A sermon preached at the Church of the Resurrection in Lockridge – Eden Hill on 13th January 2019
Years ago, before I went to England to study, we had a meeting in the home of a young doctor. He was depressed. Jesus told the rich ruler to sell all he had and give to the poor. The doctor couldn’t do this, not if he wanted to continue his practice in the up-market area where he lived. The story of the Jesus’ encounter with the rich ruler worries a lot of people – including me.
I organized a men’s breakfast. David Pawson was in Perth and I invited him to speak. I heard him once give the most powerful message I have ever heard – on the prodigal son. I invited a businessman to come with me and hear him, and I was sitting opposite him when David Pawson spoke about Jesus and the rich ruler. It is clear, he said. The rich must get rid of all their possessions, if they ever want to go to heaven; there is no other way. My businessman was not amused. He was a millionaire – or maybe he was bankrupt; I can’t remember. He kept going from one to the other. I did not agree that this story meant everyone should give up all their possessions.
Another man I knew – a full-on Christian leader, but also suffering from depression – told me he did not think he was a Christian because Jesus had told the wealthy to sell all their possessions. He was a wealthy man, he said, and he just couldn’t do it. He said he thought he might kill himself. I asked him why he would do that, and lose everything anyway? He smiled at the logic, but it made no difference to the way he was feeling. The story of the rich ruler tormented him, as it does a lot of sincere Christians, who feel they cannot measure up on this issue.
I spent three years in England from 1975 to 1978 studying the question of Jesus and possessions. The rich ruler was uppermost in my mind. What does Jesus want us to do with our possessions? Why did he tell the ruler to sell his? These are important questions.
So, this chap comes up to Jesus and asks an important question: “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Before we go any further I’d like us to register that the question we are dealing with is how we may have eternal life. It is a life and death issue. It is a question we all should ask and we all need the answer. You need to know the answer if you are survive death and the judgement that will follow, and you need to be able to give an answer to anyone who asks you. Some of us will live forever; some of us wont. Make sure you know the way to life.
But Jesus reacts first to being called good. “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” He is challenging the ruler’s belief that he can get an answer to that all-important question, if he can find a good enough teacher. He may also be flattering Jesus to get his help. But Jesus objects to such careless talk. We humans are not good. The answer to how we can have eternal life is not something you should look for in a human being. Only God is competent to answer such a question.
Some people do the rounds of teachers looking for something they can agree with, when they should be looking to the Word of God, the Scriptures. So, what does God say on this matter? This is the question we should all be asking.
“You know the answer,” Jesus says. The commandments! The good God has given them to you as the way to life. You know them! “Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not bear false witness, Honour your father and mother.” Anyone who points you to any other way than what God’s Word says – even if he is a popular rabbi – is not a good teacher.
We have to admit, this is a surprising answer. We might have expected something different. I think the ruler expected something different. He would have agreed that the commandments are the way to life, but surely a teacher like Jesus would have some special advice about how to keep them, or something to add to them. Jesus refuses to go down either of these roads. He is not teaching a new religion.
The ruler is surprised. “All these I have kept from my youth.” We are not sure what to make of this. Was he claiming never to have sinned? I doubt it. I think he was a sincere person who has tried to live by the teaching of the Bible since he was a child. Some people think Jesus is challenging and exposing his failure to keep the commandments, but I don’t see that – not here. One thing we can say, I think, is that the man is uncertain whether his love of the law is enough to get him eternal life. Perhaps that is because he knows his obedience is not perfect. There is an uncertainty here, a lack of assurance. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” is a question that still troubles him.
So now Jesus responds with those famous words: “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come follow me.”
Wow! This is getting confusing. The man is not sure he has done enough, and asks for some guidance on how to be saved. Jesus refuses to say anything more than what the Bible says, and points him to the commandments he knows. He says he has always kept them. And then Jesus hits him with this unexpected double whammy. “O, there is just one more thing. Give away all your wealth, and come and follow me!” Is Jesus playing games with this guy?
Let me ask you a question now! This “one thing” that Jesus says the ruler still lacks: what is it? Because if you look carefully you will see that Jesus actually asks for two things (or even three), not one: “sell all you have, give to the poor, and come follow me.” So, which is the one thing he says he still lacks, or are there two? If it’s the first, then Jesus is doing exactly what he has just refused to do; he is adding to the commandments. There is nothing in the law that says we should give away all our possessions. So, could the one thing that he is talking about be the “come follow me”? We need to think about this. It may just be the key to understanding what is happening here.
