Kingdom economy
Matthew Chapter 19 – 21:22
Immigration is in the news a lot lately—specifically immigration from other countries into the United States.
Part of today’s reading is about immigration of another sort that is no less challenging but ultimately more important: immigration into the kingdom of God.
For immigration it truly is: leaving behind one citizenship with its set of laws and rules and moving into new citizenship where everything is different.
There are two stories in today’s reading about this kind of immigration: The story of the rich man who wants to gain eternal life by entering the kingdom of God, and the story of the workers in the vineyard.
In the story of the rich man, the man asks Jesus how to get eternal life. Jesus responds by telling him to obey the commandments. He then goes a step further by telling the man to sell his possessions and give to the poor.
He specifically ties this to the kingdom of God when he says, “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.”
Why?
The simplest answer is that possessions tend to possess us. Those with great wealth often end up serving the needs of their wealth rather than being served by it; much less serving anybody else with it.
For the man in the story to be free to follow Jesus, he had to be free of the hold his wealth had on him; something, it appears, he was not able to do.
In the end, Jesus says, “everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.”
It is that final phrase that clearly ties this story to the next: the parable of the workers in the vineyard, which ends with, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
While Jesus never uses the phrase “kingdom of God” in this parable, it is a parable of the economy of the kingdom—an economy based on abundance and God’s generosity, not on the human concept of fairness.