"Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How
hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!""
(Mark 10:23)
Last week I wasn't at my post at Holy Trinity. I
was out in the bush, leading a small but courageous troop of wilderness
warriors in a series of death-defying challenges, aimed at conquering
their harsh environment. One of the unexpected side-effects of that
experience was that I lost track of the proper sequence in the preaching
roster and spent much of the week preparing a sermon on Jesus'
teachings on divorce.
I really felt that I'd drawn the short
straw, but I came up with something, which I faithfully abandoned
yesterday when I realised I had to deal with the rich young ruler
instead! And I must say that I didn't find much that I could carry over
from one sermon to the other, except that both passages make me rather uncomfortable because I feel targeted in both cases, being both divorced and rich!
This
wasn't always the case, of course. I wasn't always divorced, and I
don't think I was always rich, though it's hard to define exactly what rich is, isn't it?
I had a friend who pastored a church on the North Shore once, in an area that most of us would consider a rich area.
He said he often preached on Jesus' warnings to the rich, but his
sermons never seemed to get much traction with the congregation. He
eventually realised that they always assumed Jesus was talking about the next tier up in terms of wealth!
Perhaps
that's the way it always works? When we hear these warnings against the
rich, we think of those persons who live on the North Shore. When
congregations on the North Shore hear these words, they figure Jesus is
specifically targeting people who live in St Ives. When the congregation
of St Ives hears these words, they figure Jesus is talking about
Dulwich Hill (or they soon may, the way we are going). We always assume
it's not us.
That's certainly the way I felt when I was a young
Christian and a university student - full of zeal and deeply troubled by
the levels of global poverty. I looked at the wealthy churches and I
looked at the wealthy people in my own church, and I looked at them with
disdain! Then something happened. At the age of thirty, I finally got a
job, and then dad died and left me an inheritance. All of a sudden, I
had to give my attention to things like superannuation and tax returns
and BAS statements, and then I got a mortgage! And then I realised that
the people Jesus was targeting weren't people like me at all, but one
tier higher!
How do we define 'rich'? It is an important
question, and an important question for people who want to follow Jesus
most especially, for Jesus had a lot to say about the danger of riches
and worldly wealth, and none of it was good. But who is to say who is
rich? Are we rich? Well... compared to a lot of people around the world
and compared to most of the people Jesus lived and moved with we
probably are, but compared to the upper echelons of our own society we
are probably not.
I think a decent working definition of being rich would be if you don't need anybody else'shelp to get by. If you don't need anybody else, biblically speaking, you're rich - too rich.
"How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!" (Mark 10:23)
As
you may know, I've done a fair bit of reading in recent years about
human pre-history - that is, that period in human history when we lived
in hunter-gatherer communities - and I get the feeling that a lot of
Biblical ethics is about transposing the value of the hunter- gatherer
lifestyle into the contemporary context.
Hunter-gatherers lived a
subsistence lifestyle, living off the land, gathering fruits and nuts,
hunting and eating game, etc. There are still some such communities in
the world today, but they are few and far between. Once upon a time we
were apparently all like that, as is captured in the story of the garden
of Eden - the Biblical story of our origins.
The key point I want to make here is that people in hunter-gatherer communities depend on each other for everything.
Every member of the community has an inter-dependent relationship with
everybody else. We live together, work together and eat together, and
there's no such thing as competition, only cooperation.
I
remember reading a story retold by some English missionaries who had
been working with hunter-gatherer communities in the highlands in New
Guinea, and they made the mistake of trying to teach some of the locals
to play croquet. I've never played croquet, but I understand that it can
be a very aggressive game, where you not only knock your balls through
hoops, but where you also try to smash your opponent's ball to the other
end of the croquet field, thus depriving him or her of their chance to
make any hoops.
Apparently, once the highlanders got the idea of
how to play, they started working together, making sure all their balls
got through all the hoops, and when they got the last ball through they
jumped up and down together and shouted, "we won"!
That's
a very different sort of game, isn't it, reflecting a very different
sort of culture. In hunter-gatherer societies, you can't afford to have
one person win at the expense of others. The emphasis is on cooperation
rather than competition. And, of course, there is no private property in
these communities, and where there is no private property, there is no
theft, no rich and poor, and no wars!
You'll have to forgive me if
that sounds as if I'm idealizing these communities, and certainly
Thomas Hobbes and Charles Darwin didn't depict this period of our
history this way, but it's generally acknowledged by scholars nowadays
that Hobbes' description of the life of 'primitive' men and women as being 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short' was
entirely a product of him reading back into the past the miseries
experienced by the landless poor in his own time (in 16th century
Europe).
In contrast to Hobbes and Darwin, the Bible speaks of our
early days in the garden in idyllic terms, and the Bible likewise
points us towards a city - the new Jerusalem - which embodies much of the beauty of the garden and is also a place of peace.
Between
the garden and the city, the people of God, it seems to me, are called
upon to live out the values of caring and sharing, and, when they fail,
they are sent back to the wilderness for testing - a place where once
again they are forced to live as hunter-gatherers and depend on God and
upon one another for survival.
