HEAVEN AS A REWARD? LESSONS FROM LITTLE CHILDREN AND A RICH MAN
Dr. A. Andrew Das
Mark 10:23-31
21 Sunday after Pentecost
Have you ever heard the saying: “A text without a context is a pretext”? Think about that for a second: a text without a context is a pretext. One of the advantages of the lessons in our bulletins is that it allows us to read for ourselves the texts for any given Sunday, but it’s really a mixed blessing. The bulletins leave our readings almost suspended in space on the page without any relation to what came before or what came after. Mark wrote his gospel with the idea that we would hear it being read out loud, and he assumed that we would hear it all the way through. Without that context, our gospel text becomes a pretext.
The only way to see the immediate context of a reading in most church services is to bring a Bible and to use it during the sermon. Here at St. Timothy, we have a few copies in the pews, but we really need to be bringing our own Bibles. We always need to be asking how does this text follow from what comes just before, and how does it prepare for what comes later? You might even notice something that you want to mark in your Bibles to remember about the passage.
If you had a Bible open to today’s gospel text and you scanned the paragraph or two before, you would see a couple paragraphs earlier that the disciples had tried to prevent some parents from bringing their children to Jesus. This was actually the second time the disciples had kept the children away. They had done the same thing in the previous chapter. This time Jesus rebuked the disciples and said: “Let the little children come to me. Don’t stop them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I assure you: Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” It’s no coincidence, then, at the beginning of our gospel text Jesus addresses the disciples as “children.”
Now if you find today’s sermon a little slow, you could open the Bible you brought with you and look for other instances where Jesus addresses his disciples as children. You would find that this is the only place in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus ever calls the disciples “children,” and, again, it’s right after those two incidents where the disciples were keeping the small children from coming to him. So there is a lesson here from our context that Jesus is trying to impress on the disciples. The disciples really have to identify with small children, the least in their society. We too are to be “children” with respect to the things of God.
So how do we do that? Mark right away poses for us a group of people that are at the very opposite end of the social spectrum. There’s a group of people out there that has a really hard time identifying with small children, who don’t count as the important people of their world. Identifying with small children is going to be the hardest for the wealthy, the rich, the people who are the important ones of their world.
Now you might be thinking about wealthy people as the other people out there. Hey, I’m not rich. But hold on for a second! The blessings we enjoy in our day with the incredible food we have in all those long aisles at the grocery store or in restaurants, with the roofs we have over our heads with air conditioning and heating. We take all these blessings for granted, but we modern Americans are among the wealthiest people the world has ever seen.
But the wealthy are the important people of society. They are the great ones of their world. Many of us have great jobs. We have these incredible blessings—even as we find ourselves, ironically, yearning for more money and more blessings. Now in the paragraph just before our gospel text a man came up to Jesus and announced that he had obeyed all the commandments. Jesus looked at the guy and told him to go sell everything that he had and give the proceeds to the poor. Then he could come and follow Jesus. At that point the man became sad, and Mark drops the punchline that he was very rich. This had been a rich guy, and he couldn’t give it all up.
I remember years ago during one of our family devotions when our oldest son was, I guess, six or seven years old or so. We had read about the rich man in the paragraph just before our gospel text, and I had said something along the lines of how we have to be able to give everything up at a moment’s notice, if the Lord called us to do that. Think about your most precious possessions. Could you surrender them all? Then I reminded him of some of his favorite toys, and he thought about it and began to cry. He would never do that now, of course, but he was being far more honest in that moment as a little guy than most of us adults are. I have to become like my oldest son back when he was little.
After the rich man went away sad, our gospel text continues with Jesus looking around, and he says: “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” The disciples were astonished by this. So why were they astonished by the idea that rich people can only get into the kingdom with great difficulty?
To understand that, you have to realize that in this society, if you were wealthy, you were assumed to be blessed by God, and if God was blessing you, then you must be a good person. The Law of Moses in Deuteronomy 28 has a whole section on how if you do what God requires, you will enjoy his blessing. That’s followed by a whole section on how if you don’t do what God requires, you will experience his curse. So if someone seemed blessed, many Jews in Jesus’ day would assume that they had done what God required in the Law. The people who were poor and suffering had not obeyed God’s Law as they should. Proverbs 10:22 tells us that “The Lord’s blessing enriches.” So wealth, they thought, was the result of the Lord’s favor. Isaiah 3:10-11 says: “Tell the righteous that it will go well for them…. Woe to the wicked—it will go badly for them.” And the Jewish literature of Jesus’ day witnesses to how the Jews had continued to take these passages that way. [e.g., Tob 12:9; Sir 3:1, 6; 25:7-11; 35:13; 44:10-15; 51:27-30; Bar 4:1] It was a sort of rewards theology. The rich were being rewarded for their good works. If you recall, the rich man had matter-of-factly told Jesus that he had obeyed all the commandments. Now you can understand why the disciples were astonished when Jesus said that the wealthy only enter the kingdom of God with great difficulty. They were supposed to be the first ones in line. If it is going to be extremely difficult—or even impossible—for the rich, then how can the rest of us be saved?
