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Can the Rich Go to Heaven?  A Lesson from Luke 18

Luke 18 opens with Jesus’s responding to his disciples’ discouragement in the face of life’s hardships.  Jesus proposes a parable indicating that the question we should ask is not whether God will respond to man’s call for justice, but if man “in the city” will remain unjust, as “the judge of injustice” (ὁ κριτὴς τῆς ἀδικίας) of verse 6. Is man destined to corruption?  Is the city essentially bad?  Why, is law necessarily unnatural or against nature?
In Jesus’s parable about a widow seeking justice vis-à-vis her “adversary” (ἀντίδικος, or offending party in a litigation), we are invited to ask if we ourselves are to wait for a slow unjust judge or heed God as Lord who will restore justice “promptly” (ἐν τάχει) out of himself (ποιήσει τὴν ἐκδίκησιν—8)?  Will God find man open to recognize the divine’s agency latent in the present?  Will man “on earth” (ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς) have “faith” (πίστις) understood as openness to the hiddenness of the divine at the heart of earthly darkness?
In faith, man no longer seeks a relative justice, but what is right in itself.  Hence Luke’s subsequent account of men persuading themselves to be righteous (as δίκαιοι) while discounting others’ self-certainty altogether (ἐξουθενοῦντας τοὺς λοιποὺς—9).  Jesus calls man to place himself in God, rather than exalt himself on earth.  Man’s first step ought to be to place his fallenness, his having strayed, his erring or “abiding in error” (as ἁμαρτωλός) in God.  He must exalt himself in God, rather than in any context falling short of God (14).  He who does not exalt himself in God will end up being as “everyone exalting himself” (πᾶς ὁ ὑψῶν ἑαυτὸν) only to be humbled or brought-down (ταπεινωθήσεται—14).
The question here is if man is to lift himself up only to be brought down, or if he is to humble himself only to be exalted.  Luke’s subsequent verses shed light on the distinction at hand.  For now, Jesus asks people not to prevent children from freely going out to him, the teacher in whom the divine and the human coincide.  The verb ἀφίημι, denoting a sending out/away, or relinquishing, is juxtaposed to κωλύω, denoting hindrance or barring.  If children are naturally prone to go to truth, then it is our nature to place in God our own authority.[1]  Hence Jesus’s explanation that “the kingdom of God” (ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ Θεοῦ) is of those who are as children (παιδία—16) taking their first steps toward freedom (where freedom is necessarily a predicate of truth).  He who is “like a child” (ὡς παιδίον) is open to understanding, as opposed to being bent upon grasping for himself; as a child, he welcomes gifts (Jesus’s verb is δέχομαι or “to welcome/receive”), rather than crowning himself.  The kingdom of God is a gift to receive, rather than a prey to conquer.  And yet, entering (εἰσέρχομαι) into the kingdom entails activity, rather than passivity (17); even as we can enter the kingdom only insofar as we welcome it, trusting God as a child.  Such is the proper interplay of passivity and activity: we respond to a calling where we first listen to the calling without misconstruing it relatively to our own demands and expectations.  For we are meant to rise to the kingdom, not to lower the kingdom to our own plane of existence.
It is not enough for us to be passive receptacles of divine wisdom, for while we are called to receive the gift as gift, it is up to us to penetrate to its interiority, to explore it, to abide in it, to breathe it, to grow strong in it, nay to exercise our freedom at its heart.  Fides quaerens intellectum: faith strives for understanding.  Activity is present already at the heart of passivity, whereby passivity is as an exhaling allowing us to inhale.  Inhaling is not passive; we are to nourish ourselves in the kingdom; we are to eat of the fruit that is given to us, as opposed to failing to eat the fruit we are prohibited from eating.  Wisdom, then, is not a forbidden fruit, but one that we must not try to sever from its living source, its abysmal root.
Now, Luke’s discourse continues with a story in which Jesus is asked a question by a “chief” or ἄρχων.  The elder calls upon Jesus as “good teacher” (διδάσκαλος ἀγαθός), asking by what deed the chief is to inherit eternal life (18), a problem already explored notably in Luke 10.  Jesus asks in return why the chief is calling Jesus good, seemingly objecting that “no one is good if not God alone” (οὐδεὶς ἀγαθὸς εἰ μὴ εἷς ὁ Θεός; the Vulgate reads: nemo bonus nisi solus Deus).  If the good is one (εἷς), then it is not mediated; if it is unmediated, then no deed can provide access to it.  Where the good coincides with eternal life in its immediacy, no one can teach us a step-by-step way to it.  There is no “methodology” to attain to the eternal; nothing we can do to ascend.  Eternal life does not stand at the summit of a tower of deeds built upon an all-too-human foundation.  Rather the foundation is to be opened up from beneath our feet so that we may penetrate it and discover the eternal as fundamental impulse or prime mover in our everyday living/dying.
