
Getting Through the Eye of the Needle
One of the greatest gifts of going back to school after a long career is the perspective and experience we carry with us as we undertake a new journey in life. Prior education and life experience can provide a framework for interpreting and assimilating new information, if we can remember to keep an open mind. As you may know, I had the amazing privilege of returning to divinity school after retiring from a long career in the law. My role as a priest feels like a continuation of my 30-year law practice, where my work was to bring together cities that owned their own natural gas and electric distribution systems to finance electric generation assets and natural gas supplies on a joint action basis for their systems. The focus was on cooperation, building community, and working together for efficiency and economy of scale. My love of the dynamics and possibilities of the financial markets matched my commitment to providing clean, reliable, affordable energy to retail consumers who owned their own systems, so together we made meaning and purpose. In divinity school, it was that strong interest in the development of markets, commerce, and communities that was the beginning of my fascination with — you guessed it — camels.
Really.
One of my favorite courses at Yale was based on the last book of Lamin Sanneh, one of my favorite professors at Yale Divinity School. Professor Sanneh was descended from a long line of West African kings, and was raised Muslim in The Gambia, later converting to Roman Catholicism. His final book, Beyond Jihad, came out weeks before my class with him in the fall of 2017, and was the focal point of the course. Professor Sanneh’s book drew our focus to the role that camels — the ships of the sand sea — played in transporting goods and ideas throughout the Sahara — shaping centers of learning, commerce, faith, and community. Through Professor Sanneh’s eyes, I saw that camels were humped, handsome, sure-footed, load-bearing metaphors for the distance and difficulty of our journey to faith. And I know that the camel in Mark’s gospel today — you know, the one that can go more easily through the eye of a needle than a rich person can enter the Kingdom of God — will surely help us hear the good news in the gospel today.
As Berkeley Divinity School Dean Andrew McGowan pointed out in his blog this week, we’ve had some really difficult teaching from Jesus in these past weeks from Mark’s gospel. We’ve seen Jesus foretelling his passion and death on the cross while the disciples have deflected, or at least not really comprehended, the ultimate nature of this truth. And all these troubling instructions — stumbling to the kingdom, divorce, and now today wealth, have to be read in the context of the disciples’ struggle to follow Jesus and to understand what that journey means. These teachings are not timeless moral precepts, or a list of strict, literal admission criteria for the Kingdom of God. Instead, like so many of Jesus’ teachings, they are situational examples, parables, and metaphors for how we make the next right decision on our journey with Jesus. I’m sure you’ve heard or read before about the Eye of the Needle, the real gate into first century Jerusalem, that was both narrow and low, requiring caravans of camels, or even more importantly, horses with soldiers, to dismount and unpack in order to enter the gate.
Narrow Gate
This was a defense feature of the walled city that you still see in many of the gates into Jerusalem’s Old City today — including Damascus Gate, the entry I used most frequently while I lived in Jerusalem, walking up Nablus Road from St. George’s College, roughly the same distance that Buoy and I walk every day from home on Mary Street to Emmanuel. Damascus Gate is not only low, it also has several sharp, narrow turns before you reach the open market area that leads down into the heart of the Old City. The low headroom and sharp turns are like speed bumps or traffic calming, preventing a hostile force from entering the gate quickly and overcoming those within the city walls.
The Door of Humility at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem works the same way. Built by the Emperor Constantine in the 4th century to remember the manger where Jesus was born, the church’s main entrance into the nave is commonly known as the Door of Humility. This main door into this amazing fourth century structure, added onto over the past 600 years, is only 4 feet tall and two feet wide, allowing one person at a time to enter, each bending low to walk in. I always had to remove the backpack I carried with me so that I could fit under the low header and not get caught by the hump on my back.
Door of Humility
The story is that the Door of Humility was added in the 14th century — the Ottoman Period — to prevent soldiers on horseback from rushing into the Church of the Nativity at full force. And I can see — actually I have seen many times — how that door would offer those specific protections. And, I also think it gives us some perspective on Jesus’ teaching that 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. Is Jesus condemning wealth and all who hold it? No, I really don’t think so. That’s way too simplistic a conclusion, as those who have wealth have an enormous capacity to do good with it for everyone.
We see examples every day of wealth being put to work for public benefit and for the relief of those who have been afflicted by poverty, war, disease, discrimination, storms, disasters, and politics. I believe that Jesus is telling us that wealth of any kind is tricky, and this is how to thread the needle. In order to enter the kingdom of God, first we have to slow down, bend down, and unpack our stuff. This means really taking a look at all of our understandings, our lived experience, our learned responses, our biases, and our own way of doing things. We have to be aware of our own background, culture, education, and privilege so that our experience can provide a framework for interpreting and assimilating new information, rather than an inviolable moral precept or standard for judgment of others.
Maybe the reason that it’s harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God is that a rich person just has more stuff — higher and bigger packs on their camels, and more camels in their caravan — all heaped with privilege. That stuff has to be unpacked and shared before we can truly hear one another? Mark’s gospel specifically and clearly says that Jesus loved the man but doesn’t say that a rich person cannot enter the kingdom of God. We enter the Door of Humility as we encounter Jesus’ presence anywhere, in humility: laying down ourselves, our gifts, our perspectives, and our lived experience, as offerings and keys to understanding, not tools or weapons for judgment. Amen