"How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!" (Mark 10:23)
We
know the story of the rich young ruler well (even if we don't know the
man's name). Jesus, we are told, was busy getting ready for a journey
when "a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"" (Mark 10:17)
It
seems to me that this man is a bit like a guy wanting to win at
croquet. He's not asking Jesus about the salvation of humanity or the
restoration of the created order. He wants to win! "What must I do to inherit eternal life?"
I
don't want to suggest that we have full knowledge of the psychology of
this young man, but he seems doomed from the outset to me by virtue of
the way he asks the question. This guy wants to win. Does it surprise us
that he has great wealth? Of course he has great wealth! He is a winner
in the game of life and now he wants to be a winner in the afterlife!
Perhaps the key issue here is not so much the amount of money he has, nor simply theattitude he
has towards money (which is often how us preacher-types interpret the
issue) but simply the fact that the man seems to be living in a world
that's all about him!
One of the best books I read last year was one by American journalist and anthropologist, Sebastian Junger, called 'Tribe'. The book is an analysis of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) which is a condition most commonly associated with soldiers returning from war. Junger gives particular attention to the American Indian Wars that spanned the early 17th to the early 20th centuries.
Junger
notes that during those wars there were a number of white settlers were
kidnapped by native tribes and later returned to their communities.
Interestingly, a disturbingly large number of those 'returned' persons
later tried to sneak back to rejoin the tribes where they had
originally been held as captives. Junger's analysis is that these people
wanted to get back to a tribal community based on cooperation rather
than competition, where people lived interdependently with one another.
Junger suggests that most of us 'civilised' types
never get to experience real community, except during war. In wartime,
men and women have to depend on each other, and so we band together and
cooperate sacrificially in ways that we never do in peacetime. Junger's
analysis of PTSD is that returning soldiers suffer this, not because
they've come out of a horribly traumatic war-time situation, but rather
because they can't adjust back from their war context to this dysfunctional society, based on competition and self-seeking profit!
Interestingly,
I finished reading that book on my way to Manus Island last year where I
had the privilege of sneaking into the Australian government detention
centre for asylum- seekers, and meeting so many wonderful men.
What I discovered there was exactly what Junger had been talking about in the book. They were a tribe, living with and for one another. They worked together for their daily survival. They shared their medications as well as their food. They lived by cooperation rather thancompetition. There were no winners and losers, no private property. They were (and they continue to be) a band of brothers,
who might indeed struggle with PTSD if they ever do have to adjust to
living in an individualistic and dysfunctional society like ours.
"Jesus said to them again, "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." (Mark 10:24-25)
The
problem with riches is more than a problem with riches. It's a problem
with culture and values and with the way we related to one another. At
the same time though, I don't want to dilute Jesus' words. We do have a
very serious problem with riches.
I remember listening to a savvy
commentator after Donald Trump was elected as President of the United
States. He warned us not to expect too much change. As he explained, if
you're elected CEO of Apple Corp., you might make a few
changes, expand one market and shrink another, but your job is basically
to sell iPhones. That's what you do. And if you're elected President of
USA Inc., whatever else you do, you've still got to make war because
your economy depends on it. If you want wealth, you sell weapons. It's
the ultimate economy of death, though, of course, it's never presented
that way.
We are in Syria because Bashar al Asaad is waging a
religious war against the Sunni majority, just like we were in Libya
because Muammar Gaddafi was busy butchering his own people, just like we
were in Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
All lies, and we all know that they are all lies! And we know full well
why we are really in Syria, and it's the same reason why we were in
Libya and Iraq. It is fundamentally economic.
There was a protest song in the 1970's that said that war was good for absolutely nothing,
"cause it means destruction of innocent lives... [and] tears to thousands of mothers' eyes".
In
truth though, while war might do nothing for humanity, it does a great
deal for Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, and their shareholders.
Even
if you do the maths on the relatively minor missile strike against
Damascus on April 14th of this year, the Americans fired 66 Tomahawk
missiles and 19 other missiles, with the Tomahawks retailing at 1.87
million each. Do the maths and you realise quickly that death is a very
profitable industry.
The love of money is indeed at the root of
all kinds of evil, though the thrust of today's passage is not so much
on the death and destruction caused by the love of money, but rather
simply on the way the love of money blocks the path to the kingdom of
God.
"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." (Mark 10:24-25)
We
have a problem with money but the suggestion I want to make today is
that the solution to our problem with money isn't to simply dig deeper.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with digging deeper, but I
am suggesting that the reason we often find it so hard to dig deep is
because we are part of a culture that values competition more than cooperation, makes private ownership a sacred right, and makes life all about me and not about us.
We
need to build a less dysfunctional community - one where people can
learn to live againin interdependence with one another, where
cooperation is valued above competition, andwhere ultimately our
question will not be "what must I do to inherit eternal life?", but rather'what must we do to bring about the Kingdom of God for all of us?'
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