We are now going to look at some of the issues you have raised with respect to the Scriptures. You talk about the encounter between the rich man and Christ and the conclusion that is drawn is that it is very difficult to enter heaven if you are rich. You feel that this story does not apply to you since you are not very rich. And yet, from a certain angle, we are all rich in a certain important way.

Why riches are so vilified in spiritual writings – is not because they are inherently wrong but because they damage us as people. Let me expand on this. The way I will do this is by means of an illustration.

Suppose you were marooned on an island in the middle of the ocean for a month and you were given a choice – a case of bottled water or one billion dollars in gold. Which would you choose – a three dollar case of water or one billion dollars? The choice is obvious – you would choose the water because it offers you the possibility of survival whereas the billion dollars of gold would not prolong your life even for one second. Money is a totally illusory substance which has no inherent value aside from the worth we put onto it through our societal agreement.

This is the gist of this story in the Gospels about the rich man because it underlines the fact that we base our lives on illusion and falsehood. And the fact that we ‘value’ the illusory so much over what is real and lasting impacts on us and on our lives in a very fundamental way. Much of the spiritual life focuses on making us into real people and not those governed by illusion and lies. God cannot interact with lies and illusions and if we are so enmeshed in illusion and falsehood, then we are rupturing our relationship with God. In order to have a meaningful relationship with God, we must come before God in a genuine manner reflecting who we truly are as opposed to illusions we may have of ourselves. This is the essence of repentance and of contrition. Here we are in the process of forming our soul, our innermost being, our personhood, that which makes us who we really are before God.

This is not to deny that money and wealth have an enormous impact on our relationship to our neighbors because we live in societies that have accepted money and wealth as our main methods of interaction amongst ourselves. We are called on to be generous with our neighbors and to share our wealth with them and to contribute to their material wellbeing. We are to share our material blessings with others and this is one concrete way we can express our love and care for them. By amassing wealth, we are denying ourselves to opportunity to share with others and thereby we shrink ourselves.

There is something else that comes through in our consideration of stories from the Gospels. We tend to look at them at arm’s length as if we are at a distance and separated from them whereas, they are directed specifically to each of us and each one of us has to see how they touch onto and apply to our lives. Whenever we read the Scriptures we will most profitably read them as if they were directed toward us – and in a sense this is so – so that we may benefit from them.

It is interesting how Christianity differs from the views on the world and creation held by the non-Christian world. In Hinduism, for example, the world in general is seen as maya, illusion, which is totally divorced from reality. Christianity says yes, that is true, the world has fallen into the slavery of unreality which is called sin, but there is still value in the world and this world and the things in this world can be used as a means for communicating with God through the sacraments, as an example. In a sense, Hinduism throws everything out, whereas Christianity is more selective. It sees the world as being fallen but at the same time, it has the potential to be redeemed and to become what God had intended all along.

Christianity sees something of value in the many ways that man has tried to deal with his relationship to the world but Christianity goes further and the reason for this is that Christianity speaks of something that has happened and that has changed creation to its very foundations. Christianity, as I have stated previously, is not a religion in the usually accepted sense that the word carries. Christianity holds to the fact that the word God is more accurately classified as a verb as opposed to noun. It speaks of God’s actions in the world in the process of redeeming creation and setting it aright. And Christianity reflects this into the world because it speaks not just of some teaching, but of actions that have been taken by God so that the creation project could get back on track. The whole of the Old Testament is a description of this attempt by God to set creation onto its proper tracks. And what the accumulation of wealth does, is put a hindrance into the redemption that God wants to grace the world with.

The Final Judgement, which awaits all of us, is the process whereby our unreal portions – our sins – are cleansed and removed from us so that we can become real and in this way be enabled to come and stand before God. Notice that one way to see sins is that part of us which is unreal, which in a very important sense is alien to us. And this is underlined by the call for us not to judge because it is not sins that define persons – sins are something foreign to what we are at our deepest and most real being – but what defines who we are is that glimmering inner reality which is referred to as the image of God in each of us.

This is why it is very difficult for the rich man to enter heaven. He is still holding on tenaciously onto the illusory security offered by the wealth that he has. He has become trapped in the attraction of wealth which gives a false sense of security and reality and this stands as a barrier between the person and God. This is not a question of a forensic failure, it is not a question of having failed to follow a specific command or law – it is a question of our ontology, our very being which must be true and real in order for us to have communion with God. God desires us to be with Him but for us to be with Him in our sinful illusory state is very difficult. This is one way to look at judgement and it is there to be found within the tradition of the Church. In a sense, our whole lives are a preparation for us to stand before God.

We can now take another way of looking at the exile of Adam and Eve from paradise and from their presence before God. God exiled Adam and Eve out of paradise because they would not be able to stand and survive before His absolute purity and glory. Much of the Old Testament is a caution about the fact that man, in his present sinful state, cannot see God and live. This warning is sounded time and again and as an example it is presented in the strange story of people touching the ark without proper preparation – they are destroyed because they are not ready to encounter God at this level.

We started off by what seemed a simple story of the evils of love of wealth and money but what we have seen are some of the essential points about sin, about salvation, about redemption. Christianity has been done a huge disservice by hitching its wagon to the juridical view of the interaction of man and God. There is such a disparity between man and God that any talk of trial or forensic judgement is rightfully unaccepted by many. There is no need for Christianity to do this. I am reminded of a story of Orthodox monks walking through the Sistine Chapel and admiring the art work presented there and much of this art resonated with the teachings of the Orthodox Church. But when they came to a scene depicting suffering humanity in the depths of a fiery hell, their comment was that they did not comprehend what was being depicted there. This was something foreign to Christianity.

There is a noble and ancient strand within Christianity which has resisted the temptation to discuss and represent the relationship between man and God in terms of a court of law. This juridical emphasis is foreign to Christianity but can be seen in many strands of religions because man, in his depth, knows that things are not right and he seeks to correct them through rules and laws and punishment. The heart of Christianity is much more humane than that and this is the message that has to be brought to the fore again.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas