The Problem of Privilege
Reflections on the Lectionary for October 13th
I have a few different strategies for focusing these lectionary commentaries. Sometimes I do it narrowly, thinking about a single angle into a text and playing it out all the way across a couple thousand words. And sometimes I try to put all the texts in conversation with each other, pointing out commonalities and themes. But occasionally, there are too many good angles to choose just one, and there is too much to say about one of the texts to do justice to it in the context of the rest. This week is like that; the lectionary for October 13th contains one text, the gospel text, that really seems to be clamoring for my attention. But it’s too multi-faceted, too open to multiple interpretations, to stick to just one way of looking at it. So this week, instead of a deep dive into one aspect of one text, and instead of a comparison between several different passages, I’m lumping together a few different observations of Mark 10:17-31, trying to offer a choice of ways into that story.
The first thing to notice is that this is a passage that shows up across the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) in some subtly different ways. Chances are that, like me, you were taught the Mark was written first and that the other synoptic gospels are variants of it—that Matthew and Luke are, essentially, revisions of Mark. But many scholars no longer agree with that, and increasingly people put Matthew first (with Mark being an abridgement of Matthew and Luke relying on one or the other). It’s interesting to think through those options with this passage. Luke’s version is both shorter than the other two and more pointed in its critique, which might not necessarily be what you would expect from a revision. (Many scholars assume that texts get longer when they get revised, but of course that’s not a hard and fast rule). And Luke seems to make the stakes of the story more specific; it’s a “ruler” who approaches Jesus in Luke’s gospel, rather than “one” in Matthew or “a man” in Mark. Luke aims the story’s economic critique more squarely at the elite than the other two. It’s easy to imagine Luke adding that detail in, making Jesus’ point about wealth all the more poignant because he was talking with a person of authority.
Mark and Matthew mostly tell the story in parallel ways, with some exceptions. One difference is that Matthew includes a little eschatological aside, in 19:28: “Truly I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of man shall sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” Is it more likely that Matthew added that bit (to emphasize his special concern with Jews and Judaism), or is it more likely that Mark took it out (for brevity)? Those are the kinds of things scholars argue over endlessly—much to my delight. In either case, Luke also leaves that part out, and focuses not on Israel but on the wealth of the “ruler.” (In Matthew and Mark the man has “great possessions,” in Luke he is “very rich.” A subtle but perhaps important distinction). For me, all of that points to the old scholarly consensus, which is that Mark wrote the first gospel and Matthew and Luke both glossed it with their special concerns. But we will never know for sure.
In all three versions, Jesus responds to the man’s question by quoting six of what we now call the Ten Commandments. Given the ongoing obsession on the part of some Christians to insinuate the Ten Commandments into public life (including public schools and judicial spaces), it’s interesting to notice here that Jesus does not seem to view the Ten Commandments as a single and indivisible set of teaching. Rather, Jesus here quotes only six of the commandments, and he leaves the other four out. Which six does he quote, and which four does he omit? Jesus emphasizes the six that relate to other human beings (murder, adultery, theft, false witness, fraud, honoring parents), and he omits the four that relate only to God (no other gods before God, no graven images, do not take the name of the Lord in vain, remember the sabbath). Presumably Jesus knew the other commandments, and presumably he found them to be important. So why did he quote some but not others?
I read this interaction as privileging some of the commandments over the others—as claiming, at least in the context of this conversation, that some of the commandments are more important than others. When presented with an opportunity to set the standards for inheriting eternal life, Jesus does not seem to give a lot of thought to proper treatment of God, as one might have expected. Rather, in a way that reflects Jesus’ own Jewish tradition, he points to the way the Jewish law insists that we take care of each other and take care with each other. Jesus seems to suggest that our relationships with each other are paramount to our spiritual well-being, a sentiment that can be found throughout the Jewish law. God, the implication seems to be, will be fine if we happen to imperfectly observe the sabbath; God’s feelings won’t be too badly hurt. But our inheritance of eternal life might be riding on our treatment of other people. And as if to drive home that point, when the man confidently replies that he has kept those six commandments, Jesus adds another layer. “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor.” This is an instruction that doesn’t have any direct comparison in the six commandment or the ten, though the instruction to deal favorably with the poor shows up everywhere in the Jewish law and in other Jewish texts like the prophets. Jesus seems to be amending the ten commandments, or summarizing them, or somehow otherwise pointing to a broader function of the Jewish tradition. To inherit eternal life, Jesus is saying, you need to deal kindly with the poor, but perhaps more importantly, you might need to become poor.
