How Hard It Is For Those Who Have Wealth To Enter the Kingdom of God!

I have a needle, and I have to apologize, I was not able to secure a camel for this weekend. I really tried. I have this camel that somebody gave me from the Holy Land on a pilgrimage. You can see even from this little camel how impossible it would be to fit through the eye of the needle. Jesus is using this strong image to tell us how hard it is for one who has wealth to enter into the Kingdom of God. There is a kind of misnomer going around that some people are saying that Jesus really didn’t mean that. He meant an eye of the needle was a door in the Holy Land. You’ll hear some people soften this idea. That’s nowhere found in scripture or in our church tradition or in any commentaries about true scripture study. Jesus was actually trying to make a very strong point: how hard it is for one who has wealth to enter the Kingdom of God. It’s impossible. What does this do for us and for the dilemma that we face? 

I was with the priests at the clergy convocation this week, and a number of our priests have served in El Salvador over the years. I was with one of the priests, Father Joe Callahan. He serves currently at an inner-city parish downtown in Cleveland and I was talking to him about the reading this Sunday. I said, “I’m coming up at a loss here. What do I say to the people this weekend?” He said, “You think it’s hard. What am I going to say to the people this weekend?” I said, “Well, what do you mean?” He goes on, “I’m at an inner-city parish and the people there are primarily Hispanics. Some are Mexican. Some are Dominicans. Some are from El Salvador.” He said, “The same people that come here from other countries,” and he was focusing on El Salvador specifically because he lived there. He said, “When they come over here, all of a sudden, they begin to have wealth. When they come to America, they’re leaving a place where they didn’t have a house. Their house was two-by-fours with the roof and maybe a tarp on the side of the wall, and now they have a house and a refrigerator and some even have a car.” 

And he said, “And I see what the wealth does to them. I see how this changes them right in front of my eyes.” He said, “Not only do you have to preach to your parish, but I have to preach to them and tell them how impossible it is to have wealth and to enter the Kingdom of God.” He works primarily with the immigrant population and it was a really neat because he said, “You should bring your parish sometime just to meet them and encounter them and journey with them.” 

So, I said, “Well, you’re not helping me out. What does this mean? What should I tell my people? And he said, “I think my only hope would be that they could really wrestle with this, if they could really wrestle with the idea of just how wealthy we are. We tend to think of ourselves probably in this area as middle class, but if we look at ourselves compared to the rest of the world, even if we are low class in America. we are extremely wealthy. We ought to be challenged by this, by this gospel that is speaking to each and every one of us. How hard it is to enter the Kingdom of God. 

I was with a young couple recently from our parish. They’re one of our home school groups, and they had me over to bless their house and have dinner. As we were talking to them, they have three kids, and they said, “Father, we decided early on when we got married that we were going to tithe. We have a separate bank account and 10% of everything that we have goes into that account.” They said, “Sometimes it really is tough, like it hurts, to not have those resources, but we really believe that if we tithe, if we give 10%, that God will bless us and God will come through for us.” And they said, “There are sometimes we really want to go back against that and go to that resource. It’s really caused us to suffer a little bit.” 

I realized, that could be a beginning step to think about. Do we tithe? Do we give 10%? I know priests are often terrified about talking about that, but the reason I’m not terrified about talking about it is because the promise that Jesus gives to us. He says, “Whatever we give up in this lifetime we will not only receive treasure in heaven but one-hundred-fold more even in the present age.” The idea is that God is a giver who is so generous, he will not be outdone in generosity. What that means is the more generous that we are with the world, the more generous God is going to be with us. 

This parable that we have of the camel passing through the eye of the needle and how impossible that is, I think I would just invite you to do what Father Joe is telling me. To wrestle with it. To struggle with it. How attached are we to wealth? How freely do we give to those in need? How freely do we give to the church? How freely do we give to the poor, not only those that we know but those downtown, those across the world, and those throughout the entire world? We don’t have to do what the young man did. When the young man heard this, and he was troubled by this, he walked away. He walked away sad. 

The opportunity for us is that we don’t have to walk away sad and just think I can’t do it. We can stay with Jesus. We can even look him in the eyes as he looks at us with love and we can look at him and say, “Lord, can you help me do this? It seems impossible to me. What do you mean? How do I give everything away?” Instead of looking and walking away sad, continue to look at his eyes with love because it’s his love that will give us the grace. It’s his love that will give us the courage. It’s his love that will give us the generosity to give away everything that we have and to then follow him.