What Should I Give Up?

For the last few years, I haven’t been reading the Bible very often, mainly because reading chunks of it out of context and without explanation did me more harm than good.  Besides, I already knew much of it, especially the gospels, by heart, and obsessed over them.

This Lent, however, PDB11 and I are working through one of those Lent books with a Bible passage for each day followed by a short essay about the passage, a question to reflect on, and a suggested prayer.  As you can imagine, this can be stressful for both of us, as my default response to reading the Bible is to look for evidence that God is malevolent.  I don’t always find the author’s comments particularly enlightening, often because the points he picks up on in the Bible extract aren’t the ones I’m worried about. 

Nevertheless, coming back to Bible stories I thought I knew well is proving more helpful than I thought – if only because I notice things that are obvious to everyone else but which I had overlooked.

Yesterday, for example, we were reading the story of the rich young man whom Jesus told to give away all his possessions.  My usual response to this story is (a) ‘Jesus says no-one is good except God, therefore Jesus condemns us as evil,’ (b) ‘Jesus says we can’t be saved unless we give away everything we have,’ and (c) ‘Jesus wants people to leave their families, so he doesn’t care if they abandon their children to starve.’  I know, rationally, that none of these is exactly true, but I cling to them because they sound harsh enough to fit my stereotype of Jesus.

A few years ago, for the first time in years I had been paid more than the bare minimum I needed to live on.  A beggar asked me for money, and I rashly offered to buy her anything she needed.  She took me at my word, and I spent all my disposable income for the month on heating gas cylinders for her caravan, enough groceries for her to set up her own shop, and a taxi to transport everything back to the caravan site.

The following week she phoned me to ask me for more money, and I retorted that I didn’t have any more.  I avoided answering her calls after that, but I felt guilty, because technically, I had lied.  After all, Jesus had said, ‘Give away everything you have,’ not ‘everything you can spare,’ and I had given away only the money I didn’t need for food, rent and bills.

Yet if I gave away everything, and didn’t have a place to live or food to give me strength, I couldn’t go on working in a care home – or earning more money which I could give to people in need.  And Jesus had said that whatever we do not do for the least of his brothers, we do not do for him.  So, if there was a poor person anywhere in the world whom I didn’t support, or a disabled person whom I didn’t help to eat their lunch, then Jesus could send me to hell for not helping them.

Rationally, I knew that this didn’t make sense.  Emotionally, though, I subsided into a pattern of thinking of Jesus who hates everyone except the very poor, and gives contradictory commandments so that, whatever we do, he can damn us for something.  This led to my cracking up and losing my job anyway.

So, re-reading the story of the rich young man, I was surprised by the words: ‘Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”’

In other words, Jesus was specifically calling this man to come and be his disciple – which, for him as for the other people who travelled around with Jesus, meant leaving his old life behind.  Jesus wasn’t demanding poverty for the sake of poverty.

He didn’t say: ‘Go, give away everything you have, right down to the clothes you’re wearing, and go out naked into the desert to starve to death.  Then maybe you’ll go to heaven for having become poor, or maybe you’ll go to hell because you have been rich, so you’ve already had your share of good things.’

Equally, Jesus didn’t tell everyone he was friends with (for example, the family of Mary, Martha and Lazarus in Bethany) to leave their homes and join his wandering group of disciples.  When people describe living a Christian life as ‘following Jesus’, it can give the impression (at least to literal-minded people like me) that only those who travelled with Jesus, or have a similar lifestyle today, are real Christians and saved – and therefore, that as Jesus didn’t call everyone to travel with him, he didn’t love everyone enough to want to save them.

Thinking in these terms makes Jesus seem a roguish scrounger like Shakespeare’s Falstaff, accepting hospitality from those who have homes and money while despising them for being bourgeois.  But Lazarus and his sisters are also among the people whom Jesus is specifically described as loving (consider the story ofJesus raising Lazarus to life).

Sermons and essays on the story of the rich young man frequently encourage us to consider whether there is anything which we are too attached to and which is getting in the way of our relationship with God.  Normally, people think of good things (money, food, popularity, etc) which they may need to let go of in order to find the greater good of growing closer to God.

But in my case, what I cling to is fear and suspicion and the assumption that Jesus hates me.  And this is much harder to overcome, because anything so unpleasant feels like a cross which we are supposed to take up, rather than a hindrance which we should give up.  But – again! – whatever Jesus meant by ‘take up your cross’, he probably didn’t mean us to embrace suffering for its own sake.  If I ever work out what he did mean, I’ll try to write a blog post on it.