"Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!”
The Gospel passage chosen for our
celebration of the feast of the Holy Founders of Citeaux concerns the problem
of wealth. Wealth is an obstacle to following Jesus and to participating
in his kingdom. It follows immediately upon Jesus’ encounter with the rich man.
In that passage, as we well know, a man runs up to Jesus, kneels before him,
and asks him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” After he
has assured Jesus that he has observed all the commandments from his youth, and
yet finds his heart yearning for something more, Jesus, Mark says, looks at him
and loves him and says: “You are lacking one thing. Go, sell what you have, and
give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come follow me.”
Mark tells us that “At that statement [the man’s] face fell, and he went away
sad, for he had many possessions.”
The rich man was without doubt a pious man. He had for many years dedicated himself to following the commandments. But he lacked the one thing necessary: the gift of being free enough from his possessions to follow Jesus’ call wholeheartedly. Despite Jesus’ clear signs of affection for him, despite his penetrating and loving gaze (he is the only person in the whole of Mark’s Gospel that it is explicitly stated that Jesus looked on him with love) a gaze that pierced through to the truth of the man, recognized his possibilities, saw what was lacking in him, and with fatherly affection showed him the way forward, he rejected the call, preferring to remain in his gloom yet surrounded by his many possessions. The vision of this man, his face fallen with and grieving, going away from the expectant, hopeful Jesus and his band of disciples is a powerful and disturbing image of the alienating power of sin. The rich man is to all appearances and by regular human standards a good man, but in the encounter with Jesus, which the rich man initiated, when faced with the offer of fellowship and communion, he chose isolation instead. In going away and in his isolation he denied himself the possibility of hearing the promise of the hundredfold Jesus just a few minutes later spoke to his disciples.
The disappointment and frustration of Jesus
are apparent in his response: Jesus then looked around and said to his
disciples: “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of
God!” The disciples are amazed at what he said, so he says a second time, (which
is where today’s Gospel takes up the narrative): “Children, how hard it is to
enter the kingdom of God!” Then he extrapolates, “it is easier for a camel to
pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom
of God.” The image of alienation and separation is strengthened when he
remember that Jesus looked around and said to his disciples. The image I have
is of the rich man walking away in the other direction by himself, shoulders
slumped, head down, while Jesus now looks on his group of disciples with the
attention and fatherly affection the rich man so recently enjoyed, gathering
them by his attentive and penetrating gaze. Throughout the history of the
interpretation of the camel and the needle’s eye there have been a variety of
attempts to modify or soften its meaning, as one scholar puts it, by dwarfing
the camel and expanding the needle’s eye. For example, the explanation that
Jerusalem had a small gate called “the Needle’s Eye” through which camels might
pass, an idea we can find that already in St.Thomas Aquinas’ Catena Aurea ascribed to
St. Anselm. In the apocryphal work, The Acts of Andrew and Peter, a needle’s
eye actually grows miraculously until a camel is able to pass through it.
St. Jerome, on the other hand, in his commentary on Matthew, has the camel loaded down with possessions, making the task of an already large beast passing through the eye of a needle even more absurd. I follow the opinion that the saying fits better with what follows if it is left to its straightforward meaning of an impossible task. For when the apostles say to one another, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus’ answer shifts the whole matter away from human endeavor and capacity and onto God: "For human beings it is impossible, but not for God. All things are possible for God." So God can save even the rich man. Jesus has not given up on him.
We cannot save ourselves, it is a gift. We
cannot so to speak pull ourselves into eternal life by our bootstraps. But we do
have to receive the gift as and when it is given. And as the encounter with the
rich man shows, it is not received passively but requires discipleship and
leaving behind everyone contrary to it. We must allow the look of Jesus to
penetrate our hearts and tell us who we are in his eyes and what our response
is to be. The call to the rich man was specific to him. It was tailored to the
particular idea Jesus and therefore God had of him. Jesus did not tell everyone
he encountered to “Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor”. This was what was fitting for this man. But
everyone he encountered was invited to enter his kingdom, to be part of the new
family he was forming, each in his own way. None less or more than the others,
but each according to the idea God has of them, conceived in eternity from the
abundance of his love.
