Used to Having Things

The rich man walks away from Jesus, so Matthew's narrative voice tells us, "in grief" (lypoumenos).  Most translations then relate the man's grief causally to his having a great many possessions.  The relation of that statement to the the preceding one, however, is an interpretive judgment.  There is no conjunction linking the statement specifically to the statement immediately before it.  Indeed, it is probably not likely that the man walks away thinking, "I have so many possessions.  How can I do what the Teacher tells me."

I suspect rather that he leaves the scene exasperated with the hardness of this teacher and his extreme point of view.  There's nothing at all rational about what is being said here.  "Sell everything you have."  This is no exhortation to charity; the man is being told to assume a position of total destitution.  (Incidentally, this verse stands as a pretty strong witness against the idea that Matthew's Jesus is a "spiritualized" version of the more "social" gospel found in Luke).  The man knows as well as we do that a person who gives a way everything they have will sleep outside, will starve, will suffer and die.  Who is equal to such a devastating yoke?

Just here is where the asyndetic conclusion of 19:22 speaks most loudly.  Ēn gar echōn ktēmata polla:  he was used to having a lot of things.  Matthew describes this man in terms of a long-standing situation, so that the statement may indeed supply a cause not merely for the man's walking away but for the whole affair.  That is, he asks Jesus these questions in the first place because he is used to having possessions.  He responds the way he does because he is used to having possessions.  And he walks away in grief, whatever his own understanding of the reason for his frustration, because he is used to having things.  This is Matthew's etic assessment of the man and what blinds him to a reality that Jesus makes expicit in v. 29

The grief of the man, then, is a wealth-induced failure of imagination.  The call to leave everything to follow Jesus is the call to join Jesus in the midst of the new assembly, to live without defense or pretense with those who then become our honest brothers and sisters.  It is communion, not poverty per se, to which Jesus calls the man, a becoming poor for others, who then become the riches of our lives.  Not only that, but the riches of the various members of the community are meant then to become the inheritance of every member in it; they will be heirs everything on the one condition that they possess nothing.  They will be at home in the home of others, welcomed at the tables of others, in a community to whom everyone gives what he has.  The man's goods will belong to him exactly insofar as they belong to everyone else with him.  He will not starve but feast on the feasting of others.  This is the possibility to which Jesus welcomes those who follow him and to which those who see the stuff of the world as possessions—mine or someone else's—are blind.

The whole Gospel of Matthew is an invitation to follow Jesus into poverty for others, a poverty that lays hold of a greater treasure, a poverty of spirit:  this under the conviction that the God who raises the dead will make more than enough of whatever is offered to him.  We are invited to consider that in opening our hands we might receive a blessing that never runs out (zōēn aiōnion klēronomēsei).  Thus, Matthew's often-maligned reminder that the poor will always be among us is, again, not a legitimization of ignorance but rather a presentation of them as brothers and sisters for the haves of the world, those who are poor enough to have only money.