The first thing to get straight is that when Jesus says “come follow me”, he is not telling the ruler to become a Christian, or even to become his follower by believing in him; he is calling him to actually come and join his group of disciples on the road. It’s easy to make a mistake here, because we so often talk of following Jesus when we mean believing in him and obeying him. But, after his ascension to heaven, the New Testament rarely speaks of following Jesus. Never once in Acts do people follow Jesus. How can they; he is now in heaven? And Jesus didn’t call everyone to follow him on the road. What he was calling the ruler to was a rare privilege: to be in his presence full time.
The next thing to understand is that to be with Jesus is to be with the King of God’s kingdom. To be with the King is to be in the kingdom. To be in the kingdom is to have eternal life. Eternal life is not just life that goes on forever, it is the life of the kingdom (of course it goes on forever). This is something that is fundamental to understanding Jesus and the Gospels, and very few people do understand it. Once we grasp this we see that that the one thing missing for the ruler was actually to enter into eternal life. He came seeking it; Jesus told him the way; he said he was doing all that; so, then Jesus invited him to enter. But he laid down one condition: first get rid of all your stuff. And that’s when something happened that was very sad.
Why did Jesus make that condition? We don’t know; the Gospels don’t say. He didn’t ask that of everyone. But he is the King, and he is able to ask anything of any of us. And mostly we do find that there is one thing that prevents us from being a Christian. If we don’t deal with that one thing, then we stay outside the kingdom.
We see what happened with the ruler. When it was put in those terms, he discovered there was something he valued more highly than the kingdom – and its king. He loved his wealth. Jesus sees the look of horrible disappointment on his face and says, “How difficultly are those having possessions entering into the kingdom of God” (this is what the Greek says). Luke doesn’t tell us what the rich man’s final decision was. It’s like he puts him up as an example: “Look at this guy struggling with the choice between his money and the kingdom.” The look on his face tells us he is going to walk away; away from Jesus and away from eternal life. We must make sure nothing is more precious to us than the kingdom and its king. Jesus doesn’t even say how difficult it is for the wealthy; he says “those having stuff”. We all have stuff, and we need to recognize that it is a problem when it comes to our conversion. “How difficultly are those with stuff entering into the kingdom of God.” I suspect Luke had at times ministered in a region where there were a lot of well-off people. Becoming a Christian was risky. You might be outright persecuted, or you might be seen as anti-society and lose your customers or clients. We have seen something like this with the recent same-sex marriage debate. The yes movement put pressure on big companies and businesses. “If you don’t support our campaign, we will blacklist you and you’ll lose business.” Once a few companies caved in it became an avalanche. Many people are ruled by the dollar. What Jesus is telling us is that if your money – or your house, or your family, or your lover – means more to you that the kingdom and its king, you will miss out on life. Jesus opens the door of his kingdom to us now and invites us to enter. If we refuse, we may never get another chance. I think this means there can be no half-hearted Christians. In another place Jesus warns people that if they put a higher price on their life than they do on the kingdom, they are not welcome. “Whoever comes to me, and does not hate his father and mother, and wife and brother and sister … and even his own life, cannot be my disciple… Whoever does not kiss goodbye to all that he has cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14)
Some people will think I have fudged the interpretation of this passage to escape the idea that all Christians should give away all their money. Didn’t Jesus say, “Go, sell all that you have and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven!”? Couldn’t that be the one thing he lacked? But there’s a conclusion to the story, and if we pay attention to it, it will show us that the line I have taken is correct.
Jesus’ disciples were shocked at how he dealt with the young ruler. It’s good to know we aren’t the only ones to be troubled by some of Jesus’ teachings. The young man was faced with a choice between going with Jesus or keeping his possessions. He chose his wealth. Jesus follows this up with those hard words. “How difficultly are the rich entering the kingdom of God. It is more difficult for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Those who heard him said, “Then who can be saved?” They obviously thought that if it was that hard for a wealthy person, it would be hard for everyone – and it is; we are all wedded to the world. But Jesus added, “What is impossible for men is possible for God.” It is hard for us humans to get into God’s kingdom – all of us – impossible even. But what is impossible for us, God can do.
Peter then speaks up: “Look, we have left home and followed you!” And Jesus replied: “Amen, I tell you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life.”
The first thing to notice here is that the person who gives something up for the sake of the kingdom will get back more, even in this life. It is clear from this that Jesus doesn’t intend that his followers should necessarily be poor. You may have to be poor, but that is not because poverty is a good thing, or a Christian thing, or because God wants everyone to be poor. The important thing here is that you allow nothing to stand in your way of coming to Jesus. Come to him and you inherit the kingdom of God, and he will also look after you bountifully in this life! Choose something above him, and at the end you will lose everything!
