ELEVEN

THE TRAP

In an interview Andrew Walls, a distinguished historian of world Christianity, noted that wherever the other great world religions began, that is still their center today. Islam started in Arabia, at Mecca, and the Middle East is still the center of Islam today. Buddhism started in the Far East, and that’s still the center of Buddhism. So too with Hinduism—it began in India and it is still predominantly an Indian religion. Christianity is the exception; Christianity’s center is always moving, always on a pilgrimage. The original center of Christianity was Jerusalem, but then the Hellenistic Gentiles, who were considered the unwashed barbarians, embraced Christianity with such force that soon the center of Christianity moved to the Hellenistic Mediterranean world—to Alexandria, North Africa, and Rome—and it stayed there for a number of centuries. But then another set of unwashed barbarians, the northern Europeans—Franks and Anglo-Saxons and Celts—so took hold of Christian faith that soon the center of Christianity migrated again, to northern Europe. There (and in North America, through colonization and immigration) the center has rested for a thousand years, but recently it is shifting again.

In the twentieth century, Christianity receded in Europe, and in North America it just barely kept up with the population growth. Meanwhile, in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, it has been growing at up to ten times the population growth rate. In the past decade a major corner was turned: More than 50 percent of Christians in the world now live in the southern hemisphere.

For example, at the turn of this century, in the United States there were roughly 2.5 million Episcopalians and other Anglicans. In Nigeria alone there were 17 million Anglicans; in Uganda there were 8 million. Thus in just those two countries there live more than ten times the number in the United States. In the year 1900, Africa was only 1 percent Christian. Now Christians make up nearly half the African population.49

In the next fifty to seventy years, the center of Christianity is predicted to complete this shift away from European countries and from the United States. It will migrate, as it always migrates.

In the interview with Andrew Walls, he was asked, “Why does this happen? If the centers of other religions remain constant, why does the center of Christianity constantly change?” Walls replied, “One must conclude, I think, that there is a certain vulnerability, a fragility, at the heart of Christianity. You might say that this is the vulnerability of the cross.”50 The heart of the gospel is the cross, and the cross is all about giving up power, pouring out resources, and serving. Walls hinted that when Christianity is in a place of power and wealth for a long period, the radical message of sin and grace and the cross can become muted or even lost. Then Christianity starts to transmute into a nice, safe religion, one that’s for respectable people who try to be good. And eventually it becomes virtually dormant in those places and the center moves somewhere else.

Caught in the Trap

Walls asserts that the center of Christianity is always migrating away from power and wealth. This story in Mark helps us understand why:

As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. “Good teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

(Mark 10:17)

In parallel accounts in other Gospels we learn that this was a young man, and also that he was a ruler; so he is often called the Rich Young Ruler. Mark continues:

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, do not defraud, honor your father and mother.’” “Teacher,” he declared, “all these I have kept since I was a boy.” Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.

(Mark 10:18–22)

Jesus tells this spiritual seeker something that he can’t accept, and as the man walks away, notice the disciples’ reaction:

Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!” The disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said again, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

(Mark 10:23–25)

Have you noticed that some of Jesus’s sayings are like hard candy? They’re not like chocolate, which you can let melt in your mouth, swallow, and it’s gone—a momentary pleasure. With a hard candy, if you try to take it in too fast, you’re likely headed for the dentist’s chair or the Heimlich Maneuver. Many of Jesus’s sayings are like that. You work on them, you work into them, and you work through them, and only then are you rewarded with layer after layer of increasing sweetness. Jesus delivers a famously hard saying here: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” The statement is as controversial now as it was at the time he made it. Again note the disciples’ reaction:

Jesus said again, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” The disciples were even more amazed, and said to each other, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.”

(Mark 10:24–27)

There are many who believe that you can’t accrue great wealth without taking advantage of people. This is the premise behind many political and economic philosophies: that nobody can get rich without stepping on others. Even having a lot of wealth is seen as an injustice. You might expect the disciples to say, “Excellent, Jesus! We’re glad you’re not going to let any of the rich into your kingdom—they’ve gotten away with their exploitation long enough.” But that’s not their response. Instead they say, “If he can’t be saved, who can?” The disciples came from a culture that did not see wealth as evil, but rather as the reward for moral behavior. They accepted the view that if you live a good life, then God will reward you with prosperity. This was the worldview, for example, of Job’s friends in the Old Testament book of Job. They assumed that material prosperity meant you were living a good life and God was pleased, while poverty was a sign that you were not living a good life and God was not pleased. But Jesus’s response to this man shows he does not subscribe to these simplistic views—neither is great wealth necessarily exploitative, nor is it always a sign of virtue and God’s favor.

