Progressive reflections on the lectionary #38

Monday 7th October 2024

Mark 10:17-31: Never mind the camels, here's the household revolution

There are some wonderful, eye-opening, mind-expanding curiosities to get your teeth into in this week’s passage which is all about Jesus’ encounter with a rich young man. Trouble is, most people seem to get caught up in the eye-catching ‘easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle’ phrase, trying to decode it for hidden meaning. Could there have been a gate known as the ‘eye of the needle’?

It feels like a bit of a distraction to me, only worth pursuing if you don’t want to worry about the more obvious conclusion. Mark’s Jesus is fond of hyperbole, after all: “You’d be better cutting off your hand, or foot, or plucking out your eye…!” In comparison to maiming yourself this particular over-the-top statement seems somewhat mild. “Can’t be done, mate,” a more sanguine Jesus might have said, explaining: “You can’t be part of the acquisitive inequality economy and be part of my redistributive equality economy. Come on, it’s obvious. Get a grip.” So let’s move on from that colourful, distracting, piece of phraseology to note some other (more?) interesting things, somewhat in its shadow.

For a start - look at the way that Jesus, in Mark (and only in Mark) edits the ten commandments (read 10:19). Wait: “You shall not defraud…” (checks Exodus & Deuteronomy) where’s that from then? The verb used (mē aposterēsēs) is indeed best translated as ‘defraud’ or alternatively: ‘deprive of’. Perhaps it might be presented as: “You shall not keep from others what is rightfully theirs.” Some people see this as an aspect of ‘coveting’ or perhaps ‘stealing’ - but it seems deliberately different to me, and, as such, perhaps it helps contextualise what comes next.

“I’ve done all this since I was a child,” says the nameless interlocutor. “Oh well in that case you only need to make sure you’re definitely not depriving people of the wealth you’ve got stored up then,” says Jesus - catching him in a bind, leaving him to slope off to count the money he’s deprived other people of.

“You will have treasure in heaven,” suggests Jesus. Of course we individualistic modern types tend to think of this as ‘treasure in the after life’ - but this comes to us from the world of the three tier universe, the word for ‘heaven’ (ouranō) also means ‘the sky’. “Good news: you will have treasure in the sky!” In other words, uncontrolled, unguarded, available to all - a common purse. The opposite to a bank or vault. “Great!” Say the people with no money. “Ohhhhh…” says the guy with his money safely squirrelled away.

Or perhaps we could linger over ‘the curious case of the disappearing dad’ in verses 29 & 30. That’s right, verse 29 has dad in it, but verse 30 doesn’t. Where did he go?

I suspect the answer is pretty simple - there will be no ‘fathers’ in the new economy because they symbolise, embody even, the whole status based economy. It is the dads who head the households, it is they who hold and pass on wealth, it is they who decide who is ‘in’ the family, and who is out. Not in the new economy, not in Jesus’ household based revolution - that’s all changed. The dads are out, the hierarchy that they symbolise is no more. “Leave all that old stuff behind and you’ll get a whole lot more, with no hierarchy, no patronage…” No wonder that the early Christians, per Luke, lived without personal wealth. The revolution was still active.

‘Mark’ is really the gospel of households, I think. Everything Jesus does, and says, relates to households, or houses, in some way. Mark, the earliest gospel writer, writing at the time of the early Jesus movement, when the alternative economy was active, when households of resistance were central to what it meant to ‘be Christian’. That this encounter, with the young man, occurs in an ‘in between’ place, outside of a house, may be significant. Encounters in ‘liminal’ or transitional spaces were often significant in ancient literature, intended to catch the attention. If Mark has used this technique here it is because he wanted to highlight the importance of the ideas at play.

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