Lest his listeners and readers think that this is a stray point that could be ignored, Jesus then doubles down on this teaching. In 10:23 he amplifies the idea: “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” And then, two verses later, the famous saying: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
So much energy has been spent trying to make this verse—about the eye of a needle—say something besides what it says. The one I remember most clearly, from a sermon I heard as a teenager, is that Jesus here is referring to a gate in Jerusalem called the “Eye of the Needle.” The “Eye of the Needle,” so the story goes, was a very short gate, not really large enough for camel traffic, and so when the camels entered through the gate they had to drop to their knees and shuffle through. So too, I remember the sermon going, we must drop to our knees and pray about our possessions and our wealth, and by doing so we might both have possessions and enter the kingdom of God.
This way of understanding Jesus’ analogy is wrong on at least a couple of levels. First of all, no such “Eye of the Needle” gate existed in Jerusalem or anywhere else. It doesn’t take much historical sensibility to realize that a gate like that would not have been terribly functional, and any camels would have simply gone to another gate. There is no archaeological evidence or textual evidence for a gate like that. The legend of the “Eye of the Needle” gate has its origins in the medieval period, but it’s an invention out of whole cloth. It’s simply an exegetical deus ex machina designed to make Jesus’ words not mean what they mean. And that serves another of the levels on which this way of understanding Jesus’ saying is wrong—a theological one. This kneeling-camel-gate interpretation makes Jesus say something—that wealth is ok if you pray about it enough—that he is manifestly not saying. It’s a prosperity gospel Uno-reverse card, meant to make wealthy people feel better about Jesus saying that being wealthy is bad. It’s a nice idea, I suppose, but it’s contrary to the plain meaning of the text. And it’s worth pointing out that Jesus, here, is very much in the tradition of Jewish exegesis, which in the Talmud contains a similar saying (but with an elephant instead of a camel).
We are stuck, then, with a teaching from Jesus that wealth is bad, and that it would be easier for a camel to enter into an (actual) eye of an (actual) needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. What do we make of this? Why would Jesus say something like this? I can only assume that he meant it. Scholars argue over Jesus’ socio-economic situation as much as they argue over the order of the gospels’ composition, but the predominant position puts him in the peasant classes or at least the lower reaches of the artisan class. (A lot depends on how you interpret the word tektōn, the one usually translated “carpenter.” We tend to think of a carpenter as a skilled artisan, worthy of a lot of respect and earning a good income. But some argue that Joseph—and thereby Jesus—would have been a tektōn in the sense of a day laborer, someone who worked day-to-day for very low wages). No matter which option you choose, there really isn’t much evidence that Jesus would have been high-class or high-income, and so it shouldn’t surprise us that Jesus—like many people who don’t come from money—had critiques of people with wealth or status. This anti-elite and anti-wealth perspective shows up across the synoptic gospels especially (and most prominently in Luke), so this saying about the camel and the eye of a needle doesn’t stick out. Jesus genuinely seems to have thought that wealth was a barrier to salvation.
That’s hard for those of us who live in economic privilege, which is probably most of the people reading (and writing) these words. And that leads me to a final interpretation of this passage, and probably my favorite. My thinking on this has been influenced by a recent article from Willie James Jennings, in the scholarly journal the Journal of Biblical Literature in 2021, titled Renouncing Completeness: The Rich Ruler and the Possibilities of Biblical Scholarship without White Masculine Self-Sufficiency. Jennings is working from the Lukan version of the story, not from Mark, but the gist is the same I think. Jennings uses the story to think about privilege—in his case, the specific privileges of whiteness and maleness as they show up in biblical scholarship, which is heavily tilted in the direction of white men. (I wrote a bit about Jennings’ article in my recent piece for the Journal on Teaching, which you can read here). Jennings’ article is in a journal that you can’t read unless you subscribe, but the gist is that the rich young ruler’s problem (or the “man” of Mark’s problem) is that he is unwilling to let go of his privilege. His wealth affords him ways of operating in the world that let him trample on others, even if he’s keeping the letter of the law, and so only divesting himself from his wealth and privilege can save him. Jennings’ argument is that the same is true for “white masculine self-sufficiency;” that posture of privilege gets in the way of justice in biblical interpretation, and must be abandoned.
I like Jennings’ approach because it honors the specificity of wealth as a problem while also pointing to the ways other forms of privilege might also be a problem. In the story as it is told in all the synoptic gospels, the man’s material wealth is standing in the way of entering the kingdom of God, and only by getting rid of his wealth can he find his way. But other forms of privilege—other ways of hoarding resources, power, or prestige—might also be standing in our way. Those of us who are white and male, as Jennings points out, are clinging to forms of social capital that are best abandoned and forsaken. Many of us hold citizenships that give us undue power, or educational levels that provide us access that others don’t have, or linguistic or economic or gendered privileges that we are reluctant to give up. This story can be a message to all of us, about wealth and all the other ways we hoard power, and the ways those things that we think are saving us might actually be the things standing in our way.