A man once told me he had twice given all his money away, “but it keeps coming back,” he said. I knew him well for many years; Jesus meant everything to him. He was also a very generous person.
The second thing to grasp from what Jesus says is that he promises this care to anyone who has given up anything for the kingdom of God. If he had meant that we should give up everything, he would have said something like: “whoever leaves house and wife and brothers and children …”, but he says “whoever leaves house or wife or brothers or children …” In other words, if you leave anything for the sake of the kingdom, you will find that more comes back to you than what you walked away from.
This is an amazing teaching. It makes it clear that what Jesus is saying is not that we should give up everything to be a Christian, but that we should be prepared to give up anything which stands in the way of us being a Christian. That could be your partner, or a parent, or it could be your money. Many of my African students had to walk away from their families. The father said, “Look, you cannot be a Christian and belong to this African family. Continue to worship our ancestors and take part in our family rituals, or leave.” And many had to leave. Many in the early church faced similar choices. People still do today. But Jesus is not teaching that we should all necessarily become poor.
In my next talk I will look at the case of a rich man who found and entered the kingdom of God. After that I want to look at some of Jesus’ teaching that helps us to use our possessions in a Christian way.
Before I leave the rich ruler though, I want to add a postscript about the prosperity movement.
Jesus says that those who surrender something for the kingdom will not be the losers. The prosperity teachers seize hold of this and turn it into a promise of prosperity. There are various forms of prosperity teaching. I remember a Pentecostal pastor ringing his hands about the new “tabernacles” teaching. He explained that Christians like me believed in forgiveness of sins through the death of Jesus. “That is “Passover” teaching,” he said. “But the Pentecostal movement believes in the second blessing of the Holy Spirit. That is the “Pentecost” principle.” And there is an emphasis on healing that goes with that. If you have the Holy Spirit and faith you can claim healing as one of the fruits of Jesus’ atoning death. But appearing first in Australia in the 1970’s came the “Tabernacles” teaching, and it was even worrying this Pentecostal pastor. The Feast of Tabernacles is a harvest festival. The idea was that material prosperity is another fruit of the cross and we should claim it. The prosperity movement is one of the strongest recent movements in Christianity; it is sometimes called “the faith movement” because of its emphasis on trusting God as a means of getting what we want. “Name it and claim it” is a slogan of the movement. This teaching is sweeping Africa and other parts of the world where there are masses of poor people. Preachers stir them up to think God wants them to be rich. They can have what they want by believing for it. About the only way of getting rich in Zimbabwe today, other than by being a politician, is to become a prosperity movement prophet. Prophet Walter Magaye earns $2 million a month with his oils and holy water and other charms that are supposed to make you rich. The poverty-suffering people grab hold of these. The prophet gets richer, and they get poorer. When I was in Zimbabwe I saw the mansions of two of these prophets. But this is not an African or South American movement. It comes from the USA. I once attended a “Miracle Crusade”. “Everyone will have their miracle” was on all the advertising signs. The evangelist’s nephew who worked with him eventually spoke out:
“After each event, my uncle and I would board a Gulfstream jet and fly to lavish locations, from Monte Carlo to luxury hotels in Dubai. We were chauffeured in Bentleys and slept in US$25 000-a-night resorts.
“(When I saw what I had become) I was disgusted. The Gospel then became real, the real Gospel, not just the good news, the bad news too. It’s bad news because I was greedy, I was ambitious for all the wrong things, exploiting the poor, squeezing every last dollar out of people so we could live the way they couldn’t. Using Jesus to do that.” (http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ids.v50i1.2076)
The Bible has a lot to say about blessing. Blessing is certainly the destiny of the children of the kingdom. The problem at the heart of the prosperity movement is that it thinks all the blessings of heaven can be had now. You might think that the acquisition of prosperity is about as far as it can go, but some have taken it a step further and teach that political power is a fruit of the gospel. This is called dominion teaching. Yes, the Bible does teach that believers will rule in the age-to-come, and through their prayers even in this age, but to make it a now-thing and turn it into an expectation that Christians should seek political influence and establish a theocracy takes us a long way from Jesus’ warning that his way in this age would be fraught with suffering.
The story of the rich young ruler warns us that possessions can be a terrible problem. They can compete for our loyalty. They can be more precious to us than Jesus and the kingdom. If following Jesus means we have to walk away from something or someone, we should. We should not fear. God can give us as much back again in this life, and of course, eternal life in the age to come. But to use that reassurance to stir up our greed for possessions is a horrible perversion of Jesus’ teaching.