Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s, Metro Christian Zoom meeting (dated 21st March 2021). You can also follow our series via our YouTube channel.
JUDGE YOURSELF
At the back end of last year, I read a charming book called, The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The book is full of wonderful insights, and one that stood out to me was this: ‘It is harder to judge yourself than to judge others. If you succeed well in judging yourself, that’s when you are truly wise.’
I believe that to be true. Depending upon which angle you come from, and what standard of measurement you use, we can all judge ourselves to be better than we are.
For example, I’d like to believe that I have restraint when it comes to chocolate. I do have restraint. There’s a bar of my favourite chocolate in our fridge that has been there since Christmas, unopened, untouched. (In case you’re wondering, and I don’t mean to cause any divisions, it’s in the fridge because that’s where chocolate should be kept). For nearly three months, it has been in our home and it still exists—I have restraint! I can make a bar of chocolate last a quarter of a year.
Except, as Steph will tell you, that’s not true. Whilst the wrapper is sealed, I’m fine. But once it’s open, once that sweet chocolatey fragrance seeps into my nostrils, once that smooth, velvety texture tantalises my taste buds, that chocolate bar isn’t going to last the day.
When viewed from another direction, I don’t have restraint at all.
My appetite is insatiable.
We all have appetites. But unlike me and chocolate, it’s difficult to recognise sometimes how insatiable we can be. And that’s very true of the topic I want to talk about today: Greed.
When it comes to judging ourselves, I don’t suppose many of us would judge ourselves as being greedy people. And yet our Western culture is a very materialistic and consumeristic culture. What I mean by that, is we have a compulsive appetite for acquiring and expanding the amount of stuff we possess. Like many cultures before us, we are also obsessed with wealth and status—and the symbols required to display that status.
In our culture, material prosperity is presented as normal. As one journalists puts it, ‘If greed is presented as normal, then you’re being taught to be greedy.’[i]
I’d go further than that and say that it is so normal, it’s hidden in plain sight.
Our advertisements and media consistently goad us to reach and grasp for more and to keep pace with the latest trends. By sowing into us seeds of dissatisfaction and the fear of scarcity, greed-culture lures us into forming competitive relationships with the rest of humanity; a life marked by comparisons, coveting, and a tendency to classify people as either being ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’.
There are many of us who take more than we need—and that isn’t seen just in what we buy, but also in the amount that we throw away. On top of that, the amount of money we spend on insuring and securing what we have is also eye-watering.
At the same time as greed being prevalent, its offspring, poverty, is also widespread. The huge gap between the rich and poor, the haves and have-nots, in our world, and even in our own country, continues to expand at a dramatic rate on a daily basis. Over the past year of ‘lockdown’, the rich-poor gap has expressed itself rather visibly through the ‘digital divide’, where a lack of technology has prevented some from accessing education.
Colluding with the deepening plight of the poor, is that we are taught to see the poor as the result of their own problems: ‘They’re lazy…’, ‘They’ve made bad choices…’, ‘They’ve not made the best of the opportunities they’ve been given.’ Rarely do we admit that our country’s poor, and our global poor, are a consequence of our rapacious appetites.
I don’t think many would disagree with that assessment of our culture. The problem is, because greed is so normalised in our culture, not many of us would diagnose ourselves as being greedy.
We can spot it in others—maybe like the super-rich, because what they appear to have seems abnormal in comparison to what we have. But because we consider ourselves as normal, and our rate of consumption as normal, and what we desire to acquire as normal impulses, we are less prone to see it as problem we struggle with. It is a hidden, deeply entrenched pattern. Even for Christians!
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with material stuff. There’s nothing wrong with having nice things. The Bible does not condemn wealth in and of itself, and Jesus did not have a problem with people owning property and assets. But Jesus does talk about greed, and the Scriptures do speak a great deal about the damage our insatiable appetites inflict upon others, and they often champion those that have fell victim of our neglect and our self-satisfying overindulgence.
This morning, we are going to continue to explore God’s upside-down kingdom in relation to this issue of greed, by having a look at a scene where someone else also failed to recognise that this was a problem for them.
READ: MATTHEW 19:16-26 (You can also read this story in Mark 10:17-27 and Luke 18:18-27)
TO DO OR NOT TO DO…
As a bit of background, Jesus is making his final journey towards Jerusalem. It’s a journey that dominates a big chunk of Matthew, Mark and Luke’s accounts, and it’s a journey that is full of interruptions. A good number of those interruptions are regarding the nature of God’s Kingdom—with people asking Jesus if they can be a part of the Kingdom. Like I mentioned the other week [see Crusts, Circuses, and Coercion], at Jesus’ time, everyone had expectations about how God’s Kingdom would come and how the Messiah would act to bring it about.
