Shocking in its day and still now is Jesus’ encounter with a young man. The man keeps the commandments but, because he is rich, is said to lack godliness, “Go and sell what you have to the poor.” Not only is the rich young man stunned by this news the disciples are too. Their stunned state deepens with Jesus’ follow up comment. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Community of God.”
Wealth breeds its own kind of isolation making it virtually impossible to share life in any community. Isolation is usually associated with mental illness. Individuals who suffer with mental illness often experience social isolation. Their disease makes it difficult to share in healthy, mutual relationships. Wealth can be a form of mental illness too. It can isolate and hinder sharing in healthy, mutual relationships. People who seek wealth, or those who have it, give their whole selves to that endeavor. Life circumstances and the people around them can become tools to achieve that end. It is difficult for persons who are constantly meeting with other people for the purpose of acquisitive self-interest to open themselves or be with people from whom they have nothing to gain. Pure friendship across distinctions of class and consequently gender and ethnicity are rare. Hence there is an isolation associated with wealth that, likely unbeknownst to the rich person, is preventing their sharing in community. Marco Rubio is an example in our own era of a rich young man who comes to Jesus (he is a self-titled Christian) but whose wealth isolates him and makes it difficult for him to share in Jesus’ Community. This past week Mr. Rubio championed Uber as part of the erroneously titled ‘Sharing Economy.’ Uber is essentially a phone app. Via the app it is an on-demand transportation business in which people use their own vehicles, at their own expense, as taxis. Presently, since the drivers earn less than minimum wage most of the money goes to elitists in the Uber corporation. Of late, these new taxi drivers are beginning to move out of the isolation wealth breeds. They are working collectively to form a cooperative or a union which Uber and Rubio are fighting. There is, in this example and too many others (Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Postmates), very little sharing in the so-called sharing economy.
Capitalism’s false ‘sharing economy’ is but another manifestation of wealth’s isolating nature. It is therefore, entirely different than Jesus’ truly sharing economy that creates community: “There is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters … or lands for my sake and for the sake of the gospel who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands.”
Prayer: Spirit of Trust, help us to pursue and share the riches that come with community.
Question: In what further ways can I share with others?
October 11, 2015 Mark 10:17-30 Twenty-Eighth Sunday In Ordinary Time
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