A sermon on Job 23:1-9, 16-17; Psalm 22:1-15; Hebrews 4:12-16 & Mark 10:17-31 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

I’m going to take the risk this morning of doing something that biblical preaching experts strongly warn against doing when preaching on today’s gospel reading. I hope it doesn’t go too badly! 

As you heard, the reading told us of a man coming to Jesus seeking guidance on what he should do to receive the fullness of life that God offers. After establishing that he is already a very religious and law-abiding man but that he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for, Jesus gives him the one bit of guidance that he can’t comprehend being possible. Jesus tells him to sell what he owns, and give the money to the poor, so that he will have treasure in heaven, and to then come and follow Jesus. We’re told that when the man heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

That story was immediately followed by two brief conversations between Jesus and his disciples. In the first, Jesus makes his well-known statement about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for rich people to enter the kingdom of God. In the second, the disciples say, “we have left everything and followed you,” and Jesus assures them that they will all be richly rewarded.

Our attachment to money and possessions is very much the focus of all three scenes. But many preachers and scholars correctly point out that selling everything and giving away the proceeds is not something that Jesus tells everyone who comes to him seeking guidance for getting their lives back on track. Instead, Jesus tailors his guidance to the particular needs of each individual, and like the description of the word of God in our reading from the letter to the Hebrews, his insights and guidance are living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of our individual hearts.

Now what a lot of the biblical preaching experts warn against doing is leaping on that possibility in order to preach about absolutely any of our hearts desires except money. Preachers avoid preaching most of what the Bible says about money, and especially what Jesus says about money, because it is as unpalatable and off-putting to most of the people in our churches as it was to the man in this story since we too have many possessions. And not surprisingly, most preachers prefer not to preach themselves out of favour with the congregations who pay their wages.

Despite the warnings, I am going to preach about something other than money this morning. I’m not sure that it is any more likely to keep me out of trouble though. My reason for doing this is not because I’m anxious about talking about money, but because I’ve got something else I want to address, and at the risk of breaking still more rules of good preaching, I’m trying to make it fit!

Let me explain. This past week, we passed the first anniversary of the horrific October 7^th terrorist attack in Israel, and of the beginning of the war that has since kill tens of thousands of people. And I’ve been struck by the deep divisions that are again so apparent as we try to express solidarity with the grief and trauma of all that. The inability of our federal parliament to agree on the wording of a motion marking the anniversary was only the most public example. The divisions on our streets and among friendship groups and even within families have been painful and distressing. 

So the easiest and safest way for me to address that from today’s bible readings would have been to focus on the reading from Job and the accompanying psalm, because they express deep grief and trauma and painful bewilderment. And I will touch on them accordingly, but I’m also seeing an admittedly obscure connection to our gospel story that I’d like to explore with you. Perhaps these divisions in our responses to the anniversary reveal something else that, like money and possessions, we find almost impossible to let go of in order to give ourselves wholeheartedly to the kingdom of God.

The hook that caught my attention here was the middle bit where Jesus, after the wealthy man walks away, says “How hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for rich people to enter the kingdom of God.” It struck me that although I don’t usually see the kingdom of God as being the same thing as heaven-when-you-die, I have still tended to hear this passage that way. For no apparent reason, I have continued to hear Jesus’s words as saying, “How hard it is to get into heaven! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for rich people to get into heaven.”

Normally though, I think of the kingdom of God as being the emerging culture of God. It is something that exists here on Earth as the love and values of God transform small communities so that they become salt and light, spreading the culture of God in the world around them. It’s a cultural movement, a bandwagon that you either jump on or you don’t. And that understanding would actually make far more sense of what Jesus says in this story. 

Rather than telling the wealthy man that his application for an entry visa into heaven would be rejected, Jesus would then be telling him that in order to embrace a new culture, he would need to let go of whatever is keeping him chained to the old culture, in his case, his addiction to money and possessions.

So returning to the divisions over this past week’s anniversary, what might they reveal about what we are clinging to that keeps us from embracing the culture of God?

The best analysis of the divisions I’ve read was a piece by journalist Patricia Karvelas, and she quoted a brilliant insight from Labor frontbencher Tony Burke who warned against what he called “competitive grief”: the impulse to choose who we will mourn for and to undermine the mourning of others. It seems to capture perfectly what is going on, and I think it is a spin-off from our addiction to judging others and taking sides. Our ingrained tendency to tribalism makes us want to honour the grief and suffering of our chosen side, and invalidate the grief and suffering of the other side. In doing so, we impose selection criteria on our compassion on the basis of politics, which is absurd.

Grief is grief. Suffering is suffering. Trauma is trauma. And unfortunately, they are universal human realities that can come to any of us at any time, regardless of the political rights or wrongs of the governments that we live under. If someone destroys your house and kills your children, it really won’t make any difference to you whether it was done by terrorists or by an officially sanctioned national army. The pain, trauma and grief are totally independent of the identity or politics of the perpetrators. 

Like Job or the psalmist, you will cry out in anguish over the injustice of it, and cry out for answers from God and for vengeance upon whoever has destroyed your loved ones. Like Job, whichever way you look for answers and for justice and for comfort, they will elude you. Like the psalmist, and like many of those grieving in Gaza and Israel and Lebanon, you will cry out saying “Are we animals, and not humans, that others scorn us and despise us and ignore our plight?”

Our willingness and capacity to show compassion for suffering people should not have anything to do with our perceptions of the politics of the regimes they live under. I believe that the Israel government practices apartheid and that it employs military strategies that violate international law and morality. But the victims of the October 7^th attack were no more responsible for those policies than you or I are responsible for the Australian government’s horrific and immoral and probably illegal treatment of asylum seekers. 

I believe that Hamas is a fanatical and murderous fundamentalist sect that doesn’t even care about the fate of the Palestinian people whose cause it has hijacked. But the civilian victims of the relentless bombing in Gaza over the past year were no more responsible for Hamas’s atrocities than you or I are responsible for the outrageous rates of incarceration of indigenous people, including children, under the current policies of Australian governments.

If our community was attacked and our houses destroyed and our children slaughtered, we would be rightly horrified if the international community withheld compassion, care and aid in protest against the policies of the government we live under. We would be rightly disgusted if anybody held us to be complicit with those policies and said that therefore our suffering was deserved and our grief and pain were not legitimate or deserving of their concern. So what makes us think it is okay to pick sides and do to others what we would not have them do unto us?

Is it not because we are addicted to believing that we are fundamentally good people, and that we can reliably judge the relative merits of other people? Is it not because we are addicted to identifying and despising bad people, corrupt organisations, evil nations, because it reassures us of our own status as the good and deserving people? And at times, is it not because we are addicted to the approval of the fiercely righteous ones around us who will shun us if we question the tribal boundary lines they are policing?

And yet, these addictions cause us to dehumanise ordinary hurting people and withhold from them the love and compassion and care Jesus asks us to extend to even our enemies. And in so doing, this addiction cuts us off from the culture of God, the culture of universal and unconditional love and compassion and mercy.

As we stand there alongside the man with too many possessions, both of us with our fists clenched tight around the things we don’t want to give up, Jesus looks into our hearts, and loves us, and names our addictions. “Would you have life without limit? You lack one thing. Let go of what you are clinging to, and then come, follow me.” 

And the choice is ours. We can walk slowly away, grieving, because we had too much to lose. Or we can open our hands, let go of our pride and our competitiveness, and allow ourselves to be embraced in a culture of compassion and love that knows no limits, and no selection criteria, no grief contests, and no tribal boundaries; a culture in which all human grief and suffering are shared in the one broken body. 

Come, says Jesus. Let go, and follow me.