Faith | Cats | Hope | Grace

“It’s easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter God’s Kingdom.” (Lk 18:25) This quote by Jesus is often used to shame the rich. Jesus’s message and ministry was frequently a message of comfort and love to the poor and needy and this quote can be interpreted as a rebuke to those who might be seen as the cause and beneficiaries of the suffering of others. In this paper, I will argue that Jesus’s answer to the rich man’s question is a statement about power and privilege. For this analysis, I will use the telling of the story of the rich man asking Jesus how to obtain eternal life from the Gospel of Luke.

The rich man comes to Jesus to ask what is required of him to obtain eternal life. The rich man is on steady footing when Jesus asks him about the commandments and the man says that he has kept them since he was a boy. In fact, Jesus only asks him about five of the ten commandments and other than the commandment to “Honor your father and mother,” the other commandments that Jesus asks about are things people are not supposed to do. These commandments are charges to not do active harm to others. These commandments are the foundation of a functioning society. It speaks to how we can respect and maintain boundaries, including property boundaries and personal boundaries. However, a person could obey these commandments and still find themselves living in an unjust society. A person may not commit murder, but still live in a society filled with violence. A person may not steal, but still live in a society where they benefit from others’ thefts. While these commandments can help set up a functioning society, they don’t necessarily lead to a good and just society. These commandments also do not require action on the part of the faithful. And while following them does not create harm it also doesn’t alleviate it.

The challenge from Jesus is the call to action—for the rich man to sell his possessions, give them to the poor, and then to follow Jesus. In this case, the rich man can’t just avoid doing something, he has to actively engage in the ministry of Christ. The rich man is first invited to share the work of the Kingdom by taking the proceeds of his wealth and giving it to the poor. This generosity will provide for the material needs of those who have little to nothing. With this call, Jesus is potentially able to care for the material needs of one group, the poor, while caring for the spiritual needs of another group, the rich man. But the rich man must be willing to participate. Finally, the rich man is invited to follow Jesus. The call is both to follow him physically as he travels through the area as part of his ministry, but also to follow Jesus’s “lifestyle” of preaching, teaching, and healing as well as his love and care for the poor and needy. These are direct actions the rich man can take in order to obtain eternal life. This call to action is not only a divestment of material goods, it is also a call to a divestment of power and privilege. In Jesus’s time, access to wealth also meant access to power and status within the community. Those who were wealthy commanded the best seats at the banquets. They were often part of the governing and leading elite in the community. And their wealth shielded them from the harsh aspects of life that many of the poor experienced. Their wealth offered them significant privilege in their society. By selling off his wealth, Jesus asks the rich man to give up his access to power and the privileges that come with it. He also, in asking the rich man to give the money to the poor, is asking the rich man to use his power and privilege to help others. He will, in fact, be giving his privilege to others. And not just transferring that privilege to other privileged people through a transfer of wealth from one wealthy person to another. The rich man is charged with giving that privilege to those who have none. After giving away his power and privilege to the poor, the rich man is encouraged to maintain his powerless and unprivileged state and to live and work among others who share that state.

And it is at this point that the rich man says no. We are told that Jesus says, “It’s very hard for the wealthy to enter God’s kingdom!” (Lk 18:24) At first glance, it seems that the struggle for the rich man is giving up his wealth. I would argue that his real struggle was giving up what came with his wealth—the power and privilege. While there were other wealth people in the Gospel who also struggled to fully live out Jesus’s call, there were wealthy followers of Jesus such as Zacchaeus and Joseph of Arimathea. Those who despite their wealth, cared for the needy and strived for justice in their communities. Those who used their power and privilege to help and build up their communities. Perhaps it isn’t that Jesus felt that there was something inherently wrong with the wealthy, but just those who were slavishly bound to that power. In these cases, that power had become an idol that they were unable or unwilling to put aside for the work of the Kingdom. The commandments that Jesus doesn’t ask the rich man about are the commandments about people’s relationship to God. Included in those commandments is the requirement to not create an idol for oneself. While the commandment talks about not creating an idol of any living thing, that could also be expanded to include anything—such as wealth—that we put before our relationship with God and our call to worship and follow him. The rich man’s wealth was not his problem. It was his idolization of his wealth and privilege and his unwillingness to use that privilege for the benefit of others.

In the intervening 2,000 since Jesus’s ministry on Earth, people have not become any less beholden to their love of power and privilege. And that power and privilege can still be attached to material wealth. The power of wealth can be used to give an outsized voice to one group over others in access and influence in government. That power can be used to advocate for the desires of the powerful and privileged at the expense of the needs of the many. The privilege of wealth can also insulate people from the difficulties of the lives of those with less material means. It doesn’t just prevent them from experiencing hunger, homelessness, or a lack of healthcare. It can also physically separate them from those with less material means because of how society and neighborhoods are set up. That insulation prevents the calls for justice from being heard. This insulation and isolation of the privilege of wealth breeds more power and privilege. Those who idolize their wealth can live in a world that allows them to believe that their privilege arose wholly from their own actions as opposed to acknowledging the systems that have been in place for generations to maintain and grow their material wealth. And because of this belief in the success of their “unassisted” lives, if they do hear the calls for justice in their communities and the calls for care for the needy, those calls are met with disdain.

But as in Jesus’s time, there are the wealthy in our present day who like Zacchaeus and Joseph who use their power and privilege to work for justice and mercy in their communities. In our present day, there are those who use their wealth for philanthropy to help the material conditions of those in need. There are also those who use the privilege of their access to others in positions of power to advocate for more just systems within our society. Having wealth is not an inherent concern, it is the relationship people have with money. Are they allowing material wealth to come between their relationship with them and God? And are they able to balance that wealth with Jesus’s call for justice, caring for the needy, and humble servant ministry within their communities?

And while power and privilege are not always attached to material wealth, there are still unequal levels of power and privilege in different communities and that privilege can impact people’s lives. In the United States, because of the lingering effects of slavery and segregation, different levels of privilege have built up over time in different communities. And in order to get access to societal privilege, some groups have aligned themselves with those in power and separated themselves from other marginalized groups in sometimes harmful ways. Where there might have been opportunities for coalitions and partnerships among marginalized groups, the desire for the precious and seemingly rare commodity of societal privilege led to further estrangements. This alignment with dominant power in some cases lead to material wealth but perhaps most often led to societal privilege that protected people from automatic exclusion from major portions of society. These exclusions lead to unequal access to education, housing, healthcare, and other necessities of life. But as with the power and privilege that comes from material wealth, the power and privilege that has been historically granted to some communities can and should be used for those without it. Using privilege this way can lead to the inclusion of more and more groups into the privileged, dominant group. Or, perhaps as Jesus intends, the use of one’s privilege leads to the elimination of privilege. With that elimination of privilege, we all come to see ourselves equally as children of God. And a process to get us there is humble servanthood of our communities.

It is not wealth, but the idolization of wealth that leads to a separation and alienation from God. Individuals and communities must continually evaluate if their wealth is preventing them from answering the call of Jesus. This is an especially important question for Christian communities. To what end are our stewardship campaigns and our capital campaigns? How do we put the dividends of our endowments to work in our communities? Or do we instead roll that money back into the principal of the endowment in order to create even larger dividends. Are we, in all our works, using our resources to obtain the eternal Kingdom? All our gifts come from God and we must be careful not to love the gift more than the one who gave it. A right way to give thanks for the gifts we have been given is to use them in humble service of our communities.