Mark 10:17-31
Proper 23 (28) - Year B
"Good Teacher." "I've kept the commandments."
Both these perceptions stop before getting to the point. That may be a definition of sin, "missing the point."
Goodness stops with Jesus. This is where praise music seems to stop. Goodness is not attributed to Creator GOD who has seen to the good from the beginning. We stop short.
Projecting the present into the future stops with commandments and rule. These can limit some behaviors but never set us free for better behaviors to bloom and grow, forever. Life is not attributed to the positive growing edge but to the controlled and constrained arena of stopping short rather than growing into.
The point is growing into the goodness of GOD, the imitation of Christ, the companionship of Spirit -- not stopping short for anything, even Jesus or commandments.
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Beth (Reader)
I appreciate this site!
I'm interested in the eye/camel metaphor. Online somewhere, I read that the eye of the needle was actually meant to refer to part of the gate to the city. Does anyone have anything to back this up?
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Wesley White (Blogger)
The New Interpreter's Study Bible (NISB) simply says, "A proverb expressing impossibility." My own bias is that that is enough.
To play a bit - If your eye is healthy all manner of impossibilities become possible. [Matthew 6:22] If your eye have the speck of a penny or the log of a dollar it is all the same, you are focused on possibilities instead of impossibilities and that will cause a great stumbling. [Luke 6:41-42] If your eye causes such a stumbling, pluck it out. [Mark 9:47] The eye of the rich one has several dollars in it so they stumble toward Bethlehem to await a a new birth shifting both camel and needle to sidelines and bringing the poor to the forefront.
Let us know where you come out with the gate image and what you do with it.
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Beth (Reader)
re: the gate image - after doing some more research, what i found is that there are some who have suggested the eye of the needle as a gate metaphor, but that there is little to support such an interpretation. One writer noted that it was interesting that we just find ways to interpret Jesus' message to make it easier to bear. I guess that's the truth! we don't like to take Jesus seriously when it comes to our money! ;)
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Wesley (Blogger)
Thanks, Beth. I suspect we also don't like to take Jesus to heart when it comes to any part of our lives. If he can make an inroad anywhere, how can we keep all our dominos from falling? So we make the parts we need to accept for the sake of our position or institution understandable, reasonable, logical, literal. That provides a cyst around the cultural parts of Jesus so he doesn't get to our heart.
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Lon (Reader)
Beth, just a note on the needle - gate image that Grant Gallup shared, "The rich young man must have struggled somewhat awkwardly to his feet, and turned away his fallen countenance as he climbed upon his mount to ride away through the eye of the needle at the city's gate. One view has it that the portcullis in a Great Gate was called Needle's Eye, and for a camel to get through it, it would have to be unloaded of its luggage and its passengers.
Another version is that the "camel" is really "cable", which words resemble each other in Greek. So hang the verse on that rope and it's still a trick that would leave the disciples alarmed, or as Mark says, "exceedingly astonished" at this teaching. "Who then can make it into your revolutionary movement? Who then can be safe?"
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/october2003.html
Job: "Today my complaint is bitter."
Everyman: "What must I do to inherit eternal life."
Both cases call for boldness - a boldness to complain about impoverishment and a boldness to give all our resources to the poor.
While this boldness is spoken of in terms of its result in mercy and grace, the clearer reality is that it is only mercy and grace that allow boldness to flourish and be enacted. To have it be otherwise, in any fashion, would be to give into entitled rights of goodness or rewards for righteous works.
Where we are left is exercising our right to choose, right up to the end, our response to the exigencies of life.
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how hard it is to enter
a realm of experience
requiring only nakedness
our bodies and riches
become our definition
we cannot put down
without them we are nothing
we are definitely last
with no first in sight
our windup clockwork
does not go into any good night
gently or easily
we complain and grasp
and gasp to the end
shoving grace aside
until all that is left
is unrequited forsakenness
and we sputter out
may our difficult days
and persistent riches
recede before a wise heart
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html
Our tendency is to ask what will come our way without any work on our part. What is our due and when will it arrive? This is the built-in temptation with inheritance and why John Wesley and other saints say that it works against our spirit.
"Inheritance" language works in two contrary modes.
Spiritually, inheritance is a subcategory of hope. It is what our picture of a better future is all about.
Literally, economically, inheritance is an illusion. A 100% inheritance tax would reclaim money earned at the expense of others and return it to the commonwealth that basically made it possible to earn so much. All other taxes may be able to be done away with if we saw income as a public issue, not a private one. It is penny-wise and dollar-foolish.
John Wesley wrote of the folly of saving for your children/heirs in his sermon, On Money:
"Do not leave it to them to throw away. If you have good reason to believe they would waste what is now in your possession, in gratifying, and thereby increasing, the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eye, or the pride of life; at the peril of theirs and your own soul, do not set these traps in their way. Do not offer your sons or your daughters unto Belial, any more than unto Moloch. Have pity upon them, and remove out of their way what you may easily foresee would increase their sins, and consequently plunge them deeper into everlasting perdition! How amazing then is the infatuation of those parents who think they can never leave their children enough! What! cannot you leave them enough of arrows, firebrands, and death? not enough of foolish and hurtful desires? not enough of pride, lust, ambition, vanity? not enough of everlasting burnings? Poor wretch! thou fearest where no fear is. . . ."
The better way is to travel with Jesus and turn the question from inheritance to investment. Invest in the poor, in the community as a whole. Here you will find your hope brought to life. Here is the greatest return.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html
Interested in eternity? Pay attention to now.
If you are interested in more about finding the whole in a part, I recommend this short blog by Jim Taylor.
Interested in lasting wealth? Be generous with currency in need of constant replacement ($1 bill estimated life span is 4.8 years; $100 bill is in use for 17.9 years - according to the US Federal Reserve)
Pursuing happiness will have something to do with coming to terms with parts and wholes and what Eugene Peterson calls the “Great Reversal”.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2012/10/pentecost-20-year-b-mark-1017-31.html