Proper 23, Year B: Mark 10:17-31
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
October 10, 2021
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” – Mark 10:25[1]
Around the globe, Americans are well known for liking our stuff. We’re trained consumers, and despite our relatively low population, our substantial trade deficits are a constant reminder that our desires drive a significant portion of the world’s economy. Even the rolling shortages the news has been complaining about the last few months are in no small part our own fault: due to our high levels of consumption, we’ve ended up hoarding the shipping containers other countries need in order to send us the things we want! On a personal level, with our recent move—and the continuing adventure of unpacking—someone listening in on me and Shannon at home would probably hear a constant stream of “my” questions. “Where’s my toothpaste?” “Have you seen my black shirt?” “How about my brown pants?” “Did you unpack my slippers?” “What about my…,” “my,” “my,” “my,” “my,” “my.” Yet relative to our space, we don’t even have that much stuff—at least not to look at it. Despite being something of a minimalist and having been perfectly content with our possessions in a 1,000 square foot, two-bedroom condo, as I walk through our four-bedroom place here, I feel this weird urge to go out and buy things—not because we need them, not necessarily because we even want them, but just to fill up the space. There’s something about an empty room that triggers this almost panicky need to stuff it with furniture and decorations, even if you know you won’t really see or use them.
This week’s Gospel arrives a lot more quietly than our one last Sunday. Instead of a hot debate about what the Church has long trumpeted as major sins, today we basically run into somebody who simply wants to keep his stuff. Perfectly understandable for most of us. Owning things is not a sin, and everyone has the right to choose what they do with their possessions. But there’s a surprising detail here I hadn’t noticed before: although we often enjoy focusing our attention on more scandalous aspects of human nature, last week’s passage on divorce and adultery never mentioned anything relating to either God’s Kingdom or eternal life, whereas this week’s very plainly does.
Maybe our desire for “more” is a bigger problem than we’d like to admit.
Of course, it’s easy to just read past this. After all, the rest of Jesus’ words are full of hyperbole, with camels threading their way through needles and contrasts between mortals and gods. At some point, it just feels comical, allowing us to simply laugh and brush it all away. Jesus couldn’t possibly be serious about everybody giving away everything! Clearly, he’s just making extreme statements to get his point across.
But Americans not only have a lot of stuff: we also tend to take written statements literally, and concerns about the Bible’s words here have caught and torn at the Western mind for centuries. Over the past two thousand years, Jesus’ command to “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor” has influenced everything from early monastic movements to the grand utopian social experiments of the late 18- and early 1900’s. A literal reading of this passage has also driven a good bit of activity in the lives of some of history’s most famous Christians. A young St. Francis, for example, started his journey to fame by hearing these verses and then immediately giving away his family’s hard-earned wealth—much to his father’s distress. That chapter of his life ended with him wandering away from his hometown naked after ultimately giving away even his clothes! We tend to see less extreme examples in our own time, but devout people continue to adopt aspects of Jesus’ radical statement in their own lives and ministries.
However, in the big scheme of things, those movements and people are outliers. The vast majority of us continue—for good reasons and bad—to hang onto our possessions while still attempting to follow Christ. And anticlimactic as this may sound, I think that may be okay. Jesus tends to be much more interested in people than in things, and I suspect that in this situation, rather than being focused on the possessions themselves, Jesus is more concerned about the man’s attachment to his wealth.
I’m a little worried that this will sound like I’m trying to reduce the force of Jesus’ words, that I’m giving us an out to keep living our normal, highly consumptive lives while pretending to fall in line with what Jesus said. That’s not what I intend. What I’m hoping to do is turn from the symptom to treat the disease. Think of all the times you’ve sold or donated something only to later tell yourself “I never should have gotten rid of that.” It can be easy to give something away, but releasing my attachment—fully letting go of that same thing—can take a lifetime of work. Sometimes it turns out the things we think we possess actually possess us.
These kinds of attachments aren’t just a problem with physical objects. Attachments are emotional and mental, which means they can influence any aspect of our being—not just what we can touch, taste, smell, feel, or see, but anyone or anything we can imagine. Sometimes our deepest and most dangerous attachments are to philosophies or ideas—even ones we like to think of as “Christian.” Or think about some of your long lost crushes. Do you actually miss that person as they are, or are you more connected to your idea of who you wanted them to be?
Now, there is some controversy regarding the statement about the camel and the eye of the needle. Clearly, for our ears, it doesn’t make much sense, and maybe that’s what Jesus intended. But its extremity, its absolute impossibility, makes it easy to gloss over, and I think that’s a mistake. Probably the most common—and controversial—explanation has to do with “the eye of the needle” being another name for a camel gate. A lot of scholars say this idea was invented during the Medieval Era as an attempt to lessen the severity of Jesus’ words. Those same scholars rightly point out that while the walled portion of Jerusalem had different animal-named entrances, like the Sheep Gate and the Fish Gate, the city never had a formal entrance known as the “Camel Gate.” However, I think they’ve missed the point. There may never have been a formal Camel Gate in Jerusalem, but the city—and most of the ones in the region—undoubtedly had different kinds of gates. And there is one type known as “the eye of the needle.”
After my senior year of college, I spent the summer touring Europe with a mission choir. While we were in southern Spain, we took a day trip to Tangier in Morocco. As the tour guide showed us around the city, he pointed out an “eye of the needle” and had us all walk through it. The eye of the needle was a low opening with a pointed arch just to the side of the main gate and was wide enough for one person to pass in a deep stoop. Distance would depend on how think the wall was—the one we went through was probably about 5 to 8 feet long. The point of these entrances was to limit access to different areas of the city either for defensive reasons or to restrict trade—for example, to prevent merchants from selling their goods on a Sabbath or other holy day. It was designed so people might come in and out, but no burdened animal could pass through. If you wanted your animal to accompany you for any reason, you had to take off all the luggage and goods it was carrying and leave them outside until the main gate officially opened at a later time. The “eye of the needle” was just wide and tall enough for a camel to pass provided it were to shuffle through on its knees. It was a difficult, labor-intensive process both for the owner and the animal, but it was absolutely necessary if both were to pass into the city.
In this passage, Jesus is neither condemning physical possessions nor restricting access to God’s Reign. But he is giving us a warning. The Kingdom is open to all, but the path isn’t necessarily easy. The more you’ve chosen to burden yourself with, the more negative attachments to choose to maintain, the harder it will be for you to enter. Whether you call them sins or obsessions, failures or mistakes, none of those things can ultimately remain with you on your journey to follow Christ. So instead of waiting until it’s all forcibly—and possibly painfully—removed, why not begin setting down your burdens now? Now is the time to seek help, not only from God but also from your fellow Christians. A camel can’t take off its own load—left to itself, it would never be able to pass through the eye of the needle. In reality, we need every part of the body of Christ to help remove and carry away one another’s burdens. As James says, “admit your failures to each another, and pledge yourselves to each another so you can be healed.”[2] No one comes to the Kingdom alone. Only together can we enter God’s Reign.
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] James 5:16a – my translation