Jesus notes that the chief knows/sees the commandments to abstain from evil doing—notably, murder, theft and false testimony—and to honor his father and mother (20).  The chief confirms that he has guarded the commandments since his youth (ἐφυλαξάμην ἐκ νεότητός μου—21).  Is the chief, then, not as a child?  Jesus calls the chief to see that in his guarding what was given to him, he merely held onto the gift.  What he has is lacking in what is given upon our own giving-up “everything” (πάντα).  In order to access the “treasure” underlying all possession, all possession must be converted (Jesus’s term is πωλέω) in such a way as to be distributable among those who do not have, namely “the destitute” (πτωχόι/pauperes—22).  Now, what the chief “has” is commandments that are given to him.  His laws as such are not the treasure of eternal life.  The laws must be converted in such a manner as to allow those who do not have laws to partake in the law.  But how is this done?  One must return to a pre-legal setting; the chief himself as “principal” (ἄρχων) must return to the common “principle” of law, the “beginning” (ἀρχή).  Here is the necessary condition for ascent “to the heavens” (ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς), where the treasure (θησαυρός) of the law awaits us (ibid.).  The law per se is not the treasure, but a promise of the treasure that is received by man as man (the ἄνθρωπος), even as man as man needs law as reminder of his destiny or mandate as a human being.
But now, Jesus’s interlocutor does not appreciate the advice to convert his riches, “for he was exceedingly wealthy” (ἦν γὰρ πλούσιος σφόδρα—23).  Instead of converting law into virtue, the chief had converted law into immoderate amounts of money (χρήματα—24).  This made it regretfully exceedingly difficult for him to “convert” what he had into something he could share.  Indeed, the chief shares Jesus’s sorrowful regret or anguish (they are both περίλυπος) before the former’s incapacity to fulfill the necessary condition to access eternal life.  Hence Jesus’s celebrated statement to the effect that it is easier for a camel to enter (εἰσελθεῖν, from εἰσέρχομαι, as in 18.17) through the head of a needle than for a wealthy man to enter (εἰσελθεῖν) into the kingdom of God.  To enter “through” (διὰ) is easier than entering “into” (εἰς), even though there is evidently no treasure awaiting the rich as they cross the “hole” (τρήματα) in the needle.  They are, in effect, crossing a threshold to nowhere and so they have nowhere to store their riches.  The riches would have to store themselves, so to speak.  Hence the emptiness of the pursuit of the exceedingly rich, or of those who use law to enrich themselves, as opposed to honoring law as a reminder of man’s call to genuine virtue, as to a life that converts riches in the interests of the understanding.
Having abandoned or betrayed our common mandate, the rich chief of Luke 18 could hardly put his riches to good use, or place them in the interests of law, or of a republic helping children cultivate “the life of the mind”; whence the question bystanders ask Jesus: “who is able to be saved” (τίς δύναται σωθῆναι)?  Who has the power to rescue the rich and the nation based on riches from evil?  Who could deliver an exceedingly corrupt nation from its condition?  The matter appears to be hopeless while corruption appears to be fateful.  Yet Jesus responds with a most austere prophecy: “Things impossible with men are possible with God” (Τὰ ἀδύνατα παρὰ ἀνθρώποις δυνατὰ παρὰ τῷ Θεῷ ἐστιν. /Quæ impossibilia sunt apud homines, possibilia sunt apud Deum—27).  Jesus is responding to his audience, the ἀκούσαντες of 18.26: the prophecy is to be understood as distinguishing human ears from a divine eye.  Whereas human ears perceive in a mediated manner, God perceives in his perfect immediacy.  While we can grow alienated from our common condition and original mandate as human beings, God sees through our corruption, discerning seamlessly the true function of our possessions.  There is no lying, no pretending before God, since God sees from the ground up, where the ground is none other than an infinite abyss of pure intellection.
Luke 18 had opened with Jesus’s invitation to heed the divine hidden within otherwise apparently hopeless circumstances.  Verse 27 draws us back to Jesus’s early call not to give in to evil/ugly circumstances (μὴ ἐνκακεῖν) by praying or rather “always” (πάντοτε/semper) converting our wishes/prayers to God (προσεύχομαι—1).  The divine we are to turn to is immediately present to us as human beings, grounding our common mandate to return all powers to a heavenly setting, or in the fatherland in which our own power is restored “in the beginning” without exposing us to disappointment.

NOTE:

[1]Any authority outside of God would be incompatible with children’s yearning for truth.
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Marco Andreacchio was awarded a doctorate from the University of IIllinois for his interpretation of Sino-Japanese philosophical classics in dialogue with Western counterparts and a doctorate from Cambridge University for his work on Dante’s Platonic interpretation of religious authority. Andreacchio has taught at various higher education institutions and published systematically on problems of a political-philosophical nature.

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