Wrestling with camels
Sermon preached in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews on 11th October 2009 Rev Dr Teresa Morgan
Readings: Job 23: 1-9, 16-17, Hebrews 4: 12-16, Mark 10: 17-31
Our gospel today is a familiar teaching made unforgettable by a bizarre piece of imagery: 'It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God.'
People have boggled at the picture this conjures up, and tried to explain it away. Was the 'needle's eye' perhaps one of the city gates of Jerusalem?[1] Was camelos, a camel, scribal error for camilos, a rope? We don't know, but the teaching itself seems clear, and we hear it in Matthew, Mark and Luke (though not in John, who is not very interested in social action). 'Sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.'
It is one of Jesus's more embarrassing commandments. Because realistically, hardly any of us has any intention of selling all we have. We may give to charity, shop at Oxfam, tithe our income to good causes' but that's very different from giving up everything for the gospel. What then do we do with this teaching?
It may help to reflect a little on the world in which it was written. The Roman Empire of the first century was a sharply polarized society. Very little that you could call a middle class. Almost everyone was very poor, and there were no safety nets - no free health care, no education, no unemployment benefit, no old-age pension.
A lot of the poor were subsistence farmers, fishermen, small traders. One bad season would put them into debt; two would put them on the streets. We catch echoes of their anxieties in the gospels. When Jesus meets Simon Peter in Luke's gospel, for instance, and tells him to go fishing, Simon retorts, 'We have just worked all night and caught nothing.' He knows that a few more nights like that and his family will starve.
A tiny minority of people controlled the vast majority of resources - land, raw materials, trade, manufacture' And with wealth went power, over other people. The rich had slaves; freedmen; tenants; employees; debtors: all grossly unequal relationships. The parables are full of them: kings and landowners and their slaves and casual labourers and tenants. The rich man and the widow. The rich man and the beggar. The powerful and the powerless.
In this world, the commandment to sell all you have, isn't only - perhaps isn't mainly - about wealth itself. It's also about letting go of power: the kind of power which uses and abuses other people.
We can't have power like that and keep the most important commandment of all: the one which runs like a golden thread through all the gospels. 'Love God and love your neighbour.' You can't love your neighbour and keep her in slavery, or leave him to starve.
And loving our neighbours is what makes us human.
It is our neighbours who teach us who we are. They're our other selves. Formed like us, they think and feel like us. In their eyes, we see our own hopes and needs. They remind us that we are not unique: the world wasn't created just for us, and we don't have to survive in it alone. We are made plural - a family, a species - and our species is part of a vast web of interrelated beings; a continuum of ever-evolving life.
Our neighbours teach us that we are one. One creation; one body. Because of that, the way we love them - or not - is the way we love ourselves. And the way we love ourselves is the way we love God, in whom all creation lives and moves and has its being.
And loving God is the way we grow into our fullest humanity, in the image of God who so loves the world.
Well, the world we live in is more complex even than the Roman empire. And in this corner of it, we have made some progress in the last couple of centuries, in loving our neighbours and lessening the gulfs of wealth and power between us. We do, for instance, have free education, health care, a minimum wage, pensions - and they make a difference.
But the price of loving our nearest neighbours has sometimes been that we export poverty and powerlessness elsewhere. Cheap electronics, imported food, designer knock-offs - they all come to us because somewhere, however far away, our neighbours have lost farms or fishing boats, or work in sweat-shops for derisory pay. So one important way in which we can follow Jesus's teaching today, is by practising love even of all our neighbours, however near or far. By sharing what we have, and by trying to live in such a way that we don't abuse their resources or exploit their labour.
That is one message of today's gospel. But there is another intertwined with it, which is just as challenging and even more personal. Because the other problem with being rich and powerful, is that it makes us feel in control.
You remember the parable of the rich man whose land produced a huge harvest (Lk. 12.16ff.). He built himself a row of granaries, stored it all, and then, congratulating himself on his prudence, settled down to eat, drink and be merry. But God said to him, You fool: this night your life will be demanded of you. And who will enjoy your wealth then?
That man thought that wealth gave him control of his life. We in the modern western world can sympathize. With our relative wealth, our welfare provisions, it's easy for most of us to fall into thinking that we are pretty self-sufficient. Which, of course, is why people nowadays notoriously don't know their neighbours. We don't expect to need them. For many of us, a good neighbour is someone who doesn't bother you with their noise or badly-bagged rubbish - not someone you go to when you run out of food.
In the Roman world, the great majority who lived close to the breadline never got a chance to forget how much they needed their neighbours. When you live close to the breadline in a state without a welfare system, your neighbours are your welfare system.
Jesus understands that the experience of poverty, terrible as it is (and he's not recommending it for its own sake) teaches us something that wealth can never teach us. How desperately fragile human life is. How at any moment, the material goods we build up around ourselves, which look so solid, can melt away, and we can lose our health, our savings, our loved ones, our life
He knows it's only when we recognize how fragile we are, that we understand where our real strength lies. Not in building up and looking after Number One, but in being part of one body - the unity of creation and the God in whom it lives and has its being.
So then - should we sell all we own in order to appreciate our human vulnerability? Perhaps not necessarily.
When Jesus gave this teaching, he probably expected the Kingdom of God to come at any moment. He wanted to prepare people as quickly as possible. But even by the time the New Testament texts were written, people were beginning to suspect that they were in for a longer wait. So a more moderate teaching developed, in which Christians were advised to combine a prudent life on earth with preparing for heaven. So Paul, for instance (Rom. 13.6), tells people to be good citizens and pay their taxes (which means they had money!), and the author of Colossians (4.1) tells people to be just to their slaves, rather than giving them up.
Both strains of thought still co-exist in our tradition. Some people still do sell all they have and give themselves full-time to praying and preparing for the Kingdom. Others look for a compromise between living in this world and preparing for the next.
Either way, the gospel invites us to reflect on where our real treasure is. Is it in our granaries and bank balances and sense of control over our lives? Or is it in our connectedness, to our fellow human beings and to God? Or, paradoxically, as the end of today's gospel hints, can we actually have it both ways?
In the story of Genesis, when God made the world, he gave it to Adam and Eve to look after. It was a treasure. A gift of everything, interconnected and unlimited. Indivisible, because it was part of them and they were part of it and it was all part of God. As we follow the teaching of Jesus, we slowly relearn that interconnectedness, with other human beings, and with creation, and with God. It is a treasure. A gift of everything from God to us. Costing only the broken bits and pieces of the world which we have wrestle from one other and then use to push each other away. Who in their right mind would hang on to their slaves or granaries or camels, their few tiny fragments of creation, when in God, our treasure is everything?
Amen
[1] Rabbinic parallel for camel and needle's eye, with elephant!