Now Jesus at that point could easily have faulted the disciples, along with the rest of their society, for how they were reading the Scriptures. The Hebrew prophets criticized wealthy people all the time who had failed to exhibit any real righteousness, especially in how they ignored and exploited the poor. In fact, the prophets would exalt the poor at the expense of the rich. [e.g., Isa 10:1-4; 53:9; Amos 2:6-8; Mic 2:1-5; Pss 10:2-11; 12:5; 37:12-22] But Jesus does something even more radical. He posits wealth and the kingdom of God in terms of an either-or.
Jesus responds to their astonishment: “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 than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Too much health and wealth in the present age keeps people distracted from the things of the God. People who are comfortable don’t need the Lord. The disciples were astonished by this even more. They began to say to each other: “Then who can be saved?”
It’s like a camel going through the eye of a needle. We have this image of the largest animal in Judea and the smallest hole. No amount of effort will ever do it, contrary to the rich man’s optimism about his own goodness. So the disciples begin to wonder if anyone can be saved – if not those who had seemed blessed.
Jesus looked at them and adds, “With men, this is impossible, but not with God, because all things are possible with God.’” In other words, rich people can never be saved, despite all the presumption of good works that they must have done. It’s impossible for them. God has to make it possible.
The disciples don’t get it. They figure that if rich people are not after all first in line for the kingdom, hey, Peter reminds him that they had left everything to follow him. [cf. 1:16-20] The rich young ruler may not have been able to leave everything behind, but they sure have. Surely they have done what is required for the kingdom of God. Didn’t Jesus just say that the kingdom’s not for the rich?
You know, Jesus does not rebuke Peter for his thinking. No, he grants that there will indeed be a reward for Peter’s leaving everything behind. Jesus says: “I assure you, there is no one who has left house, brothers or sisters, mother or father, children, or fields for my sake and for the sake of the gospel, who will not receive a hundred times more, now at this time—houses, brothers, and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and eternal life in the age to come.” It’s like the parable of the sower back in Mark chapter 4 with the good seed that bear a hundredfold fruit.
Yes, Peter will get his reward for abandoning everything, but then comes the punchline: “Many who are first will be last, and the last first.” Jesus makes clear that it will be a reward of grace. The rich find themselves last in the kingdom of heaven, and small children find themselves at the front of the line. And that’s because it does not depend on what we of ourselves have done. The kingdom of God is impossible for us—for all of us! Only God can make it a reality.
As confident as Peter was in what he had sacrificed to follow Jesus, he too, like the rich man, will turn away and deny him—three times! God will have to make the kingdom possible for Peter too, as we see at the very end of the story. At the tomb: “Go tell the disciples—and Peter—that he is going ahead of you to Galilee and you will see him.” [16:7]
So we have a lesson here: God does not reward us with the kingdom for our good works. Those good works will indeed have their reward, but our enjoyment of the kingdom is not a reward for them. God exalts the little ones, the least, and he humbles the great and the proud. And it’s not just our impossible salvation that God makes a reality for us—it’s also a new way of life. This one’s not an either-or. Our salvation expresses itself in how we live—for instance, being able to surrender our possessions should the Lord call us to that.
Jesus wants to turn our entire way of thinking upside down. We should never think of ourselves as anything more than poor, lowly people who have received the riches of God’s grace. Are you wealthy in this world? If you’re living here in America, let me tell you, for the vast majority of you—yes, you are very wealthy. If you’re wealthy, ditch any sense of attitude about yourself. Think of yourself not as somebody important. Think of yourself like a small child—a nobody in terms of worldly status. That’s who you really are. God will exalt us—we do not exalt ourselves. We consider ourselves nothing in this world.
It’s a mindset we have to cultivate at every moment of our lives—in our dealings with colleagues at work, with family members, at school. We consider ourselves the least in this world compared to others. And we have a model for this in our Savior. Although God created the heavens and the earth, he chose to suffer humiliation at the hands of his creation and to die naked, abandoned on the cross. The last shall be first and the first shall be last, and so Jesus is exalted above all others. The Lord modeled being last in our world when he saved us from our sins.
Jesus concludes our gospel text that those who have left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or friends for the sake of Jesus and the kingdom will receive a hundredfold in this age and in the age to come. So don’t worry when you have experienced the denial of this world. The Lord is watching and he cares for you, just like a dear father. By the way, did you notice that when Jesus repeats how we’ll enjoy in the age to come brothers and sisters, mothers, and children a certain family member is missing. Did you catch that? No fathers. But who just called the disciples “children”? Jesus is the head of this new household, and he is not asking anything of us that he did not first do himself. Actually, he’s asking of us the impossible—but with God all things are possible. Jesus looked at his disciples just like he had just looked at the rich man. With his loving gaze upon each of us, God’s grace makes this all possible. That attitude of sheer child-like humility that is so difficult for the important people of our world—the Lord is helping us with that! AMEN.
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