Young, Rich, and ... a Ruler, You Say?

No.233: October 18, 2024

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Dear Friends,

Our Rector took the week off last Sunday and it fell to me to preach the homily at church. The lectionary just so happened to fall on a gospel reading from Mark 10:17-31, commonly known as Jesus’ interaction with a rich young ruler. That’s usually the Sunday that all the wealthy people wish they’d made a tee time and skipped church. Sell all you have and give it to the poor? It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God?

Everyone knows that riches are a particular danger to the soul and hindrance to heaven, right? Well, that is certainly the impression the church often gives. Until it comes time for the fundraising drive for the new building. Then the church really, really appreciates people who have done very well for themselves.

It has become something of a default for people to think that Jesus takes a very dim view of economic prosperity. But I happen to think that this episode with the rich young ruler ought to strike us as a strange passage of scripture. The disciples themselves thought the encounter was really weird. The gospel writers tell us how shocking they found it. Then who can be saved!? they exclaim. They had good reason to be surprised because Jesus’ sudden assault on material goods and prosperity seems to cut against the grain of what the Scriptures teach from the very beginning.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and he made human beings, male and female, to be fruitful and to multiply and to have dominion over all creation. He put them in a lavish garden. Poverty is not the theme. Material abundance is the theme.

Our first parents sinned, of course, and were exiled from the garden. From then on there is a continual contrast in scripture between the “Edenic” and the wilderness. The wilderness is an uncultivated (i.e., non-Edenic) place of scarcity, vulnerability, utter helplessness, and poverty. The children of Israel wandered the wilderness for forty years as a punishment, not a blessing. The blessing was a “land flowing with milk and honey,” a place where the vines strain at the weight of their grapes, and the grain harvests are all bumper crops. God even told them in Deuteronomy 18 that they would be so prosperous in the land that they would take it for granted and say to themselves, “My hands have done this.” They would forget that “the LORD your God gives you the ability to create wealth.” That is the peculiar danger of prosperity. Not the stuff itself, but ingratitude.

In Deuteronomy 28 God issues covenant blessing and cursing. Obedience will bring prosperity; disobedience will bring poverty, scarcity, and starvation. Nowhere yet in Scripture is poverty portrayed as the good thing.

King Solomon famously asked God for wisdom instead of riches. So God gave him wisdom. And riches. And the riches were not Solomon’s ultimate downfall—his pagan wives were. Nevertheless, Solomon wrote a whole book of wisdom under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit: Proverbs. In that book he talks incessantly about hard work, diligence, thrift, wise investing, and prosperity. Folly, according to Solomon, uniformly brings poverty and scarcity. Again, where is poverty a virtue or good thing in the Bible?

And then there is Jesus himself. He sees a group of commercial fishermen with empty nets and he tells them to try the “other side of the boat.” Whatever, bro. Man, that must have sounded ridiculous. The result is a miraculous catch that nearly sinks the boat. That’s a remarkable moment of very much material blessing. (Honestly, I really liked how the writers of The Chosen imagined this episode as bailing Peter out of a sticky financial jam.) Jesus tells many parables about a landowner who leaves his vineyards to stewards, and he expects his vines to produce. He tells of servants given talents, and when the master returns the guy who didn’t improve the master’s bottom line—not even bank interest!—is called a “wicked” person and thrown into outer darkness.

This encounter with the young man—Jesus telling him to sell everything he has and give it to the poor—is the strange episode. Is Jesus now suggesting that scarcity and poverty is somehow a good thing, and wealth and riches are bad? Something to feel especially guilty about? That has been the theme of a thousand bad sermons made to guilt-trip people who have done very well for themselves. They’re bad sermons because that isn’t what Jesus is up to, as I hope to show.