Understandably then, as Jesus makes this road trip to Jerusalem, these expectations are repeatedly put upon Jesus, especially by his disciples. Again and again, Jesus finds himself having to correct them, as they’ve misunderstood the shape of God’s Kingdom. As Jesus makes clear several times, he’s not going to start a military campaign against Rome—the only death that will take place at Jerusalem will be his own, and through that death, God’s Kingdom power will be seen. [ii]
There’s a similar interruption happening here, also.
This man asks about what he must do to have eternal life. He’s not asking about disembodied life in Heaven after death. This man is asking how he can be a part of God’s Kingdom, God’s commonwealth as it comes on Earth. In other words, he is asking, ‘Jesus, how can I be a part of God’s plan for this world?’ (Like Jesus’ disciples, it could be that this Young Man envisages Jesus’ road trip culminating in the Romans booted out of Jerusalem and Jesus being enthroned. So, while he’s got the chance, this man comes to Jesus, in advance of his coronation, in order to guarantee himself a place in Jesus’ world order afterwards.)
Jesus tells him to obey the commandments, and when sincerely asked, ‘which ones?’, Jesus then lists the Ten Commandments:
‘Do not murder…
Do not commit adultery…
Do not steal…
Do not testify falsely…
Honour your mother and father…
…and love your neighbour as yourself.’
There are a three things to note here.
Firstly, Jesus is not giving this man a check-list of things he must do to enter heaven, as if it’s just about mechanical observation. Again, this is about God’s Kingdom, and as we said in the first week of this series, God’s Kingdom is about God’s rule on earth, both in the future and in the now. As such, what Jesus is doing here is reiterating the shape, the culture, the ethics of God’s Kingdom. In other words, if you want to participate in fleshing out God’s rule then don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, etc.
The second thing I want you to notice is that Jesus gives an edited version of the Ten Commandments. I’m not talking about that fact that Jesus only lists the last six (although, there is something to be said about that). The edit I want to highlight is the last line: Jesus switches the final commandment of ‘Do not covet’ with the command to ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’.[iii] We’ll come back to this in a moment.
The final thing that stands out is the young man’s response to this list: He’s done it all!
I don’t know how he’s made that assessment, but it’s a self-assessment and he’s pretty confident that he’s left nothing undone. You can see he’s eager—and that’s commendable—so he asks ‘what else can I do?’ And Jesus then tells him to ‘sell everything, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow me.’
We’ll explore Jesus’ response in a minute, when we come back to Jesus’ Commandment switch. But for a moment, I have to ask again, how does this young man believe he’s done it all? What standard of measurement is he using to make this judgement?
Maybe it’s because of the ‘Do not…’ pattern? Maybe he’s understood the shape of God’s commands as prohibitions, instead of seeing them as prompts to express an alternative life. After all, it is much easier to ‘do not…’ than it is to ‘do’.
I also find it easier to excel in the ‘do nots’ of life. I have kept many rules that prescribe that I do nothing. I’m an expert in procrastination. But to read the Ten Commandments as the negation of action is to miss the life of action that they are prompting us to explore and exhibit.
I’d suggest that we are not supposed to read these commandments and examine our individual selves to see what ‘I’ have abstained from inflicting upon others. Instead, we’re supposed to reflect on what we have done for the benefit of others and not only for ourselves. We may not have killed, or stolen, or coveted—well done, by the way, if that applies to you—but have we done justice, mercy and love?
Furthermore, the final six commands explicitly spell out the ramifications of keeping the first three commands: What are the tangible, real-world results of serving only God, and having no idols, and not misrepresenting God’s name? Not bringing harm upon others. The final six commandments are not about personal virtues, they are communal in their focus, and they are about what it means to be in good relationship with others.
Actually, I’m going to go so far as to say that the idea of personal virtue is a complete delusion. Virtues can only be understood in the context of relationship with others.
Or as St John Chrysostom is said to have said it in the fourth century, ‘No act of virtue can be great if it is not followed by advantage for others.’[iv]
Jewish religion understood this (and still does). Early Christianity understood this, too. But today, like the young man in this story, it’s easy for us to forget this.
The young man in this story judges himself as being virtuous, and he does so because he understands this list as being about abstinence. Many Christian’s can fall into the same trap. But God’s Kingdom is not about inaction, but action, and action in the context of continually extending goodness within the human community.