Look at how Jesus deals with the man in this passage. By referring to several of the Ten Commandments, Jesus asks him some implicit questions. For example, “Do not defraud.” In other words, have you misrepresented the facts in business dealings? “Do not steal, do not give false testimony”: Jesus is asking, “Have you stolen? Have you even exploited? Have you taken from people things that are by rights theirs?”

The young man says, “All these [commandments] I have kept since I was a boy.” That is: “No, with all my wealth I have always acted in justice and kindness and fairness; I have never sinned in any of these ways.”

Jesus doesn’t turn to him and say, “Liar.” He accepts the assertion. While of course you can accumulate wealth through vice, it is possible to earn wealth through virtue and hold it in virtue—that is, discipline, vision, delayed gratification, patience. Here we see that Jesus has no ideological problem with wealth creation per se. He does not say that having money is wrong or unjust in itself.

Nonetheless, he says it is harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into the kingdom of God.

And over the centuries people have tried to deal with this statement, sometimes in funny ways. Some people say, “Well, it’s not a literal needle. Back in Jesus’s day Jerusalem’s walls had gates that were very narrow, and it was hard to get a camel through, especially if it was carrying a large load. But if you took the load off and the camel held its breath as you pushed, it was hard but not impossible for it to get through the gate.” Or, “It’s not a literal camel; there’s an Aramaic word for twine that sounds a lot like the Aramaic word for camel. What Jesus is really trying to say is that it’s very difficult to get twine through the eye of a needle, but if you suck on it and point it with great care, it’s not impossible.”

Those explanations overreach; I think it’s clear what Jesus means by this image. Every culture has vivid metaphors like this. Think of the saying “a snowball’s chance.” It is impossible for a snowball to survive in a hot place, and it is impossible to get a camel through the eye of a needle. Just so, it is impossible for the rich to get into the kingdom of God. That’s what Jesus is saying.

But there is an important nuance here. Jesus didn’t mean that it’s a sin to be rich. It is not that all individual rich people are bad, nor are all individual poor people good. Jesus did not make such blanket assertions. Nor, on the other hand, was he saying, “Just be careful, don’t fall into greed, be generous from time to time.” No. Jesus was saying that there is something radically wrong with all of us—but money has particular power to blind us to it. In fact, it has so much power to deceive us of our true spiritual state that we need a gracious, miraculous intervention from God to see it. It’s impossible without God, without a miracle. Without grace.

Revealing the Trap

Consider how Jesus counseled this young man. Yes, this man needed counseling, though on the outside he looked completely pulled together. He was rich, he was young, and he was probably good-looking—it’s hard to be rich and young and not be good-looking. But he didn’t have it all together. If he had, he would never have come to Jesus and asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Any devout Jew would have known the answer to this question. The rabbis were always posing this question in their writings and their teachings. And their answer was always the same; there were no differing schools of thought on this one. The answer was “Obey the statutes of God and avoid all sin.” The young man would have known this answer. Why then was he asking Jesus?

Jesus’s perceptive statement “One thing you lack” allows us to capture the gist of the young man’s struggle. The man was saying, “You know what, I’ve done everything right: I’ve been successful economically, successful socially, successful morally, successful religiously. I’ve heard you’re a good rabbi, and I’m wondering if there’s something I’ve missed, something I’m overlooking. I sense that something is lacking.”

Of course he was missing something. Because anyone who counts on what they are doing to get eternal life will find that, in spite of everything they’ve accomplished, there’s an emptiness, an insecurity, a doubt. Something is bound to be missing. How can anyone ever know whether they are good enough?

In New York City, as you walk down the street, you see a lot of people with flawless faces. You can’t do it unless you want to be arrested for harassment, but you’d like to go up to some of them and say, “Are you quite as flawless as you look?” They would have to say no, because every day they look at themselves in the mirror and they know their little scars and deformities. In fact, one of the reasons many of them are so beautiful is that they’ve put tremendous time, energy, and resources into covering their blemishes. Still, if you look closely enough at anything or anyone, you will see flaws and pockmarks.

Here’s a man who is pulled together, has degrees from the right places, is on the partnership track, has already made millions, and is only twenty-eight years old. Yet, to his surprise, he finds himself seeking out gurus and rabbis and saying, “I’m still missing something. Do you know of anything I’m missing? I’ve accomplished a lot but I sense there’s one more thing I need to do. I’m ready to open up a spiritual portfolio. What do I have to put in there? I’m willing to make some changes. Just tell me what to do.”

