[The following is a homily I gave some years ago. I’ve posted something on this Gospel passage before, but there are usually several approaches and emphases that can be used to interpret and understand it. If that weren’t so, I would only have to preach once on each Gospel passage and then retire! Anyway, since my brain is drying up again, I thought I’d drag out another “oldie but goodie.” It’s around 3000 words, so I’ve divided it into two parts.]
That was an impossible reading that we just heard! (Lk. 18:18-27). As a matter of fact, practically the entire Gospel is impossible—from our perspective, of course. But the message of Jesus in today’s impossible Gospel is that things that are impossible for us, are possible for God, and for God to do in and through us. So, there’s still hope for us: the impossible things don’t have to remain such.
Let us look at what was going on here. The Gospel starts out with a question. Now, we all have lots 
of questions for God, and most of them seem to start with, “Why?” Well, this is a different question—it starts with “What?” But it’s a very fundamental question, a question that should be a very important one to anyone who’s hoping for a happy ending, a happy afterlife, and that question is: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Now it’s interesting that the man phrased it in that way, because it already shows that he has some understanding about the kind of relationship between us and God, and how this salvation works, because he said “inherit” eternal life. Now how does an inheritance come to us? Do we work for it? An inheritance is something that is just given to us, that we don’t deserve, but it’s handed to us by some rich uncle or eccentric grandmother or somebody who has taken a fancy to us and would like to leave something of their wealth to us. In that sense, it’s just a gift, it comes out of nowhere. But on the other hand, there still is something to do, because he asked, “What must I do, to inherit…?”
Basically, what you have to do to inherit something, at a minimum anyway, is to stay in the good graces of the one you want to inherit something from. Don’t annoy or provoke your old uncle, or he’ll decide not to include you in his will and you won’t get any inheritance. So, there is something that has to be done to keep a good relationship with the one whom you hope to inherit something from.
This man asks about the most important thing: eternal life. Of course, he didn’t need anything else, obviously; he’s rich. But still, being a pious Jew, he was interested in eternal life. So, he asks Jesus what to do to inherit eternal life. And Jesus did not actually give him a straight answer. He starts off by saying, “Well, you know the commandments, right?” And He listed a few of them. That was his answer.
To certain other people who asked a similar question, Jesus listed the commandments and said, “Do this, and you will live,” and that was the end of it, though they’d keep asking questions and get into trouble later on. But Jesus didn’t say that this time. He didn’t say, “Do this and you will live.” He just said, “Here are the commandments.”
Now there must have been something sort of eating away at this rich man, because he could’ve gotten off scot-free at that moment. He could’ve said, “OK”—because, as he said, he’d kept all those commandments ever since his youth. So he could’ve said, “OK, here I asked the Lord what to do that I might have eternal life, and He says: here, keep the commandments.” The rich man could have said, “Well, I do that, so it’s already set!” And he could have taken off, right at that moment, glorifying and praising God, having no other questions or problems, for the rest of his life.
But something made him hang around a little longer and get the hard word from Jesus. Something made him think that maybe this is just not that simple, because Jesus didn’t give him the “Go in peace and you shall live.” He just said, “Here are the commandments.” So he said, “OK, I did them, I’ve always done them,” kind of cringing, waiting for what’s coming next. It is important, how Jesus responds to him. This is also a different response than we read in the Gospel of Matthew, and it’s likely, I suppose, though we don’t know for sure, that in the three years of Jesus’ ministry more than one person came up to him and asked him “What can I do to gain eternal life?”
So, in this case, Jesus does not say, “If you would be perfect…”—as we find in the account in Matthew—“…then do this.” It’s just the opposite. He says, “There’s something that you lack; there’s something still missing, even though you obeyed all the commandments.” That’s when Jesus put the ax to the root of the tree, and said, “Go, sell everything that you have.”
The guy didn’t let on at that moment that he was wealthy; but of course, Jesus knew. “Go and sell everything that you have, and store up treasure in heaven…” Set up a bank account in heaven, of heavenly treasures—the heavenly account is really a high-interest, no-penalty account, you know. It’s very secure; it doesn’t depend on the plummeting Dow Jones or anything like that. It’s something that you can rely on. Jesus says, “Do that, and then come, follow Me.”
Jesus pressed that sore spot in the guy’s life, and revealed his attachment. So the man became sad and walked away. It’s important to also notice that this was a very personal kind of encounter here, because the message that Jesus gives here He doesn’t give to everybody. He deals with different people in different ways. It’s not the call to every Christian without exception, to sell every single thing that you have, and give to the poor, and follow Him. Some people (maybe not too many, but some people) can have wealth and still be followers of Jesus, and still use their wealth to be generous to other people, and not be attached to their wealth.
You know, it’s actually good that there are some wealthy Christians, somewhere in the world, otherwise Mt. Tabor Monastery could not write grant proposals to Catholic foundations and expect to get money to do massive repairs on our church! So it’s good that some Christians, somewhere, have some money to give.
In any case, Jesus knew that this particular man was attached to his wealth. For that man, wealth was an obstacle to his salvation, an obstacle to his union with God, and so Jesus had to say, “You’ve got to get rid of it.” He goes on to say, “How hard it is, then,” just by seeing what happened, “for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.” And He gives his famous comparison: “It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”
As an interesting little aside, the word for “camel” (gamla in Aramaic), also means “rope”, so it’s actually possible, and even likely, that Jesus was saying—since there’s some sort of comparison between a thread and a rope—that it’s easier to put a rope through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
That may be so, and I don’t think it even weakens the comparison, because He could have said it’s easier for the Temple to pass through the eye of a needle, or the Empire State Building, or something like that. But it doesn’t really matter, because if it’s impossible, it’s impossible! If it’s impossible for a rope to go through, it’s impossible for the Empire State Building to go through, no matter how much bigger it is; impossible equals impossible. In any case, Jesus is saying that this is a serious matter.
To be continued…
Making All Things New 