Seeking Heavenly Treasure

Have you ever had someone do something that you had just explicitly told them not to do?

Most of us have probably had some experience of this if we have raised or worked with young people in some capacity (as a parent, caregiver, teacher, youth leader, etc.), but this phenomenon is certainly not restricted to young people. There seem to be many occasions where we tell someone not to do something and they do that very thing!

This is where we find the community that Moses is leading in our first reading from Judges 2. God has previously told Israel not to worship other gods. And what do they do? They worship other gods! And God gets “offended” (the scripture tells us). 

The scripture continues to tell us that God then “delivered them over to plunderers who despoiled them. God allowed them to fall into the power of their enemies round about whom they were no longer able to withstand.”

It’s probably important to say that on multiple occasions in the Hebrew scriptures, God can be portrayed as an angry and vengeful force – easily offended and sometimes even seemingly petty – meting out punishment for even slight offenses. It’s also important to say that most of the Hebrew scriptures were written during Israel’s time of captivity in Babylon – when they had a lot of time to reflect on where they had gone wrong as a collective. Of course they thought that God might be behind their misery somehow – teaching them a lesson in obedience.

I don’t think that’s how God works.

I also think that God does not necessarily protect us from the consequences of our actions.

And so the reading from Judges is meant to be a teaching story about priorities and first principles. God had asked the Israelites to stay focused, and they had not. God sends leaders and prophets to help the people wake up. And they do not. As a result, they experienced a lot of chaos – not because God wanted to punish them but because they lost their focus and priorities.

In our second reading for today, we read from Matthew 19 (this passage is also found in Mark 10 and Luke 18). In it “a young man approached Jesus and said, “Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?” Jesus says, “If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” The man asked him, “Which ones?” And Jesus replied, “You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; honor your father and your mother; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The young man says, “All of these I have observed. What do I still lack?” And Jesus delivers his mic drop moment when he says, ““If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

And we are told, “When the young man heard this statement, he went away sad, for he had many possessions.”

Let’s just pause there.

What does this bring up in you? If you were raised “in church” what (if anything) did you hear preached about this story? How do you understand this passage found in 3 of the gospel accounts (do you read it literally or how do you make sense of what the story is saying)?

My friend, Ched Myers, and other biblical scholars call this passage from Matthew a “text of terror” for modern followers of Jesus because we, like the Israelites, have lost our way so badly that we don’t even know what to do with this passage. We Christians – especially in the West and especially those of us with means (meaning me) – have essentially dismissed and ignored this passage because it upsets us too much to consider. We’re kind of terrified to even ask, “What if he meant exactly what he said?” and so we do all kinds of theological gymnastics to try to re-shape this story to fit our modern systems of power and privilege.

Ched says that, first of all, we’ve read this passage all wrong. This passage is not so much about rich people as it is the kingdom of God. Ched states that this passage insists, “that the kingdom of God is simply that time and place in which there are no rich and poor. By definition, then, the rich cannot enter—not, that is, with their affluenza intact.”

In the kin-dom of God, no one has too much and no one has too little, and our thinking and behavior have dramatically shifted to reflect the embodied justice of our one true God. The “poor” will willingly and easily enter the kin-dom because they seek a change in their status. The “rich,” however, have a lot more to lose and are the ones who will often think twice about relinquishing the power, privilege and trappings of the lives they have come to lead.

In such a deeply unequal and capitalist context such as the United States, someone like Jesus is dismissed as naive – or we “idealize” this passage and dismiss it outright as pie-in-the-sky that we could never hope to attain. Think about that for a minite – that the idea of distributive justice is so outlandish that it’s easier to discount a two thousand year old tradition than question our own ideas about wealth, possessions, ‘private property’, etc.

Ched goes on to say that, “Jesus is not inviting this man to change his attitude toward his wealth, or to treat his servants better, or to reform his personal life. He is asserting the precondition for discipleship: economic justice. Stung, the man whirls and slinks away —thus becoming the only character in [the gospel] story to expressly refuse Jesus’ call to follow.”

Part of the problem is that the young man comes to his faith life just as he comes to his regular life – as if they operate according to the same rules. He probably believes (and has been taught) that God “rewards” the deserving, that eternal life can be “inherited” (he uses the same word in Greek that is used for inheriting a parcel of land – indicating that he is familiar with how wealth is passed down through the generations – like the kin-dom of God is just another thing that he can inherit) and that by following all the rules, one “succeeds.” As Ched also says, “beneficiaries of a socio-economic system often envision religion as a reproduction of their privilege.”

Ouch.

As you may see, these passages, taken together, offer us much (possibly unsavory) food for thought and reflection. They can be “texts of terror” for those of us with means who wish to be “faithful” to the gospel. Whenever I see texts like this in the lectionary, I wince a little because I struggle with all of these questions myself and feel like I live a very compromised life in the belly of the beast!

Back in 1956, the United States adopted a new national motto. We decided that “In God We Trust” was what we wanted the world to know about who we were and, ironically, plastered it all over our money! For me, this begs the question, “To what degree do we trust in God? In what ways and for what? And to what degree do we trust in money?In what ways and for what?”

In my estimation, we’re a lot like the Israelites who have lost our way and “worshipped” the false gods of money, wealth, success, celebrity and power. And, I would submit, we are feeling the devastating effects of having lost our way.

Secondly, those of us who have far more than we need (in terms of wealth and possessions) face the same invitation that the young man in the gospel faces. Ched says that the invitation is to “de-construct the fraudulent system from which he derives his privilege, and restore to the dispossessed what has been taken from them. Justly redistributed surplus is then redefined by Jesus as “treasure in heaven”…We might say Jesus has just radically revalued the currency!”

I know that this is a lot to take in. Period.

And yet this is our faith tradition. Most of us (if we grew up in church) were probably shielded from these texts or from “radical” (which means getting back to the roots) interpretations because it was such an unpopular and seemingly ridiculous proposition.

Yet here we are. Trying to find our one true God. Letting go of idols. Redistributing surplus and deconstructing fraudulent systems. As we seek heavenly treasure.