This thread is about spitituality, not christianity exclusively.
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"Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich 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 someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” -Matthew 19:21-24"
Discuss:
What is the kingdom of God?
What's the problem of the rich?
The current pentecostal churches encourage wealth, is there a problem here?
How do you enter the kingdom of God?
My impression, this parable is a metaphor, a hyperbole, kingdom of God, heaven, are spiritual states, not physical states.
The rich man is a metaphorical physical state of greed and self, where the kingdom of God is one of Love?
Heaven is not an exclusive realm for christians, but all people.
'Jesus' is also a metaphor, He is the metaphor for a gateway.
God is not a exclusive christian God, He is a universal creator.
Let the fighting begin! LOL
I estimate Jesus only said about 5% of the red letters attributed to him. So is this something he would have said, given my understanding of what his gospel actually was? Or, was it something politicos would have said, given my understanding of politics in those days? Given both, I tend to think this is the product of politics, which involves a fundamental misunderstanding of what salvation actually is and/or what it is for
Salvation is for Christ...saved from what mankind makes Christ to be. By mankind I include the material worlds, all they contain, as well the foundational, but faulty concepts, notions, and ideologies about reality that support all these material appearances. The material worlds represent a kind of "anti" Christ, or, alter ego personality populated by sub egos called "mankind". These material worlds, if they exist, are an existential threat to Christ. But if they don't exist, no problem.
Technically, Christ is the richest of the rich, nothing and no one richer. By contrast, mankind is poor, even impoverished, no matter how "rich" anyone may seem to be in comparison to others mankind. If Christ were to succumb to man's condition, Christ too would be impoverished, awaiting yet another death on another day.
So it's not wealth that is the problem, at least not Christ's wealth. Man's wealth is problematic because it is yet another metric that manufactures inequality. And yet, man's poverty is also a metric which emphasizes inequality. You would not know a rich man from a poor man except by comparison. Side by side they are not the same, they are different, and here is the kicker: they are therefore both special in their own way. The poor man has, by comparison, MORE poverty than the rich man. In this strange way, each person has MORE than any other person, just by being special in his/her own way. The sickest person in the world has MORE (sickness) than the rich man...and so on.
This then is the deal with the devil so to speak. Each of us has sold our soul, so to speak, to have MORE than Christ. In keeping his end of the deal, the devil makes each of us special. Technically speaking, I, as man, have MORE than Christ. For example, I have both life (what I call life) and death, whereas Christ only has life. I have faith, imagination AND what I call " knowledge", whereas Christ has only knowledge. In so many ways the devil has granted me MORE than Christ, and MORE than my neighbor, simply by making me SPECIAL (different from everybody else, including Christ).
In case you didn't know, Christ, on the other hand, is not special...being equal to the richest of the rich...being king amongst kings...being no different from any being that actually exists. Consequently, if mankind did exist, it would destroy the equality that exists in and among what is Christ. That is, man's special status is an existential threat to equality...and visa versa.
In seeking special status, man does seek to GAIN something from his appearance in the material worlds. But even if man were to gain all of the material worlds, he would "lose his soul" so to speak. If man's "soul" is Christ, this is another way of asserting that man AND Christ, cannot coexist. There is nothing in a world built on special status (inequality) which can add to the equal distribution of the wealth of Christ, and if one seeks to find out, one will lose track of (forget) his soul (Christ), rendering the soul as good as dead.
This is all reversible by addressing the causes of the symptoms. Man, no matter who, is seeking something...indeed something more. But whatever it is, it is like grabbing for sand. This requires attention. So the cause is a misappropriation of attention. As a rule of thumb, if our attention is not on Christ, we are PAYING, as in "paying attention". Indeed, attention is what we "pay" to gain anything in a world where almost everything is hard to come by.
Therefore, to be saved from any kind of manifestation of special status, we must place our attention fully back onto Christ, where it was before time seemed to begin. Our attention might feel like everything we have if you consider just how much bandwidth our thoughts occupy...our precious thoughts and especially our beloved political opinions, and, pretty much everything that lends itself to a sense of "self".
So it's quite likely the young "rich" man was advised to unburden himself of anything and everything that was grabbing his attention, and keeping him from giving his entire mind to the attention of Christ. But it's also likely that advise was later politicized by those poor students who surrounded Jesus for the miracles, hoping he would be the Jewish "Messiah" (he wasn't).
The richest man is the one who thinks he knows what he does not know. By this definition, even the poorest of the poor can be very rich, in a strange sort of way. However, it is exactly this type of person, who considers his opinions so valuable, which is most unqualified for the kind of salvation offered by Jesus. By this definition, every man is both rich and poor, having extremely poor opinions of what Christ is, and what salvation means.
By suggesting someone sell everything he has and follow him, Jesus was giving this young man the best chance he had, at that moment, to achieve the same salvation Jesus was achieving at that moment. The young man needed a teacher, and in Jesus, had someone who, by following closely the advise of spirit (Christ), was able to live hand to mouth, day by day, until the objective was achieved.
Nowadays, it would be a lot like joining an ashram to be close to a guru. Some of us need that. But all of us need to focus our attention on Christ, and to the degree that money and possessions interfere with that, we need to learn to let that go.
P.S. As a rule of thumb, the more we PAY attention to the material worlds and the dramas that arise out of the inequality produced there, the more impoverished we become relative to our soul (Christ). Like the YouTube algorithm, the material worlds are designed to grab our attention, and hold onto it, potentially forever...except for salvation. So yes, it is technically difficult, and not one man will ever be saved. But by a miracle, Christ might be saved.
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