Mark 10:17-31
Jesus’s radical economics are on full display this week. As a kid, I remember that this passage was one of the few things that we read about in the bible that my Sunday School teachers were sure was a metaphor. Once again, we have a person coming to Jesus with a question, and once again, we find Jesus answering a question with a question. The man wants to know how to get eternal life. Jesus offers an interestingly snappy retort, asking the man why he would call Jesus good. Jesus lets the man know that only God is good, but then he pivots to listing off the standard list of commandments. The man replies that he follows all the commandments. In his time, a person who followed all of those commandments would have been thought of as good. But as Jesus just reminded us, no one is good but God.
All of the commandments that Jesus lists for the man are all things NOT to do. Even “honor your father and mother” is essentially, just don’t dishonor your father and mother. This is where Jesus makes a great ethical turn from the law calling you to not do evil, to God’s law requiring you to do good. For Jesus, it is not enough for you to not wound someone. You must help someone who is wounded. The man says, “I have not done bad things.” Jesus calls him to do some hard good things. Jesus wants the man to, “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” That is a huge ask, and the man quickly gives up and runs away.
Jesus says something akin to sell everything, give the money to the poor, and follow me many times throughout the gospels, but I’ve rarely heard anyone say out loud that he meant it. I have heard more equivocation about this passage than almost any other. If you google it you can find tons of pastor’s blogs talking about how it doesn’t really mean that, or that if you read it alongside Paul’s letters, then taken together it means something different. There are lots of rationalizations for why to disregard this.
I don’t think Jesus is kidding here. Later in this passage Peter literally says that the disciples have done this. The passage says, “Peter began to say to him, ‘Look, we have left everything and followed you.’” Jesus’s response is, “Good job! You will be rewarded.” It is a hard thing to hear, and it was as radical then as it is now. As a person with a house with a lot of stuff in it, it is pretty hard to know exactly what to do with this commandment from Jesus. What does this mean for us today?
Jesus again refers back to the idea that the last shall be first and the first shall be last. To me, this is a good reminder that this is not just about one person’s choices, but instead the need for societal change. Just like then, our economy and our society are structured so that the first are first and the last are last. Just like then, the most affluent and powerful in our society have the most and the best of nearly everything. As of 2010, the top ten percent of wage earners in the United States made just under fifty percent of all income made in our country.1 By contrast, as of 2015, the bottom fifty percent of income earners in our country now take home a mere thirteen percent of all income in the United States. To make matters worse, the top one percent take home over twenty percent of income in America. This means that one percent of the people in this country take home almost twice what half of the people in the US make all put together. That income inequality reverberates throughout our society in unequal schooling and unequal healthcare, and those inequalities are even worse for people of color and people from marginalized communities.
These economic visions of epic reversal become even more radical when they are combined with all of the scriptures we have discussed before. Jesus calls on his disciples to serve him by serving others. Jesus calls on his disciples to love their neighbors as themselves. Jesus calls on his disciples to be fearless, and drop all that they have to follow him. And Jesus calls on all of us to see our responsibility to one another as the Samaritan did. All of these radical ideas fit perfectly within a framework that says society should be ordered so that the last shall be first. In a radical society where the last were first in all of our economic priorities, surely the man fallen by the road would receive all the care he needed, surely those who chose to live on less in the service of God would have all they needed, and every neighbor would have all that they needed because we would prioritize sharing our resources in love.
Today is the feast day for St. Francis of Assisi, a rich kid who gave away everything to go serve God and the poor. Yes, these ideas are pretty radical, and it’s hard to think about how different our lives and our society could be if we followed them. But, Jesus meant it when he said them, and St. Francis believed him. To admit it is the first step towards a more equal, more just and more loving tomorrow.
Pickety, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p 323.