Mark 10:23-25
Life
only seems to be getting harder. If you watch the news, and I would recommend
against it, you notice that the world is a place of turmoil and heartache. Here
in the United States, despite record numbers of people unable to work, the
official unemployment rate slowly drops, defying simple logic. If so many
people are out of work, have given up looking, why is this number touted as
economic success? They are not fooling me!
The
wealthy get blamed for so much. It would be nice for a change if some of the
rest of us took on some responsibility for the mess we are in. We have gotten
ourselves over-extended, and under financed. We took on loans that we couldn’t
afford. We made purchases that were luxuries and neglected the necessities,
knowing that someone would be there to bail us out.
Wealth
can corrupt our minds. It deceives us into thinking it provides safety and
security, when only the LORD can provide that. In Jesus ongoing discussion with
His disciples, Jesus has loved a rich man to the point of telling him the
truth: his wealth was getting in the way of his pursuit of God’s Kingdom. If he
wanted the Kingdom, he would have to get rid of the wealth.
And
now Jesus turns his attentions to His disciples, wanting to drive home the
lesson on wealth’s poison. He states simply that being wealthy and going to
heaven is a difficult journey. It isn’t impossible, but very hard to accomplish.
And when the disciples here this they stand amazed. Jesus is speaking in such
straight forward and stark terms about wealth, that they don’t quite know what
to make of it.
And
if Jesus had not intended to be so stark, He could have backed away from His
statements, softening them. But instead He makes it even more pointed. Entry
for anyone is difficult, not just the wealthy. The bar is very high when it
comes to heaven. No one will scrape through, just barely making it. We are
either in, or we are out. We either walk upright, or we have the proverbial
gate slammed in our face. If we get there it is not because of something we
have done or something we failed to do. It has nothing to do with ‘doing’.
Jesus
then gives a simple illustration that drives home the point. There are two
primary ways of looking at this illustration, and both of them point to the
same truth: getting to heaven is extremely difficult for anyone. The difference
turns on the meaning of the phrase “camel through the eye of a needle” use
here. The first meaning relies on a misspelled word, the word camel. It is only
one letter different from the word rope. So if the first copy of the text had
made this mistake, switching letters, then we get “rope through the eye of a
needle” instead. And the illustration makes sense. It would be impossible to
put a large ship’s rope through a home sewing needle. It would take a miracle!
The
second way to understand this phrase is to hear a reference to a small door in
a city gate, barely large enough for a person to fit through. When the large city
gates were closed at night for security purposes, there was a small door in the
large door that would allow limited access into the city. This small opening
would be easy to defend if the enemy broke through it. Only one person could
get through at a time. You could possibly get a camel through it, if the camel
were stripped of all its cargo, forced down on its belly and dragged and wedged
through the door, quite a feat with stubborn camels!
So
the truth is clear either way you understand this phrase. Either it takes a miracle
or we have to abandon everything in order to enter. In the context of the rich,
if they hold onto their riches, they won’t make it. If we hold onto anything
with more tenacity than we hold onto the LORD, we won’t get in.
What
are you carrying that won’t fit through the door?