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20th Sunday after Trinity

04 October 2024

13 October, Proper 23: Amos 5.6-7, 10-15; Psalm 90.12-end; Hebrews 4.12-end; Mark 10.17-31

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A LATIN poet wrote to his lover: “Sooner will rivers flow backwards to their source than will your licentious libido be curbed.” English has similar expressions for unlikelihood: “Pigs might fly when hell freezes over.”

These are examples of a figure of speech called “adynaton”, from the Greek word for “impossible” (used in verse 27 of this Gospel). It emphasises the unlikelihood of something, to emphasise a factual statement, which otherwise would be bland (“X is very difficult. . .”).

This snippet of information helps us to make sense of Jesus’s words 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.” The vivid image of an absolute impossibility is not meant to show that the matter at issue is likewise impossible, only that it is very, very difficult.

Ever since Jesus said this, it has worried his followers, from the disciples who heard him to later Christians whose view of wealth was morally neutral, or even positive. One solution has been to tweak the Greek: to say “cable”, not “camel”. But cables cannot pass through the eyes of needles any more than camels can. Making the impossible less striking and yet still impossible solves nothing.

Another option has been to confabulate the existence of a small gate in the city wall of Jerusalem, big enough for people, but not camels, to pass through. This emasculating solution to a hard teaching has roots in the 19th century, possibly even earlier. It turns one figure of speech, adynaton, into another, “bathos” (or anti-climax).

Such ingenious confections fail because their aim is not to find the truth of Jesus’s meaning, but to uphold preconceived ideas of what the Greek text should say, or what its meaning should be. In fact, no one needs to know about figures of speech, such as adynaton, to make sense of this teaching; for Jesus himself provides the interpretation, so that there can be no misunderstanding: “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for with God all things are possible.”

Adynaton has a useful side effect when we recognise it for what it is, and understand how it works on us: it reminds us that what people say is not always what they mean. How many detective programmes contain a moment when one character says about another “I could kill him!”? I always take it as an indicator that the object of the exclamation is about to turn up murdered, and that the person who uttered the exclamation is going to be a prime suspect. Such sayings are examples of a more familiar figure of speech, “hyperbole” — which means “exaggeration” (not just “exaggerated praise”). I hope Matthew 5.29 is a hyperbole.

Not every hard saying of Jesus is an adynaton. Verse 25 is easy to identify as one, because it is a comparison, like Zechariah 10.6: “Even though it seems impossible to the remnant of this people in these days, should it also seem impossible to me, says the Lord of hosts?” We may not dump everything that we wish Jesus had said differently — or not at all (such as the teaching on divorce, which I wrestled with last week) — into the adynaton/hyperbole category and just ignore it.

Still, recognising adynaton no more solves the problem of wealth than does the invention of a gate. When his disciples are shocked by Jesus’s teaching, they ask, “Who can be saved?” Riches were one way of judging whether God favoured a person, although Jesus consistently speaks against material prosperity as a sign of divine favour. What the disciples want is a definitive guide to what and whom God approves, and why.

When Tolkien’s Lord of the Nazgûl dismissed the threat from Dernhelm on the field of battle, he relied on an adynaton-prophecy: “No living man may hinder me!” Croesus of Lydia was told to “Beware the day when a mule becomes king of Media.” Witches assured the Thane of Cawdor that “None of woman born Shall harm Macbeth.” Perhaps these seeming-impossibility prophecies permit us to speculate that verse 25 is a judgement on those who make assumptions about the meaning of poverty, as well as that of wealth.

In sum, Jesus resists explaining how God’s salvation works. I think he would have approved of Fr Faber’s version of verse 27: “For the love of God is broader Than the measure of man’s mind.”

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