Jesus tells him. And his counsel lays the man flat.

Jesus begins his reply by telegraphing the punch. The first thing he says to the man is “Why do you call me good? No one is good—except God alone.” That’s a hint, a preview. Jesus is not saying that he’s not good. He doesn’t say, “Why are you calling me good? I, Jesus, am not.” He is saying, “Why are you walking up to somebody you think is just a normal human rabbi and calling him good? There’s a flaw in your whole idea of goodness and badness.” That’s the hint.

But then the blow comes. Jesus has already accepted what the man said about having obeyed the commandments, having lived an ethical life. What Jesus says to the man goes further. Jesus proceeds to tell the young man the one thing he needs to do: “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

In other words Jesus says: “If you want to follow me and to have eternal life, of course you shouldn’t commit adultery; you shouldn’t defraud people or murder them. You shouldn’t do bad things. But if you just repent of doing bad things, all it will do is make you a religious person. If you want eternal life, if you want intimacy with God, if you want to get over that nagging sense that there’s still something missing, if you can’t find a way to get the stain out, then you have to change how you relate to your gifts and your successes. You have to repent of how you’ve been using your good things.”

And there are many ways that we use these “good things.” We may be using our “good things” to deal with the imperfections that no one else can see. We may be incessantly trying to turn material wealth into a spiritual treasure to deal with that inner sense of poverty. We may be trying to turn physical beauty into spiritual beauty to deal with that inner sense of deformity. We also may be using our good things to feel superior to others, or to get them to do the things we want them to do. Most of all, we may point to our good things—our achievements and our attainments—and say to God, “Look at what I’ve accomplished! You owe it to me to answer my prayers.” We may use our good things to get control of God and other people.

So Jesus is saying to the man in this passage, “You have put your faith and trust in your wealth and accomplishments. But the effort is alienating you from God. Right now God is your boss; but God is not your Savior, and here’s how you can see it: I want you to imagine life without money. I want you to imagine all of it gone. No inheritance, no inventory, no servants, no mansions—all of that is gone. All you have is me. Can you live like that?”

How does the man respond to Jesus’s counseling? “He went away sad.” The word sad translated here is better translated “grieved”—he grieved. Let me tell you why that translation is better. There’s a place where the same Greek word is applied to Jesus. Matthew records in his Gospel that in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus started to sweat blood as he grieved in deep distress. Why? He knew he was about to experience the ultimate dislocation, the ultimate disorientation. He was about to lose the joy of his life, the core of his identity. He was going to lose his Father. Jesus was losing his spiritual center, his very self.

When Jesus called this young man to give up his money, the man started to grieve, because money was for him what the Father was for Jesus. It was the center of his identity. To lose his money would have been to lose himself—to lose what little sense he had of having covered the stain.

It’s one thing to have God as a boss, an example, a mentor; but if you want God to be your Savior, you have to replace what you’re already looking to as a savior. Everybody’s got something. What is it for you?

If you want to be a Christian, of course you’ll repent of your sins. But after you’ve repented of your sins you’ll have to repent of how you have used the good things in your life to fill the place where God should be. If you want intimacy with God, if you want to get over this sense that something is missing, it will have to become God that you love with all your heart and strength.

Do you see how nuanced Jesus’s reply is? This young man’s problem is not his financial worth; it’s his moral worth. It’s his sense that he doesn’t need the grace of God. Christians, you see, are people who know that their Christianity is impossible, a miracle—there’s nothing natural about it, it flies in the face of all one’s merits. Everybody has to recognize that we have been resting our hopes on some form of personal merit. And it’s our personal merit, our moral worth, that keeps us from understanding the cross.

What happens with the young ruler is analogous to another, less confrontational encounter recounted a bit later, in Mark chapter 12. In that case, as in the first one, Jesus shows that the law demands that we give God everything. A teacher of the law is impressed with Jesus’s wisdom. So he, like the rich young man, asks Jesus a question:

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

(Mark 12:28)

This inquiry is designed to trip Jesus up, but it seems also to be sincere—he really does want to know the answer. The teachers of the law were professional scribes and scholars of the law. They spent their lives studying, classifying, and categorizing it. Some had discerned as many as 613 rules in the Old Testament law. And they were always trying to distinguish the lighter ones from the heavier ones. The fundamental question was: “Of all the hundreds of rules and commands, which one is the most important?” This is how Jesus responds:

