There’s an interesting Website that I’ve logged onto a few times called The Global Rich List. One simply types in how much your annual income is and it calculates out how your income compares to all of the other people living around the world.
I was curious, and so I keyed in our family’s income. I learned that I am the 58,641,004th richest person in the world. Now, when I saw that 58,641,003 people are richer than me, my first thought was that I need to hit up my church councils for a raise. That’s a lot of people I have to pass over to be the richest person in the world.
But the real story isn’t how many people in the world are richer than me. The real story is how many people are poorer than me. And the answer to that is 5,941,358,996. That’s nearly six billion people. In fact, our family is in the top 1% of wage earners alive today. Compared to the rest of the world, Denise and I are wealthy almost beyond imagination.
Our gospels address wealth in a way that often makes us uncomfortable. There is a beautiful story of a rich man who comes to Jesus and asks what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. It is in our nature to believe that if we do something for someone that we will be rewarded. Children who want something from their parents will clean their rooms or take out the trash without being asked. Students will do extra credit in order to get a better grade. Employees will stay late and come in early in order to get a bigger raise. It is this mindset that was behind the rich man’s question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life.”
We are told that Jesus looked at this man and loved him. I believe that this is the only place in the synoptic gospels that we are told that Jesus loves a person. This is a powerful story. It is a story that we need to take to heart as we seek to live as Christian men and women.
How easy is it for a person of wealth to inherit eternal life? Well, according to Jesus, it’s as easy as getting a camel through the eye of a needle. Ever since this text was written down people have been trying desperately to alter this metaphor. There is even a common myth that the “eye of the needle” was the name of a narrow city gate in Jerusalem that a camel could only fit through if you completely unloaded it of the wealth it was carrying on its back.
That’s a great myth, and a very convenient way for 21st century pastors of affluent congregations to circumvent what Jesus is saying in order to not upset parishioners. But it undermines the whole point of the story. The answer to how hard is it for a wealthy person to do anything to inherit eternal life, according to Jesus, is this: It’s impossible.
Why is it so hard for people of wealth (like me!) to enter into eternal life with God? That’s really the wrong question to ask. The correct question is this: Is there anything that God cannot do for us?
The difference between asking what we can do to enter into eternal life and asking what God can do to save us is the crux of understanding this. We can’t, by ourselves, do anything to gain eternal life. God brings eternal life to us, and what he asks in return isn’t our wealth. What he asks for is us! He simply asks for us to turn over our lives to him.
Our affluence teaches us that we don’t need anyone else, and that we are perfectly capable of providing for ourselves. But that is not how the gospels call on us to live as people of faith. We need God to reach out to us. We are called to come before God as children who are helpless, powerless, dependent, reliant and vulnerable.
God calls us to live as people who walk in the way of the cross, and that means living lives of devotion. It means separating ourselves from the things of this world that hold us back. Jesus calls on us to look past our wealth so that we might be free to come to him as a child might come, knowing that no amount of accumulated wealth can purchase eternal life.
As we journey to the cross in this season of Lent, we are reminded that we are to free ourselves from everything that blinds us to the love and grace of God. May we use our gifts to spread the amazing word of God’s love within our community and everywhere our ministries may reach.
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month’s s contributor is Tom Murray of the Lutsen and Zion Lutheran Churches.
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