Wealth is a problem for Jesus because it
stifles the capacity to hear and to respond.
In Jesus’ view this capacity is found most of all in the child. In fact,
the passage just before that of the rich man is that in which people are
rebuked by the disciples for bringing children to Jesus and he says, “Let the
children come to me…for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. And then:
Amen, Amen, I say to you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a
child will not enter it. In our Gospel for today, he calls his disciples
“children”: "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! (Mar
10:24 NAB). From one perspective, Jesus is like a father to them, begetting
them into his new family. But from another perspective, that of the relation of
Jesus to his Father, Jesus is the Child, the archetypal child, and the
disciples are children in him of the one Father. From this perspective, Jesus
is the archetypal example and teacher of what it is to be a child before God. Therefore
there is no paternalistic attitude here on the part of the Jesus when he calls
his disciples ‘children’. Rather, it belongs to his desire to share with his
disciples his communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit by granting them a
share in his Sonship.
Ever-begotten anew by the Father, who is
“greater than I”, Jesus lives in the amazement of having received himself as
sheer gift. The Father has handed everything over to him and this knowledge is
for Jesus a source of infinite amazement, wonder, and gratitude. In love, he
receives the gift and hands it over again to the Father in total surrender. Jesus’
thirst is for his Father’s love and in everything he does he strives to abide
in it. Jesus loves children because they thirst for love, they feel his love,
surrender to it and take it with them into their lives as a matter of course.
In order to remain in this love, which is precious to them because it
corresponds to their yearning, they do or at least try to do, what love
demands. When children behave badly, they do what they can to come back into
love. They yearn for love. They receive the gift of the kingdom as the answer
to their yearning.
Personally, I find it helpful to see the
hopes and ideals of our Cistercian Founders, and of St. Benedict before them,
in terms of an attempt to create a space for a life of spiritual childhood,
that is, a space in which the freedom to receive the kingdom of God as Jesus
offers it in a disposition of wonder and gratitude is fostered and realized. Of
course, spiritual childhood is a grace, it cannot be manufactured, but certain
conditions can be set up in which the grace
may be received and flower. In his circular letter of 1998, Dom Bernardo Olivera
synthesized the ideals of our Founders as expressed in the primitive documents
as follows:
Authenticity in monastic observance in the
spiritual life and in liturgical life.
Simplicity and poverty in everything, so as
to follow and be poor with, the poor Christ.
Solitude so as to be able to live with God
while building up a communion of brothers.
Austerity of life and of work, so as to
promote the growth of the New Man.
Conformity to the Rule of St. Benedict that
is absolute, that is, without additions contrary to the Rule’s spirit and
letter.
In offering us the grace of our Cistercian
charism, Jesus asks us to make the simple act of trust of embracing its ideals.
Since it is our call, it is through them and nowhere else that he will be able
to pull us out of and beyond our private, personal and complicated selves, into
conformity with his spiritual childhood, and therefore into the joy of his
fellowship with the Father and the Spirit and the whole communion of saints.
Our charism is our wealth. The particular
interpretation of the Gospel and expression of its values that have been handed
over to us by our Founders belongs to us and represents our unique place in the
Church and in the history of salvation. Jesus has promised us that when we
embrace the charism it will bear much fruit and we receive much in return. As a
gift, it is something we cannot know the extent of unless we receive it. It is
only in the living of it that we gain understanding. Likewise, when like the
rich man we reject it we really do not know what we have missed out on, except
perhaps indirectly in the sadness, restlessness and discontent we may feel. With
joy and gratitude for the gift, we have received and confident that the Lord
sees our desire to serve him more faithfully, generously and simply let us turn
now to the celebration of this mystery in which he gives himself most fully.
Icon of the Founders written by Brother Terence. Homily by Father Timothy.
