Shane Claiborne and the rich young ruler

I don’t think I’m grossly misrepresenting the book if I say that Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution is basically an impassioned, iconoclastic, mischievous challenge to the modern church to do what the rich young ruler (Luke 18:18-30) so famously failed to do - sell everything it has, give the money to the poor, and follow Jesus into life-changing solidarity with the disenfranchised and destitute. So Claiborne’s is another powerful and increasngly fashionable voice calling the church to be a radical Jesus movement again (see also ‘Being a disciple of Jesus is not enough’). But it still seems to me that this desire to revert to the pattern of Jesus-discipleship arises essentially as a reaction against the excesses, hypocrisy, idolatry or ineffectiveness of the modern American church; it is of only limited value for the larger task of reconstituting the people of God following the collapse of the Christendom paradigm.

There is no question in my mind that the church urgently needs to differentiate itself radically from Western consumerist culture and needs to do so not by words only but by actions and not by individual actions only but by communal activism - and I have to admit that I’m not doing much to help matters. But are we bound to take the sort of social and economic radicalism that Claiborne advocates as normative for the emerging church? Or should we regard it as component - as a badly needed, if overstated and idiosyncratic, prophetic voice?

What does the story of the rich young ruler tell us? Claiborne relates how he was dissatisfied with the argument of a teaching pastor at Willow Creek who said, ‘Now this doesn’t mean you have to go sell your rollerblades and golf clubs’; what it really means is that we should not make idols of our things. Claiborne comments regarding this sophistry:

In our culture of "seeker sensitivity" and radical inclusivity, the great temptation is to compromise the cost of discipleship in order to draw a larger crowd. With the most sincere hearts, we do not want to see anyone walk away from Jesus because of the discomfort of his cross, so we clip the claws on the Lion a little, we clean up a bit the bloody Passion we are called to follow. (The Irresistible Revolution, 104)

Claiborne thinks that Jesus means exactly what he says: ‘Rather than accumulating stuff for oneself, followers of Jesus abandon everything, trusting in God alone for providence.’ I am half way through the book, and so far it is basically an exposition, through some compelling stories and some haphazard theological reflection, of that principle: by and large the church in the US conforms to the caricature of the Christian businessman who expressed his understanding of what it meant to follow Jesus by having a 24 carat gold bracelet made for himself with the letters WWJD inscribed on it (157). That may or may not be a valid critique. What interests me is the question of whether the story of the rich young ruler provides us with a model for normal Christian praxis.

It seems to me specious to argue that the young man’s problem was simply that he loved Mammon rather than God. I have never felt comfortable with the traditional rationalization which says that what really matters is the condition of our hearts, not whether we actually give up all our wealth or not. Peter points to the fact that they have all left their homes and livelihoods in order to follow Jesus (Lk. 18:28). That’s exactly what being a disciple of this highly controversial itinerant rabbi consisted of: it was a risky journey with Jesus down a road of self-abandonment for the sake of the future of God’s people; and if anyone was going to join the group, they had to make sure that they were prepared to pay the cost, not metaphorically or spiritually but literally (cf. Lk. 9:57-62). The reason is that this is the difficult narrow road of salvation that Israel must take if anything is to survive the coming fires of judgment. That’s why Jesus says to Zacchaeus when he repents of his unrighteousness, ‘Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham’ (Lk. 19:9).

The instruction to sell personal possessions and give to the needy, therefore, forms part of an eschatological vocation. The prophetic community that will proclaim the impending reign of God over his people, the coming transformation of Israel, will have to let go of the normal material securities of life and trust in the Father to provide:

"And do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be worried. For all the nations of the world seek after these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you.

"Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

"Stay dressed for action and keep your lamps burning, and be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the wedding feast, so that they may open the door to him at once when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will dress himself for service and have them recline at table, and he will come and serve them. If he comes in the second watch, or in the third, and finds them awake, blessed are those servants! But know this, that if the master of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have left his house to be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect." (Luke 12:29-40)

The disciples will have to live in this state of liminality, of radical trust, of social dislocation, until the moment of eschatological fulfilment, when God will intervene to judge and deliver - when war will come, when Israel will be divided, father against son, mother against daughter (12:49-53; cf. Mic. 7:1-10) - and the kingdom will be given to the Son of man. It will not take for ever: the signs are already there to be read (12:56). This is a transitional state of affairs.

So the rich young ruler chooses to take his chances with history rather than abandon everything in order to follow Jesus, which was the only form of discipleship on offer. But we are not standing at that same fork in the road. We have our own challenges to face, our own crises to negotiate, and they are likely to require from us some sort of radicalism. But I think it will take more than following Jesus. There is undoubtedly a legitimate space in the landscape of renewal for communities such as Claiborne’s The Simple Way: they are a living protest against greed and excess, both inside and outside the church; they are a powerful reminder of a critical and formative period in the biblical narrative, they remind us of Jesus; they shake up our comfortable assumptions about what community means; and they are a prophetic witness to the compassion and justice of God. But the Jesus story reaches backwards and forwards, into the national life of Israel and into the evolving life of the New Testament churches, which to judge from Paul’s letters did not overtly draw their inspiration from the model of concrete Jesus-discipleship. And then, of course, there is what happens after the eschatological crisis….

In the end, I would argue that Jesus-discipleship does not show us what it means for God’s people to be ‘new creation’. It shows how that possibility was brought about - and perhaps it shows us how the possibility is to be recovered when the church has lost its way. But we need to bring the whole biblical story into view if we are going to understand adequately what it means to exist in the world as God’s creational microcosm.