Birth is a crap shoot. No one chooses their family of origin, their gender assignment at birth, the nation-state of which they are a citizen, or worse still, being born state-less, as is true for the Muslim Rohingya of Myanmar and a growing number of Muslims in India who are being stripped of their citizenship by Narendra Modi’s racist Bharatiya Janata Party, better known as the BJP.
Expected gender roles, class and caste, race? Socially constructed fictions with no basis in biology, though powerful fictions to be sure. And on this weekend when we celebrate the Indigenous People of North America, organized into tribes and nations, we are mindful that this traditional notion of tribe was itself an accident of birth, leading to tremendous modern conflict over who makes it onto the tribal roll.
But there is another understanding of tribe, one that is in line with the early Christian experience, one based on affinity and choice. You might be one of Justin Bieber’s “Beliebers,” for they are a tribe of sorts. Red Sox fans are definitely a tribe. Members of the evil death cult that refuse to get vaccinated or to wear a mask are definitely a tribe, and a dangerous one at that, bonded together by insane belief and toxic values. Like the Crips, the Bloods, and MS-13, members of the white supremacist affinity tribes have markings and signs to identify one another, the white power hand sign and special hats. But then again, the early Christians used the fish as a sign, and then there are the Masons with their rings. Belonging in and of itself is not bad. In fact, belonging is essential for our health as social creatures. It is what we choose to join that matters.
Today’s reading from the Gospel According to Mark is all about what it means to belong, what it means to make a choice to belong, but it is a dense reading, and we would do well to unpack it a bit before we try to find a meaning we can use in our own lives.
We begin with a problem of translation, one I have mentioned before, and one that plagues and distorts Christianity, turns it into a religion about dying instead of about living. The Koine Greek term translated traditionally and here as eternal life does not mean what we have made it mean. It does not mean life after bodily death. We can certainly look at the teachings of Jesus as a whole and make a strong case for permanence of the soul, but this is not it. What the man asks of Jesus is how he might achieve life in the age to come, probably meaning the age of the rule of God that Jesus has been announcing. Life of the age and eternal life simply are not the same thing. Another read might be “life in full,” as in a life that fulfills the promise and potential of our existence, though this is very individualistic reading, one that does not comport with a gospel that is about collective salvation.
The man who asks Jesus this question has often called the “rich young ruler,” though this is a merging of the slightly different accounts in the three synoptic gospels, with the unknown authors of Matthew and Luke the Physician putting their own spin on the story. Here, in Mark, the words seem to be those of an older man, for he states that he has kept the commandments since he was a boy. And he is not called a ruler, which makes sense, for the Judeans were not self-governing. They were ruled by a foreign occupier and puppet kings like Herod, who were not Judean and had no real power.
The commandments Jesus lists are odd, for he includes a new commandment that is not in the traditional “big” Ten, the commandment “Don’t cheat,” sometimes translated as “Don’t commit fraud.”
Think about that for a minute. Imagine what it might look like if integrity mattered as much as profit in America. We’d have to rebuild half the economy, for entire market sectors are based on deception and manipulation.
The prohibition on cheating ties in closely with the statement that the man had many possessions, a term we should understand as land holdings, for this was a period when wealthy Judeans were exploiting the economic stress caused by Roman occupation to acquire large tracts of land, sometimes through cheating, often when smallholders sold under duress. Think for a moment about the gray area between art the Nazis looted and art Jewish owners sold in distress or under duress, the ongoing questions of justice decades later.
Smallholders were the backbone of the Hebrew social and economic system for centuries. Families that had lost their land were particularly vulnerable in much the same way widows and orphans were considered vulnerable in a patriarchy. The instruction that the man sell his possession and give the money to the poor is not about re-distribution, it is about reparations, the return of ill-gotten gain. It is about doing justice.
Then there is that passage every privileged white preacher tries to avoid or explain away, the chance of a wealthy person entering God’s kingdom being about the same as a camel passing through the eye of a needle. After all, the church has often been about wealth and power, and many today preach the heresy of prosperity theology, the idea that God makes the faithful rich, gleefully ignoring the fact that there are many wealthy people who are quite the opposite of righteous, that cheating and stealing is what made them rich. You don’t have to be all that observant to know that being a good Christian alone isn’t going to make you rich.
Maybe my favorite tactic for neutralizing the message of this text is the “Eye of the Needle” gate approach, a tradition that stretches back to the 9th century, and claims that Jesus was talking about a real thing, a real gate in Jerusalem that was used only at night, and that a camel could fit through, but only stripped of freight and kneeling, so that by extension, a wealthy person could enter heaven, but only without their wealth, and only in humility.
The problem, of course, is that there is exactly zero historical evidence that such a gate ever existed.
Jesus means what he says, and it might sting, though we should consider that context of land consolidation and collaboration with the Roman enemy, with the command for reparations for smallholders. Privileged Judeans did not speak out against Roman rule because they were benefiting from the unjust system.
If the rich in Judea and Galilee were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer, if corruption was rampant and frustration was growing, if Jerusalem was the powder-keg about to blow, which it was and which it did, then we read Jesus’ statement about the inability of the man wealthy with ill-gotten gains from participating in the in-breaking rule of God in a very different way.
And this is maybe where we can start to construct meaning for our own life. Rather than gloss over the passage, deciding that Christ’s judgment doesn’t apply to us because we’re not rich, we might pause, take stock, ask ourselves some difficult questions. Have we benefited from stolen land and stolen labor? Do we collaborate with injustice? In the destruction of lives? In cruelty?
Because I sure do. Every day.
Can we fit through the eye of the needle and become participants in God’s just and caring realm? What will we have to sell? What will we have to give away?
As we mature, we learn about belonging, learn that it is not about “me, me, me”… at least most of us do. We learn that belonging requires sacrifice, and that the greater the connection, the more it demands of us. We choose our tribe.
In the Congregational and United Church of Christ tradition, we call our deep and voluntary relationships covenants, like the covenant the ancient Hebrew people entered into with the holy mystery they called Yahweh. And covenant always includes mutuality, reciprocity, accountability. Even a gym expects sacrifice, and we are so much more than a gym.
Tell me teacher, what must I do to be part of God’s kingdom of love and justice?
Obey the Law. Don’t cheat.
But I do all of these things?
Yes, but you benefit from injustice. You can’t carry the fruit of injustice into the kingdom.
And the man walks away. And Jesus lets him.
No one said changing the world was going to be easy. Reparations, repair, is required. And I don’t know exactly what that looks like for me, for you, for our society. But I know I want to get there. And I make that journey with you, my tribe, people who have agreed to work together, to sweat and to cry and to laugh and to give, to build a better world. May God bless us and the camels we might just have to leave behind.
Amen.