth and God's commandments.
What might all this say to us
today?
The radical Jesus poses a
perennial question: What rules my life—the camel or the kingdom?
On the other hand, the moderate
Jesus fixes my eye on something splendidly positive. I mean the gift I have in
anything I possess, anything I "own."
Ultimately, whatever is mine (save
for sin) is God's gift.
Even if it stems from my own
fantastic talent, that talent itself owes its origin to God. But a gift of God
is not given to be clutched; it is given to be given.
And there lies its glory, there
its Christian possibilities.
The theology I have amassed
through fifty-nine years is not just my theology, packed away in my personal
gray matter for my private delight.
It is meant to be shared—at times
even refuted!
Each of us is a gifted man or
woman—gifted in more ways perhaps than your modesty will admit.
It doesn't matter what your
specific possessions are: millions or the widow's mite, intelligence or power,
beauty or wisdom.
What the moderate Jesus tells us
is to use your gifts as he invites or commands us to use them. To some he may
say: Give all you have to the poor and come, follow me naked.
To others: Share what you possess;
use it for your brothers and sisters.
Use your power for peace, your
wisdom to reconcile, your knowledge to open horizons, your compassion to heal,
your hope to destroy despair, your very weakness to give strength.
Remember, your most precious
possession is yourself
Give it away ... lavishly.
To do that, we cannot stare at the
eye of the needle; we have to stare at our Lord.
If we look too long at the
needle's eye, trying to get our personal camel through it, we may despair.
How can we ever reconcile our
riches with God's kingdom, our possessions with Christ's command to let go?
" I don't have an answer for you.
It's hard enough for me and I
constantly struggle with it.
Each person has to struggle.
What I do know about me — and my
faith tells me it's the same for all of us — is that we cannot do it alone. But
Jesus offers hope for all of us.
With men and women," Jesus
noted, "it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible
with God"
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