“How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!”
This is one of those passages whose interpretation varies pretty predictably—which is to say, no one thinks that Jesus could possibly be talking about him. If anything, this is about someone else. One of the marks, perhaps, of the decadence of the modern West is that no one seems to understand his own wealth.
There are reasons for this confusion—we’ve all heard of the famous 1 percent, and it’s true that the ultra-rich are so staggeringly rich compared to the rest of us that it is difficult to conceive of any other form of wealth.
Still, it’s worth recalling a basic distinction once made to me by someone working with those in real poverty: if you’re not worried about whether or not you’re going to eat, you’re well off. That was, and remains for me, a useful reminder. Although I have known serious financial problems in my life—crippling student loans, credit card debt, etc.—I have never honestly worried about whether or not I would eat or have my basic needs met. Of course, that has less to do with my particular financial situation than with my known safety net of family and friends.
But what we make of our current economy, or the availability or lack of a safety net, isn’t really the point of the Gospel. The point is quite clear, and often re-echoed in what tradition calls the “preferential option for the poor”—material comfort can be a barrier to entering the kingdom of God.
This is not to say that we must all take vows of poverty. It’s clear in other passages, and of course in the wider tradition, that this is what the Church refers to as a counsel of “perfection.” That is, it is not required of everyone. But it is, objectively speaking, a higher form of life to reject all material possessions for the sake of the kingdom—just as it is, objectively speaking, a higher form of life to reject married life and embrace celibacy for the sake of the kingdom. This is not to say that material things, or marriage, are bad, but merely that they pose their own unique temptations as well as opportunities.
So if we can put aside the question of these more radical vocations—what tradition calls the “counsels of perfection”—it’s still worth wondering about the general principle of material life and its challenges. Perhaps we are not the 1 percent, but we are still, in the grand scheme of things in this world, pretty wealthy. What are we to do? Is there any hope at all?
The words of the Gospel, though they begin in a hard way, soften almost at once: “With men it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God.” This doesn’t, exactly, free us of all responsibility or sense of urgency, but it gives us hope that we may, whatever our material status, go through the eye of the needle.
. . . if, that is, we rely on God. If we try to do it ourselves, there is no hope.
That is why, in the end, poverty is in many cases—though not automatically—a clearer path to salvation. If you have nothing, it is easier to throw yourself on the mercy of God and recognize that you bring nothing to the table besides yourself. But if we have something—maybe it is not a lot of money, but it’s a talent, or a passion, or a bit of property, or a set of brilliant ideas—it is always tempting to convince yourself that you can bargain, so to speak, with God, that you bring something to the table that will be useful to the transcendent and eternal creator. This is and always will be an absurdity. As St. Paul says, “What do you have that you have not received?” This is not a denial of the reality and legitimacy of human work and effort and, even, merit—but it’s all relative. You can be the most brilliant, beautiful, talented, rich, philanthropic human being; you can give your entire life to others; but all becomes meaningless, from an eternal perspective, because your life cannot take away sin.
There is only one life that can do that—the life of the God-Man. And although the Catholic tradition may speak over and over about the merits of the saints, it is also insistent, at the same time, that all these merits and graces are ultimately meaningless apart from the merit and grace of the Son of God, whose unique and singular sacrifice made it possible for us to have fellowship with God.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” then, as our Lord says in the Sermon on the Mount. Because to be in a state of poverty means, in effect, to be in a state of reality before God. To be poor in spirit means to see God, because to see God truly means to see ourselves truly, to understand that our entire existence is a gift, our accomplishments a work of mercy, our merits the outpouring of grace.
The history of the Church is full of dramatic examples of this realization. You have, on the one hand, saints who give up their wealth—like St. Francis of Assisi, whom we remembered last week—to better embrace Christian discipleship. But just as often, honestly maybe more so, if more quietly, you have those who give extravagantly because they realize that their wealth cannot be, ultimately, theirs, or even their children’s. Go to any great city, and you’ll see churches and institutions all over that were built by the singular devotion of a person who understood that his prosperity was not ultimately his own. Often, too, such people realized that their money is most valuable, most profitable, when used for the sake of their souls.
We can build great works here on earth, but how long can they last? As St. John Henry Newman taught us, our vocation in this life is to move out of the shadows into the truth. But we cannot do this if we are in love with shadows, or if we imagine that we ourselves can come up with the right amount of light to banish them.
Wherever, whoever we are, we must seek the mercy of God, and ask for the grace to amend our lives and follow him with a pure heart. With God all things are possible—whether that’s being happy with very little or being saved with very much.