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

(Mark 12:29–31)

Jesus answers with two commands from the Hebrew Scriptures. The first is from Deuteronomy 6:4–5. This passage includes the shema, which pious Jews recited morning and evening, as well as the command to love God with all our being. The second he takes from Leviticus 19:18, to love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves. Thus Jesus boils down all of the law of God into one principle—love, directed to God and to others. Here Jesus is going to the very heart of the core dilemma of ethics. Human thinkers have for centuries felt there was a tension between “Law” and “Love.” Do I do the legal thing, or the loving thing? Jesus is not so much picking one or two rules over the others, nor is he choosing love over law, but rather he is showing that love is what fulfills the law. The law is not being fulfilled unless it is obeyed as a way of giving and showing love to God or others.

When he hears Jesus’s reply, does this man walk away sad like the rich young ruler? Mark continues:

“Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

(Mark 12:32–33)

The teacher admits that these two commands are the most important. His reference to the burnt offerings and sacrifices shows that he realizes that these cannot make up for sins. Here we see him coming to recognize what an impossible standard the law gives us—that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a good man to satisfy the law. The closer he gets to seeing this, the closer he is to figuring out the gospel. If we concentrate on rules and regulations exclusively, we can begin to feel pretty righteous, but when we look at the heart attitude that the law really is requiring and getting at, we begin to realize how much we need grace and mercy.

And what was Jesus’s assessment?

When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

(Mark 12:34)

We sense that Jesus’s answer—“You’re getting close”—might have given this teacher of the law goose bumps. On the surface it was almost the same answer he gave the rich young man—“One thing you lack”—yet that reply was met with something closer to nausea. Similar underlying questions, similar answers, completely different responses. Only one of them could see the trap.

Avoiding the Trap

What is your attitude toward money?

It’s not a coincidence that for every one time Jesus warns about building our lives on sex and romance, he warns ten times about money. Money has always been one of the most common saviors. Your ability to go out to cool restaurants, to have nice new things, to negotiate a professional culture and peer group—all those things are probably more important to you than you know.

How do you know that money isn’t just money to you? Here are some of the signs: You can’t give large amounts of it away. You get scared if you might have less than you’re accustomed to having. You see people who are doing better than you, even though you might have worked harder or might be a better person, and it gets under your skin. And when that happens, you have one foot in the trap. Because then it’s no longer just a tool; it’s the scorecard. It’s your essence, your identity. No matter how much money you have, though it’s not intrinsically evil, it has incredible power to keep you from God.

But did you notice what Mark wrote as Jesus talked with the rich young ruler: He “looked at him and loved him.” Why was Jesus’s heart suddenly filled with love? Jesus was a loving man, of course, but this explicit statement of his tenderness toward a specific person is rare in Gospel narratives. Did Jesus love him for his leadership potential? Was it because of what the man said? No, I don’t think so.

Jesus, who at this point is about thirty-one years old, looks at him and identifies with him. Jesus, too, is a rich young man, far richer than this man can imagine. Jesus has lived in the incomprehensible glory, wealth, love, and joy of the Trinity from all eternity. He has already left that wealth behind him. Paul says that though Jesus Christ was rich, for our sakes he became poor (2 Corinthians 8:9).

And I’m going into a poverty deeper than anyone has ever known, Jesus says. I am giving it all away. Why? For you. Now, you give away everything to follow me. If I gave away my “big all” to get to you, can you give your “little all” to follow me? I won’t ask you to do anything I haven’t already done. I’m the ultimate Rich Young Ruler who has given away the ultimate wealth to get you. Now, you need to give away yours to get me.”

If you understand that Jesus is the true Rich Young Ruler, it is going to change your attitude to money. For example, you won’t be trying to figure out how much you have to give away; you’ll try to figure out how much you can give away. The real standard for how generous you will be is the cross. Jesus is saying, “I want your attitude toward your money to be utterly changed and reworked by what I am going to do there.”

Does it move you to think of what Jesus did for you? When that begins to really move you, amaze you, make you weep, you’ll have a fighting chance of avoiding the trap. Letting Jesus’s sacrifice melt you will drain money of its importance for you. Human status becomes just human status. Approval becomes just approval. You can give money away or you can keep it, depending on what’s the best thing at the time. The only way I know to counteract the power of money in your life is to see the ultimate Rich Young Ruler, who gave away everything to come after you, to rescue you, to love you.

Jesus says, “My power is always moving away from people who love power and money. My power is always moving toward people who are giving it away, as I did. Where do you want to live?”