Which brings me back to Jesus’ switching of the Commandment. Unlike four of the previous five items on Jesus’ list, loving your neighbour doesn’t begin with a ‘Do Not’. It is explicitly loaded with a call to continually ‘do’. There is no possible way of scratching this off the list.
DO WE SEE?
Also—and here’s Jesus’ possible reason for the replacement—unlike ‘Do not covet’, the call to practise loving your neighbour addresses the coveting problem from the other side of the economic fence. After all, what does a person who has many possessions covet? It’s easy to ‘do not covet’, if you’re rich. One could even maybe—foolishly—suggest that being rich is a way to overcome coveting?
It’s easy to not steal, too, when you’re rich.
But as Jesus points out later in this scene, riches can become a blockade to entering the Kingdom. In other words, they can prevent us from experiencing and expressing the shape of God’s Kingdom on earth toward others. In our ‘rich state’, we’re more likely to accuse and judge others as being guilty of coveting what we have, and we’re more likely to defend what we have from them. And so, instead of developing empathy and compassion towards others, we’re prone to cultivate a viewpoint that demonises and blames others.
As someone who had many possessions, the Rich Young Man probably didn’t covet what those around him had, because his neighbours owned nothing he wanted or needed. The poor and the oppressed in his society, those who begged on street corners, those plagued with prejudice and disease, possessed precisely everything this Young Man didn’t want: poverty. So instead of urging the Young Man not to covet—because Jesus knows this young lad doesn’t covet—Jesus instead, through his tweak, beckons him to address the imbalance and to change the predicament of his neighbour.
Or to put that another way, instead of hearing the commandments as ‘do not covet’—which is easy if you’re living the dream and are content in life—hear it instead as a call to be generous and show benevolent care for others. Which was the intent behind the original law anyway.
In other words, the commandments are prompting us to stop thinking of our own needs, and how to indulge those needs, and leading us to see and consider the needs of our neighbours.
The Old Testament laws are full of instructions to care for the human other. Laws regarding the Sabbath, Jubilee, gleaning regulations for fields, the Old Testament tithing system, even the sacrifices themselves, along with the importance of hospitality, all pulsated with an economic concern for the poor, the oppressed, the foreigner, the orphan and the widow. Even God’s warning about having a King had, at its heart, the real concern that a King, in their status, would covet and take people’s resources. [v] In all these instances, there is a consistent push against greed and a call to a make sure that resources are distributed to those in need.
The Old Testament makes these appeals, not because it has a problem with wealth or aspirations, but because it knows that without some check in place, things get out of hand. Greed will run rife: some will amass, and some will be left impoverished as a result. And, as the scriptural story goes, that’s what happens—hence the Old Testament prophet’s constant appeal to get with the programme of God’s agenda.
I’m saying this, because Jesus isn’t really saying anything new, here, to this ‘Young Man’. Many Jews in Jesus’ time knew this, and practiced this alternative way of living. What is odd is that this young man does not see it, even though Jesus gives him a helpful nudge by swapping out the last commandment.
Which is why, after he asks Jesus what else he can do, Jesus just repeats the meaning of his last commandment more explicitly, telling him to ‘sell what he has, and give the proceeds to the poor’. Jesus isn’t actually assigning the Young Man an extra task. Jesus is providing commentary; Jesus is clarifying what ‘do not covet’ involves within this young man’s context. This Young Man lives in wealth while some of his countrymen live in poverty; if he really wants to participate meaningfully in God’s plan for humanity, then he cannot ignore the plight of his neighbours.
It’s at this point that the penny finally drops, and the young man walks away, saddened because he has many possessions. It turns out that the Young Man does covet after all. If Jesus had kept the list unedited, this would not have surfaced. However, the way in which Jesus sensitively directs the conversation exposes the Young Man’s desire to grasp by revealing his inability to let go.
SO?
It would be wrong of us to judge the man in this story. Mark’s version of this story purposely reminds us that Jesus had genuine love for him, not condemnation. This young man is not a crook, or a lost cause, or a corrupt business owner. Like all of us, he is dependent upon God’s action and grace.
The reason I’ve looked at this young man is because, as I said at the beginning, it’s hard to judge yourself—it’s impossible to see what you are blind to. And like this young man, we too can be blind to our ability to grasp.
As Tim Keller, in his book, Counterfeit Gods, puts it, ‘Jesus warns people far more often about greed than about sex, yet almost no one thinks they are guilty of it. Therefore we should all begin with a working hypothesis that “this could easily be a problem for me”. If greed hides itself so deeply, no one should be confident that it is not a problem for them [sic].’[vi]
In contrast to what Keller correctly points out, Christians are sharp-shooters when it comes to pointing out sexual sin, but we barely speak about the damage greed is doing, and we rarely admit that we struggle with it, too. Sadly, in some quarters of Christianity—and I’m thinking about the prosperity gospel—actually encourage us to grab for more. More, to these people, is our divine right.
