God of the Possible

Scripture – Luke 18:24-26 (NRSV)

Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, 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.” Those who heard it said, “Then who can be saved?”  He replied, “What is impossible for mortals is possible for God.”

Devotion

Today’s passage from Luke 18 comes at the end of the story about Jesus’s encounter with a rich young ruler. The ruler asked Jesus what he needed to do to inherit eternal life. Implicitly, the ruler believed he could earn salvation through his good works, and that he had in fact accomplished this by living according to the Old Testament law. But Jesus turned the tables on the ruler, showing that God alone is good enough for eternal life and showing the ruler that there were limits to his personal goodness. The ruler, who was “very rich,” was not willing to give up his possessions in order to follow Jesus, even if this meant he would receive “treasure in heaven” (Luke 18:22-23). At this point in the story, Jesus commented, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, 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” (18:24).

This saying of Jesus is not a comfortable one, especially for those of us who are rich. We who follow Jesus today often reassure ourselves about our kingdom status in one of two ways. First, we compare our wealth to the uber-rich, to folks like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. In this comparison, we’re not rich. This seems like a convenient way to avoid the personal implications of Jesus’s teaching, except for the fact that many of us are relatively rich when compared to the rest of the people in the world. Second, we may have heard that the “eye of a needle” was a gate in the wall of Jerusalem, the opening of which required a camel to kneel down in order to pass through. Under this interpretation, Jesus was simply requiring the wealthy to be humble. The main problem with this reading of the view is that there is no evidence at all that such a gate ever existed.

So what’s going on in this passage? It’s likely that Jesus was speaking hyperbolically. He was exaggerating to make a point and doing so in a humorous way. Imagine watching an actual camel trying to pass through an actual eye of a needle! By speaking this way, Jesus got the disciples’ attention. And the disciples got Jesus’s point, asking “Then who can be saved?” (Luke 18:26).

Notice what Jesus did not say in response. He did not say, “Those who keep the whole law can be saved” or “Those who give away all their possessions can be saved” or “Those who are poor can be saved” or anything like this. Rather, he said, “What is impossible for mortals is possible for God” (18:27). Jesus’s answer to the “Who can be saved?” question is as negative as it can be for those who think salvation can somehow be earned through human effort. According to Jesus, it is impossible for human beings to save themselves, no matter how good they might be. Only God has the power to save.

With respect to the issue at hand, this means that God can save a rich person. In fact, in just a few verses we’ll see this very thing happen in a striking way. In the first part of Luke 19, Jesus had an encounter with a rich man named Zacchaeus. As a result of this encounter, Zacchaeus promised to give away half (not all!) of his possessions to the poor and make restitution for past unjust financial dealings (Luke 19:8). Jesus replied, saying, “Today salvation has come to this house” (19:9). It’s not that Zacchaeus earned salvation through his actions, however. Salvation came through God’s grace in Jesus, to which Zacchaeus responded with repentance. God did what was seemingly impossible, redeeming even a chief tax collector who had become rich by his financial misdeeds.

Notice that, in the case of Zacchaeus, salvation wasn’t merely a matter of his receiving life beyond his earthly life. It was also something Zacchaeus experienced in this life. He was saved from the greed that had motivated him to become rich. He was saved from acting unjustly according to God’s law, even if he followed Roman laws. He was saved valuing wealth above the community of God’s people. He was saved from a life of emptiness into a life of kingdom fulness.

You and I may be rich in possessions that keep us back from following Jesus. But even if we have very little, there are other things that bind our souls, hindering us from living fully in God’s kingdom. Jesus came to save us, not only in the age to come, but in this age. He came, as my friend Terry often says, to liberate souls. Jesus is at work setting us free from everything that holds us back from experiencing the eternal, abundant life of God’s kingdom. There’s no way we could accomplish this on our own. But what is impossible for you and me is possible for God.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the High Calling archive, hosted by the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Zacchaeus Was a Wee Little . . . Mafia Don?

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