You would have to excuse the rich man who just walked away from Jesus in today’s gospel if the lesson that he learned in this encounter was not “Sell what you have and follow me”. Instead, what he probably came away thinking was a more familiar lesson we all know: “If you don’t want to know, don’t ask.” We feel sorry for him, a basically good man who asks what he ought to do and can’t bring himself to do it, and is then told that it will be very, very hard for him to ever see the kingdom of God.
Let’s leave aside the image of the camel and the needle, though, and even the rich man for a minute, and ask: what is this “kingdom of God” that the rich man can’t get into? It’s a phrase we hear almost every week here in this church, and yet we would all be hard pressed to describe that kingdom or even say where it is. Throughout the gospels from the very first moment Jesus appears, we’re told that the kingdom of God is here, is at hand, but then it doesn’t appear to be something that we can actually see, and over and over people don’t understand what Jesus means when he says it is here.
What confuses us all the time is the idea that this kingdom must be off in the future, a vision of the end of time when all human imperfection has been wiped away, maybe it’s the kingdom we see in life after death. But that is not at all the picture in today’s gospel. Jesus said the kingdom of God was at hand, available. What he seems to want us to understand is that there is a kingdom of God at hand right now, but we fail to see it, a kingdom that we can see and touch and live in if we want it and embrace it, but it is a kingdom that exists alongside a false kingdom, and that kingdom is one that entraps us, without our even knowing it.
Jesus spends much of his public life trying to explain this kingdom of God and what it looks like. Read through the Sermon on the Mount and you see this kingdom, it’s a world turned upside down, where people give away more than they have, where everything stops because one poor person is at a disadvantage, where people forgive anything, where you don’t need to worry about money or possessions because people in the kingdom will all find a way to take care of one another somehow. That is the kingdom of God, and Jesus wants us to see that it is available now if we want to embrace it. The kingdom is about a network of completely new relationships between everyone, between the rich and the poor, now on an equal footing, between the people who need help and the people who are in a position to give it.
That’s the kingdom the rich man is being offered. But he lives in a kingdom that he’s been successful in, he knows how it works. Throwing it all away for another kingdom where the rules are completely different, where his whole life starts over from square one, a new identity, is almost impossible for him to do.
He’s not the only one. All through the gospel of Mark people are being told about this kingdom, and they don’t get it. It’s because it’s not a traditional view of heaven or paradise, where you have everything you ever wanted, including everything you have now. It’s not Florida or the Caribbean. There is a hidden and humbled shape to the kingdom of God; it demands letting go and self-surrender; it demands that we allow ourselves to fall with the confidence someone will catch us; it pushes us to our limits of how much we’re willing to trust in God and in other people.
That’s why this is a tough gospel for all of us, rich or not. We know we want to believe that God loves us unconditionally, just as we are, and it’s obvious that Jesus loves this rich man just as he is. But it’s also obvious that we’re being pushed to be a citizen of this other kingdom. But like the rich man our lives are tied up with fears and lack of trust and things we think we can’t live without.
That second reading from Paul says the word of God is a double-edged sword, and it is a great image for this gospel story, because the word of God is trying to do surgery on us, perhaps minor surgery or something more major, something that will open us up and take out whatever it is that is keeping us from this kingdom that is so close to us. Whether it is our money, or our distrust of other people, or our aversion to the poor, a fear that we will not be taken care of, or our fear that we are not good enough to try to live in a kingdom like that. Hard things to put aside, it seems as if it would be impossible for us to cut them out and throw them aside as easily as this rich man is being asked to throw all his obstacles aside. But somehow that is work that God can do on us, if we put down whatever it is we are grasping so tightly. We’re being offered a hundred times more than we have, Jesus says, and we don’t realize it.
Sometimes in all of our lives we have turning points and transitions, where we have the chance to change something significant about the way we live, who we want to be, and who we care about, and what our priorities are, maybe even to change how much we decide to place our trust in God. Today, the rich man had a turning point like that where he had a chance to step forward and seize the moment. Today, at least, he couldn’t. But he’s still an example for all us, because he was looking for the kingdom, he asked Jesus what to do to be part of it. He didn’t realize that the kingdom was more wonderful than everything he already had, and how close he was to being able to live in it. It is that close to us, too, if we don’t walk away.