forsaking the good gifts

It is no surprise when we read the story about the rich young ruler, Jesus tells him to sell all his possessions and follow him. We are so familiar with the story we don’t recognize the underlying narrative.

Sometimes God asks us to give up what is good, even that which he has given us.

N.T. Wright in his book Jesus and the Victory of God describes the central symbols of first-century Judaism which Jesus challenges. One such symbol is possessions (including land as inheritance); Jesus completely subverts this common understanding of God’s blessing.

A Jew of this period saw riches as a blessing from God for their righteous living. The riches and land one possessed were seen as gifts from God, part of the promised inheritance going all the way back to Abraham. To be wealthy was to be Godly, in the eyes of the average Jew. Jesus completely subverts this ideology, saying such things as it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom than a camel to enter the eye of a needle. It was assumed by most that the rich would enter heaven, their question was about everyone else. Jesus turns that upside down, saying the poor in spirit, the meek will be guaranteed entrance; it is the rich who need to worry. This turns everything inside out, those who were on the inside are found to be on the outside, those on the outside find themselves on the inside.

But to get back to my original point and where this gets us today. Could it be the case that a good gift given today will not be a good gift for us tomorrow. We can see this easily with the maturation of children. The baby leaves the goodness of the mother’s milk for the goodness of solid food. I don’t think many of us would return to the all liquid diet of infancy after having tasted the goodness of real food.

I’m not sure what this means exactly for me; but Jesus makes it clear that to move forward we must forsake the things of the past, for something better. When Jesus is proclaiming the kingdom come he is describing the ancient promises fulfilled . The problem for the people is it requires giving something up, those things which limit their entry. These things were for some the traditions which were getting in the way of God’s intention. There was a rich landscape of zealots, trying to usher in the kingdom. The trouble for them, such as the Pharisees we see in the gospel accounts, was that they had an idea of who God was and how he was going to act. Jesus comes proclaiming a way of God which was quite contrary to their understanding; instead of forsaking their ideologies they rather chose not to follow Jesus’ path. So sometimes the possession we are holding onto is an ideology and conception of God which limits him to a certain way of acting in the world. Jesus came to destroy all prior conceptions and remake our understanding of who God is and how he works in the world.

So how often to we hold onto the good gifts of yesteryear instead of forsaking all and following Jesus?