In Matthew 19 we find a familiar tale. Permit me to reproduce some of it here—and I pray patience to allow your attention span to stretch and stay with me. The best parts of this post happen at the end.
Now behold, one came to Him and said, “Teacher, what good shall I do to have eternal life?”
“If you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.”
I love the way this translation phrases eternal life in the man’s question, but Jesus replies with the simpler use of just life. They are one and the same.
“Which commandments?” he said.
Yeshua goes on to list several of the ten commandments and half of the greatest commandment, love your neighbor as yourself. In other words, he lists the basics, but also the ones that can be externally measured.
“All these I’ve kept,” the young man said to Him.
I too have been like the young man. In my younger days, I offered up a list of commandments I kept. I followed the rules of purity culture. I gave ten percent of my income to charities, sometimes more. I traveled the world on mission trips and served the world’s poorest. I cleaned church bathrooms and took meals to those who were sick or grieving. I put most of my possessions in storage and moved to an internship that required all my time and gave me no personal boundaries. I loved a haunted man, thinking I could rescue his being with my personal sacrifice.
Then the young man asks, “What do I still lack?”
Most of us have heard this story so many times, and we know how it ends. As my pastor pointed out this week, we tend to fixate on giving the young man a hard time. He’s a person who walks away and doesn’t go all the way. We judge him. But notice here that he’s genuine in his faith and his desire. He has lived a dedicated life thus far. We don’t give him enough credit for all the ways he has chosen well to even get to this point. He is young—or rather, immature—but sincere. Often I don’t give my younger self enough credit for how far she took me either. Richard Rohr writes that as we mature we should not condemn or judge previous stages of maturity. He states, “In fact, the litmus test, the proof than an apparently higher state of awareness is genuinely higher, is that it always includes and honors all the previous stages” (The Naked Now, p.118).
Yeshua answered the young seeker, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you own, and give to the poor; and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.”
But when the young one heard this statement, he went away grieving, for he had much property.
Then Yeshua said to his disciples, “Amen, I tell you, it is hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
What’s really at stake for this young seeker?
It’s easy to skim over this story with the lens of a Christian salvation message, a transactional exchange. What must I do? Do this, and this is what I’ll give you. Phrases such as “eternal life,” “perfect,” and “enter the kingdom of heaven” seem to signal this is about who gets into heaven. Who is “saved.” Who performs the best. But one of my deep delights after years of sitting with a more contemplative journey along the wisdom path, is returning to traditional passages and seeing them in a whole new light. Fireworks dance through my synapses as I externally exclaim with wonder, I can’t believe this is in there. It’s been there all along, but I couldn’t see it before.
I’m going to posit this passage isn’t about salvation at all, at least not in the traditional sense of who gets in and who is left out when it comes to notions of heaven or hell. It’s also not really about the need to do more externally. It’s not about the evils of wealth. It’s not about perfection. That word actually means wholeness or completeness. It’s about leveling up to a higher sense of being or consciousness. Here are my clues.
One is the phrase “kingdom of heaven” or “the kingdom of God.” It permeates the words of Jesus. It’s all over the place. It gets mentioned at least three times in this chapter alone. But it’s not a place. It’s not the afterlife. Consider how Jesus uses the phrase:
The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.
The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
It’s something here and now, not something for later. And it’s something internal, not something external, like a social utopia. Summarizing Jim Marion, Cynthia Bourgeault claims, “The Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness; it is not a place you go to, but a place you come from. It is a whole new way of looking at the world, a transformed awareness that literally turns the world into a different place” (The Wisdom Jesus, 30).
If this is true, what is Jesus really asking of this young one? He’s asking him to increase his consciousness to the next level, to grow in the ability to be present, to decrease his sense of separation between God and himself, God and others, and himself and others.
How is he supposed to get there?
In this case, Jesus asks him to sell his possessions. Again, this wouldn’t make sense as a marker of salvation into a physical heaven. If it were, then all but a sparse handful of us on this planet would actually make it in. The key is trying to understand why. Why is Jesus saying this to this young seeker? It’s not about being in or out. It’s about sinking deeper into what already is. He asks this hard thing because attachments and overidentifications get in the way of accessing that higher consciousness.
At this point my brain leaps straight to Eckhart Tolle and his book about the ego, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. About ownership Tolle offers, “’Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ Jesus said, ‘for theirs will be the kingdom of heaven.’ What does ‘poor in spirit’ mean? No inner baggage, no identifications. Not with things, nor with any mental concepts that have a sense of self in them” (43).
It’s not the giving up of the possessions that is key to Jesus. It’s the giving up of the egoic attachments we make to these possessions, or any kind of identifications we form. Tolle points out, “Renunciation of possessions, however, will not automatically free you of the ego. It will attempt to ensure its survival by finding something else to identify with, for example, a mental image of yourself as someone who has transcended all interest in material possessions and is therefore superior, is more spiritual than others. There are people who have renounced all possessions but have a bigger ego than some millionaires” (44). Someone who follows the exact physical instructions of Jesus to this young one, but misses the heart journey being offered, misses the whole point of the story.
When it comes to releasing attachments, it helps to distinguish between form and formless. Before his death, Jesus says to Pilate, “My Kingdom is not of this world.” Tolle defines “world” as synonymous with “form.” If that’s true, Jesus is saying, my Kingdom is not of form; it is something formless, something only found within. To access it, you have to release your attachments to form. You have to go beyond physical sensing to a different kind of sensing and awareness.
I like to think that I have made the choice to press in to find the next level of consciousness. But I am also the young one, afraid of letting go of those attachments that seem to define my identity. Just last week I was conversing with my spiritual director about how I can see this beautiful vision of where I want to be, of what awareness and higher consciousness are meant to be like. I can catch a sense of what Jesus is offering this immature one. It’s breathtaking. But then there is the reality of where I actually am, the messy ground where I attempt and woefully fail to living out that practice. The gap often feels so large.
“Are you yet willing to pay the cost of what being there would require?” my spiritual director asks.
Deep sigh. No. I’m probably not, at least not yet. But then she encourages me. All anyone can do is ask for the next step, the next place of growth, the next thing the Divine wants to reveal. That is the place to wrestle, the place to weigh the cost and say yes.
If I were to write the end of this story as a personal translation, taken with liberties, this is what it might sound like:
“I’ve done all the right things in the eyes of society and institutional religion,” says the immature one. “What am I still missing?”
The wise sage said to her, “If you wish to be complete and find wholeness, go, work to observe and release your attachments to what you own, your overidentification to your roles, your emotions, your sense of self as an individual. Open and give of yourself, especially to those who have less—less things, and less consciousness—tapping into the abundance that flows and sensing your connectedness to the Divine, to each individual you share space with on this earth. Then you will have internal treasures of being. This is the way I am walking. I am the Way. Come, follow me.”
But when the immature one heard what the wise sage said, she went away grieving, for she had many attachments. She was not yet ready to pay the cost of what it would take to enter that higher level of consciousness.
I am both/and.
I am the one who stays.
I am the one who walks away.
Grace to us all.
Referenced Reading:
- The Wisdom Jesus by Cynthia Bourgeault
- Putting on the Mind of Christ by Jim Marion
- A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle
- Previous posts involving this book:
- A recording of the sermon that fed some of my thoughts: https://www.gracepca.com/sermons/turn-amp-trust-1
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Shalom.
Danielle Klafter 