Through the Eye of a Needle
I’m in the middle of a book by one of my favorite authors, Peter Brown. A historian who teaches at Princeton, his biography of Saint Augustine is one to which I have returned regularly, year after year. His recent tome will likely share a similar fate with me, and already I regret having bought it in electronic form. Those don’t sit well on bookshelves.
Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-555 AD, is beautifully-written, rich in detail, and a pleasure to read — at least for me. In it Brown recounts the challenges that confronted Christianity as it moved through the stages from poverty and persecution to tolerance and then into public favor. Against all odds, there came the day when the state showered its support on the Church and its ministry. But of even greater import, powerful and quite wealthy individuals began to embrace Christianity. A natural byproduct, however, was the need to reconcile all of this with the comment of Jesus, that it was “easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” At first blush that doesn’t exactly offer the warmest of welcomes to the wealthy.
Like many, I’ve long been fascinated with the story of the rich young man who asked Jesus how he might be saved. When Jesus told him to give everything away and follow him, “he went away sad, because he was rich.” Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always seen this as a portrait of someone who had to choose between Jesus and wealth, and Jesus drew the short end of the stick. As for the young man, he was crestfallen, and readers are left to conclude that once again wealth had done its subversive work. However attractive might be the words of Jesus, there simply was no choice; and that day the devil chalked up another win in the victory column.
Brown’s text has given me new insight, however, and it salvages the integrity and decency of the young man. While not commenting on this passage in particular, Brown does describe the difficulty of many wealthy Christians as they considered an ascetic or even monastic life in the late 4th and 5th centuries. As attractive as the monastery might be, many of these people simply couldn’t drop everything, walk away, and put on the habit of a monk
The reason for this was simple. Today wealth can be an entirely private affair, in which a person can live in isolation and still have a huge portfolio of stocks and bonds. Not so in ancient times, when wealth was more social and brought with it all sorts of responsibility. Running off to the desert might seem like a great idea, but if one left in the lurch a dependent sister, a widowed mother, and a gang of slaves and serfs, then flight could resemble the abandonment of moral responsibility. In the extreme, embracing the ascetic life could appear to be the height of self-indulgence, because it meant shirking one’s social responsibilities.
This was not true for everyone who went off to the desert, but people of means had to take care of business first. That explains why Saint Anthony saw to the welfare of his sister before moving into his cave. And no doubt he was not the only one who had to put his ducks in a row before leaving behind the village and its social nexus.
How does this salvage the reputation of the young man who walked away from Jesus? Well, it suggests that wealth may have played an entirely different role here. He may have walked away, but not necessarily for love of money. Instead, he may have seen no way to untangle himself from the obligations that it imposed on him. Instinctively he knew he could not turn his back on his associates, as if they scarcely mattered. As a decent young man, and as one not far from the kingdom of God, it would be the height of irresponsibility to dump the people who depended on him. And for that he walked away sad.
Coincidentally, this may help in our appreciation of another tough saying of Jesus. Biblical literalists have struggled with the command to put aside love for brother and sister and father and mother in order to put Jesus first. To sensitive people this has always seemed heartless, but what if Jesus meant to say something entirely different?
Reading Brown’s books has given me an insight that may get to the heart of what Jesus has to teach. In itself wealth is not intrinsically evil. On the other hand, it does burden us with responsibility that can easily strangle us. It can blind us to our potential to do great things in the name of Jesus.
And the same is true with the tough language Jesus sometimes uses for family. In fact, we should remember that Jesus loved his mother, but he also knew he had a calling to reach out to all of humanity. The myopia that often blinds us to all outside the circle of our family and friends also keeps us from seeing Christ throughout the world. Such parochialism traps us just as surely as can wealth.
And what is my conclusion? Quite possibly the young man went away sad because he knew how difficult it would be to live in the bigger world of Jesus. He walked away knowing that wealth brings with it responsibility. How we choose to use it makes all the difference in the world. We can let it shackle our lives, or we can use it as one of our many talents and tools. On that depends the character of our lives and the course of our journey to the Lord.
Notes
+Quite by coincidence the book I finished before starting Brown’s just happened to relate to finance. The book, by Greg Steinmetz and entitled The Richest Man Who Ever Lived, details the life of Jacob Fugger. Fugger, a 16th-century business mogul from Augsburg in Germany, was banker to the Hapsburgs and found himself on the Catholic side of the Reformation against Luther. It is an interesting and easy read, though one reviewer (from The Wall Street Journal, I believe) faulted Steinmetz for several errors. One even the reviewer missed was the observation that Luther had nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg, thus beginning the Reformation. Since Wittenberg never had a cathedral, I assume Luther discovered that rather quickly and nailed them instead to the door of the castle church.
+The photos in today’s post illustrate the subtle fall colors of the restored prairie at the entrance road to Saint John’s. Yet another sign of autumn are the various stacks of wood, ready for the winter fireplaces in the monastery.
