Sometime in the early 1970’s we went to see a hit musical which came to Los Angeles, from Broadway, “The Rothschilds.” After their incredibly successful “Fiddler on the Roof,” Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock brought us another musical about a Jewish family, but this time instead of Tevye’s deep poverty we caught a look at the Mayer Rothschild family’s rise to vast riches.
In the play, Mayer’s son’s are confronted by his wife Gutele (Mama) about their love for money. She has an amusing habit for a Jewish mother of quoting the New Testament and speaks Jesus’ words from our text this week (Mark 10:17-31), verse 25, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” One of the sons replies, “Ah, but Mama, if one is rich enough, one can buy very small camels and very large needles.”
That Rothschild boy’s flippant dismissal of Jesus’ warning is not that far from the attitude most of us take toward this passage. We are quick to assume that the rich young man who came to Jesus seeking eternal life is a special case, and that there is no blanket call for the rest of us to give away all that we have in order to follow Jesus.
Maybe so. There is certainly evidence that not all Jesus’ disciples gave away all their possessions, otherwise there would have been no homes in which to gather and no way for any of them to eat. Yet shall we escape the force of Jesus’ words that easily?
The rich man’s possessions were clearly a hindrance to his following of Jesus. That’s why the Lord asked him to dispose of them. The question for us is whether we have possessions which hinder our discipleship and whether we are willing to relinquish them in order to follow Christ. What have we got to lose, in order to win eternal life?