From a sermon preached at Bethany Lutheran Church, Iowa Falls
Scripture: Mark 10:17-31
Thank
you for having me to share a bit about camp, to join with you in worship, and
to preach on the story of Jesus and the rich man, which is a misunderstood
story—the kind of story we delve into at camp where we have the time and space
to deal with complex and misunderstood stories. Of course, the best news for
all of you is that I’m a guest preacher, so if you don’t like what I say, I
won’t be here next week!
You know a Bible story is ripe with meaning when you open up your Bibles and see there are a bunch of footnotes about words and phrases that have been added or omitted in ancient sources. But if you are like most people, when you notice a footnote in your Bible about some Greek word, you do what most sane people do and think, “I don’t have time to figure out what that means.” Lucky for you today, I do have time—and in this case, I believe the footnotes are important, because in Mark 10:24-25, Jesus says, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle…” etc. and in most Bibles you will see a reference, and at the bottom of your page it will say something like, “Other sources say, “Children, it is hard for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of God!” And if you are a sane person, you will say, “Ah, so scholars disagree, and this passage sounds really hard anyway, so OK, this is one of those unfathomable mysteries—plus, I was a little weirded out that I might be a rich person anyway, since Jesus doesn’t really define what it means to be rich—so I’m going to either A) ignore this passage entirely, or B) assume it applies to other, much richer people than myself.”
A
brief note on the notes to scripture. What we know today as the Bible was
originally many books—you probably know that—but more than that, those books
were copied by many scribes—human beings who would physically write copy the
words to create new books. This was slow and also the scribes made errors.
Humans didn’t have printing presses until the 1500s—you may remember—so when
the book of Mark was originally written, it was then copied many times by many
different people—people we call “scribes.” We know about some of these scribes
because some of these ancient texts have quite literally been dug up through
the years, and what we have found is that scribes occasionally made mistakes in
copying the scripture, but that is not what happened here. What also
happened—and what indeed is happening in our story today—is that a scribe has
made an intentional change to the original text. They added some words!
When
that happens, it is well-worth our time to consider why a scribe would do this,
and in this case, I think it’s pretty obvious: The scribe read the original
words and did not like what it was saying. He (I say, “he,” because it is an
odds game it probably was a man) read the original and thought to himself,
“Jesus needs to more clearly condemn rich people, because the way it reads
right now seems to imply that it is hard for anyone to enter the kingdom
of God, and that can’t be right!” The scribe made a theological edit—he
believed that Jesus meant to condemn rich people, not everyone—and so he
changed the text to clarify.
This
makes sense at first blush, and this scribe is certainly not alone in trying to
soften this passage. In fact, around a thousand years later, a man named Anselm
of Canterbury was so offended by this story—especially the part about it being
nigh on impossible for a rich person to be saved—that he appears to have made
up the idea that there was a gate in Jerusalem called, “The eye of a needle.”
In this version, Anselm was claiming that it was not impossible for rich people
to be saved, it was just kind of hard. That story about the “Eye of the Needle”
gate has become so pervasive that you may still hear about it today, but that
doesn’t change that it was invented a thousand years after Jesus.
OK, now you’re all wondering why the Ewalu guy is here to give us a long history lesson about scripture, so I had better get to the point, which is this: If this passage has confused or worried you, you’re not alone, but please, please, please, do something important, and read to the end of the story with me. When you do, this story flips on its head. When you read to the end, this story about judgment becomes something else—but we have to get there to see it. So, let’s do that now:
