The meeting between Jesus and the rich young man is one of the most startling, challenging, and misunderstood in the Gospels. It startles us because of Jesus’s blunt declaration. According to St Mark, He tells the young man, “There is one thing you lack. Go and sell everything you own and then come, follow me.” St Matthew’s version is still stronger. Jesus tells him: “If you would be perfect, go and sell, come and follow.” If that is perfection, how can the rest of us rise to the challenge? We should desire perfection, but how many of us can go and sell, come and follow? The challenge is impracticable and impossible. So are we destined to be only second-class citizens in the Kingdom of God? Is perfection the preserve of those few who abandon everything to live lives of poverty, chastity and contemplation, in monasteries and convents? Or have we misunderstood something?
Perhaps we have….
It’s interesting that in general Jesus asks middle class people (like fishermen with boats and employees, tax collectors, etc) and even ‘rich’ young men to follow him -i.e. become his personal disciples, and poor people to go home and say nothing. Sounds harsh, I know, but check it out in the Gospels.
The good monsignor needs to expand that Gospel reading a bit. Yes, we all have our “vulnerabilities” we need to work out, but we can never be “perfect.” A little later in this reading, Peter asks Jesus (in frustration, it seems) if anyone will be saved?! This Gospel reading is about GRACE and our need for Jesus because we cannot be perfect! Keeping the laws isn’t enough or we could have basically saved ourselves.
Or, at least, that’s what I’ve learned from Protestant teachers!
Christ often spoke in hyperbole. This is, after all, what the parables are: radical oversimplifications of complex subjects so designed that simple listeners can grasp what he has to say if they will only stop to think about it – or to ask him. This is their entire point, this forcing the listener too stop to think, to puzzle out. And Christ’s remark to the rich man are not different. They are hyperbole, not parable, yet the internal practice is the same, that is, they have the same rhetorical stance. Nasty shock for the rich young man! Can his words be taken literally? Of course, and for some, they will be. But for most, they are a blow to the head, a demand that they stop to think, to puzzle out – precisely the end he sought withthe parables. Larry
This is what I heard about the last part of the reading: the “eye of the needle” was a small door in the city wall to be used after the gates were shut for the night. For security they would not be opened at night. If a merchant wished to enter, he and his camel must pass through this opening, The camel had to get down on his knees to fit, and creep through. In addition, baggage had to be removed from his back (and taken through separately). Therefore whatever we are “carrying”, whether attachment to earthly wealth or anything else, we must shed to enter the kingdom.