Matthew 19:16-26
This text is a powerful example of how Christ seeks to graft those on the fringes of the divine tree of life deeper into the system. Christ begins by clarifying the root: the Father is the root of all good – that is to say, the source of all life is the only one that is good. A teacher is not good unless the Father makes him or her so. Recalling the prominence of Genesis theology at this time, the goodness of all creation is by the declaration of God that it is so. In other words, apart from the word of life that the Father provides, nothing exists – let alone anything good.
So Christ begins the reorientation of the mindset of the man – Christ sees the man as a four-point David in the making. He sees the man appeals for wisdom – granted, the man goes to Christ, but Christ picks up the focus and returns it to the father. Thus, point one of the Davidic relationship is achieved. The man has come to God with a need – eternal life.
Christ responds to the need: take the laws that spread life from God to all creation and follow them. He lists them in their negative forms – but view the positive: preserve life, be faithful, let others keep what God has given them, be true, honor those who gave life to you, act upon yourself and others with Godly intent. This is point two of the Davidic relationship – God responds to need with an action plan.
Now to fulfill the rest, the man simply needs to turn around and fulfill the last two points – point three, distribute the life God has given him to the needful. Followed up with point four, listen – view the distribution of life and how it falls, listen for the needs of creation and then cycle around to point one. It couldn’t be simpler.
Yet the man is special – he is bold actually. He tells Christ, “I have done all of these things from my youth.” In other words, the man knows the sequence of David. He follows it, and it gives life, but he perceives in Christ that there is more – there is an eternal life that is beyond the life and death status of this world.
Christ responds, if you want to do more, show me by doing more! And Christ gives two levels of additional participation:
First, take all that you have, sell it, give it to the poor.
Second, follow me.
The popularity of Genesis theology shows up here again – this is what I dub the “Call of Joseph.” When Joseph was elevated by Pharoah and approached by the brothers for food, Joseph gave one request with eschatological implications. During a time when all of the world was in famine, and every nation found themselves crawling to Egypt, selling all that they had for a scrap of bread, Joseph told his brothers to tell Jacob and the rest of the family, “Leave all of your possessions. Come here and everything that you need will be provided for you.”
Had Jacob and his family listened, it would have been beneficial, but be that as it may, the Call of Joseph is something that is used by Christ and Paul constantly, simply due to the nature of the ultimate exodus awaiting those who are part of Christ’s assembly.
Here, Christ is placing powerful demands to the man – it is not a matter of chastisement. Rather, Christ is hearing the man say, “I want to be more like the responsible lord that God wants me to be.”
And Christ implicitly says, “Ok, I gave you the basics. You said that you did those. Now I give you the advanced version – take all that God has given you and distribute the life further down the tree.” He is testing the man. How?
Because if the man truly knew the cycle of David, he would know that on turning back to the Lord with more needs, God’s grace would have been sufficient. It was one thing to amass great wealth, but quite another to find a person’s wealth in God.
This is why Christ says that the man ‘will have treasure in heaven,’ because as far as wealth is concerned, the Father’s coffer of life is always full – one must simply fully engage Him according to the four-point cycle of David to unlock it. There is no room for the concept of earthly wealth when one is a fully participating member of the tree of life.
The man leaves frustrated because he has to choose between trusting the Lord to deliver him as David did, or trust in his own gathered resources to give him life.
For us, this is an example of how failure to trust in the power of a relationship with God potentially cuts one off from the source of life. When we have to make a decision between the value of what God has given us versus the value of the divine relationship itself, we must choose God over the material that God makes possible.
Material things don’t create more life – it is just the way it is. By God’s grace our life increases. As our life increases, we are able to serve our purpose of stewardship to a higher capacity. As we bring more needs to God’s attention, he gives more life to us.
So in this example, what would happen if the man had said, “Ok! I will do it.” He would sell all that he had – he would encounter the poor. He would be to them as God – he would be their Lord. And yet to act responsibly (and in Davidic fashion) he would hear their cries – he would takes their cries and turn back to the Lord and say, “Ok! I have given away all that you gave me, and there is still more. Lord, hear the cries of these people who have come to me.”
And Lord, seeing that the man had sold everything and given it to the poor, would give him more than enough resources to fill even more people. And as the cycle continues, the man grows just like any other branch in God’s divine tree of line. As people become inspired to tap into the life God is willing to provide and pass it along, the tree grows gtronger and stronger.
But, as we learn from the lesson of bad kings, when individuals do not pass the life of God on, or they do not hear the needs of those they serve, or do not approach God for the life required to fill those needs, their branch becomes unhealthy, and they jeopardize not only their own life, but the lives of every person whom they inspire.
This is, incidentally, the pattern of patriarchal growth in the Ancient Near East. Patriarchal narratives stem from encounters just like this, where someone wandering in the desert received a gift of life from God – generally a spring or wadi or some sort of life-preserving thing. Then the patriarch adopts God as their savior and their whole family – soon a whole nation – is literally watered by the grace of God.
We lose sight of this principle in the modern-day world we live in. Our sustenance is not generally viewed as a direct product of God, but more a product of our own labor and work. And yet when it comes to opportunities, who controls those? Is it destiny? Is it luck?
Christ is telling us here that the life we seek, the goodness we seek, has one source – it is in participating in an ideal relationship, bridging life from the hands of God to those in need of life. It will never be found in one’s own wealth. It will not even be found in one good teacher.
It is far simpler than that, but it requires faith.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
© 2006 Jacob Gorny