OF CASH, OF CAMELS, AND OF TIGHT PLACES

A Needle's Eye in Jerusalem

Today’s Gospel reading in the now-combined Roman Catholic and Anglican Lectionaries was St Mark’s rather touching story of the young man who came to Jesus and asked what he should do to obtain eternal life. Jesus told him that as a good Jew, he ought to know the answer: keep the Commandments. Yes, but I’ve done that faithfully all my life, said the youth sadly; implying that he felt there was still some essential ingredient missing. Jesus, says Mark, looked at him, and loved him. I’ve always imagined Jesus previously occupied with something else, and as it were replying over his shoulder, almost mechanically. And only now turning and looking at him, and ‘loving him’. There aren’t a lot of places in the Gospels where we are told that Jesus loved someone. John, of course; Martha, Mary, and Lazarus; and this anonymous young man, who thus finds himself in very select company. Jesus looked at him, and loved him, and saw at once what the lack was. Go sell your possessions, give what they bring to the poor, and come and follow me – sensing perhaps already that the Twelve would become Eleven?

            This, clearly, was not what the youth had been prepared for. He thought for a minute, then with infinite sadness shook his head and walked slowly away, ‘because he had many possessions’. And Jesus, equally sad, turned to his disciples and said, How hard it is for someone who has much to get into the Kingdom of Heaven! It is harder than it is for a camel to get through the Needle’s Eye.

            We were reminded that Needles' Eyes were particularly narrow gates in Jerusalem, used by pedestrians after the great gates were shut, and that even a very young and skinny camel would have a hard time getting through, let alone a plump or laden one. (Also, apparently, the rich and grand wouldn't use them because it mean stooping and squeezing, most undignified.)

            What I found interesting in both the homily that followed and in the commentaries in Prions en Eglise, by Emmanuel Schwab and Marc Sevin, was the way they all pointed up a lesson, a moral, that had not occurred to me. The obvious moral is depressing to all but the dispossessed; but as Fr Jean-Kamel pointed out, we are all rich in something. As Fr Schwab wrote, if selling all your possessions was the point, you would be buying your way into the kingdom. No, the point is that any riches you have – money, goods, talent, sophistication, intelligence, culture, beauty, strength, generosity, what you will – any wealth you have that serves to make you feel secure and stops you a) helping those who need it and b) pulling up sticks and following Jesus – this is what you have to learn to distance yourself from. Not to get rid of, necessarily; but to regard with equanimity and to give. To give to those who need it; to give to Him who is the Kingdom.

            Again, the point is not necessarily to donate everything to the local food bank or to create an association helping leukemia-patients in Angola. As someone else wrote, what is asked of us is being there. Not to be in our parallel world of Facebook or Twitter or Nintendo; not to dwell in a cherished past; not to strain toward a hoped-for future; but to be there in God’s time: the present. As a wonderful Sixties book put it: Remember Be Here Now. If you wear your riches lightly, you can be there for whoever needs you right now, at any time, and all your riches will be available at once. If you wear them lightly, you can be there and follow when He calls, right now, at any time. If each of us is the rich young man, then each of us is on the receiving end of that look of Jesus’s, and of that loving. In very select company.    

CODA: How not to walk away grieving. 
After publishing this, I remembered that there was another point to the commentaries I had read. The way not to be 'rich' is to be poor.  To be poor in spirit is to be blessed. How does one become poor in spirit? By realising, in the bottom of one's heart, that one can give oneself nothing. That everything is given by God, and that we need to ask for everything. If the real riches are those of the spirit, then we are all poor. Seek, and you shall find. Ask, and it shall be given to you. Given to you, not earned by you. Quæsumus, Domine. Gratias agimus tibi.