To repeat Keller’s words, if greed hides itself so deeply, if greed presents itself as normal, if greed masquerades itself as sacred, then none of us should be confident that it is not a problem for us.
As well as not judging this man, we also shouldn’t take Jesus’ instruction to this man as being universal to each of us. The lesson here is not about selling everything.
That could well be true for some of us (seriously), but it would be wrong to apply that to everyone.
It’s important to remember that Jesus calls many people to different things within the New Testament. Some people he calls to itineracy. Some people he calls to stay where they are. Some people give things up completely. Some people just use what they have in a new and more selfless way.
Luke’s version of this story is quickly followed by the account of Zacchaeus (Luke 19:8-10). Zacchaeus doesn’t give up the entirety of his wealth, only half, and Jesus still declares that salvation had come to Zacchaeus’ household. The rule of God was finding expression through Zacchaeus’ life.
Again, it’s not about an amount, or percentages. It’s all about heart. Zacchaeus had become aware of the shape of God’s rule. He began to see others. He began to love others. He began to do Justice.
So to be clear, I’m not telling you to sell everything you have, and if someone does wave this verse in front of you saying that you must do so, because it’s the plain text, then I personally believe they are being abusive of you and this particular text. I’d also say the same if they asked to see your bank balance and monthly bills.
It would be wrong of me to impose anything on you concerning what this text is instructing you to do practically. That’s Jesus’ job, not mine.
What I would like us to see in this text, is that the upside-down challenge of God’s Kingdom still does apply to us: it’s not about materialism and consumerism, but about communal care and provision.
What I would like us to see, is that many of us do struggle with this invisible, subtle addiction of acquisition.
What I would like us to see, myself included, is that it’s on each of us to come before Jesus and allow him to open our blind eyes and to guide our hearts and minds in what it means for each of us to follow Christ in our particular context.
What I would like us to see, as John Chrysostom reminded us, and as Jesus makes clear here as well as in many places, is that our faithfulness to God is truly expressed in our faithfulness and concern for others, not just personal piety. Loving God and loving others are eternal entangled.
I’m reminded of something that James writes in the New Testament letter bearing his name. He writes that, ‘Anyone who sets himself up as “religious” by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air. Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world.’ – James 1:26-27, The Message
In other words, in contrast to a society where greed and indulgence are normalised, Kingdom living is not about looking out for ourselves and our own comfort, but about looking out for others and bringing comfort to others.
[i] Danny Dorling, Inequality and the 1%, p.40.
[ii] As a matter of interest, in Luke’s gospel, the only person who does grasp the shape of this Kingdom is the thief who is being crucified alongside Jesus (Luke 23:40-43). Somehow, this man observes something of the shape of God’s Kingdom in the suffering of Jesus and he asks to be a part of it. His request for the Kingdom is the only time Jesus responds without an object lesson or a challenge to someone’s thinking on the Kingdom of God.
[iii] See Exodus 20:2-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21 for the Ten Commandments (also known as the Decalogue). ‘Love your neighbour…” is from Leviticus 19:18.
[iv] The full quote is, ‘No act of virtue can be great if it is not followed by advantage for others. So, no matter how much time you spend fasting, no matter how much you sleep on a hard floor and eat ashes and sigh continually, if you do no good to others, you do nothing great.’
[v] For an example of tithing as being about the care of others, see Deuteronomy 14:28 (Also see a previous blog post of mine, Tithing: A Critique of Modern Practise and Pressure). For sacrifices, see Deuteronomy 12: 17-19, 16:14 (As an aside, understanding that sacrifices were shared communal meals helps to give context to the prophet’s frustration with offering diseased animals—other people, the poorest in the community, were being fed rotten food by these who could afford to give better). Regarding care for others, see Deuteronomy 10:17-19, 15:4-11, 24:17-22. Regarding the warnings about a King, see Deuteronomy 17:14-17 and 1 Samuel 8:10-21. To this non-exhaustive list, we could also add the voices of the prophets and their anger against the oppression and abuse of the poor [for examples, see Isaiah 58:1-7, Habakkuk 2:4-19, Amos 5:21-24, 8:4-6, Malachi 1:7-8, 3:8-10 (by the way, I would highly recommend reading the verses in Malachi in the social context of the verses given above for tithing and sacrifices)].
[vi] Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods: When the Empty Promises of Love, Money and Power Let You Down, p.53.
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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