Will rationalizations fit through the eye of a needle?

"He was setting out on a journey when a man ran up, knelt before him, and put this question to him, `Good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?' Jesus said to him, `You know the commandments: you must not kill; you must not commit adultery; you must not steal; you must not bring false witness; you must not defraud; honor your father and mother.' And he said to him, `Master, I have kept all these from my earliest days.' Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him, and he said, `There is one thing you lack. Go and sell everything you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then, come follow me.' But his face fell at these words and he went away sad, for he was a man of great wealth" (Mark 10:17-22).

Ever since my earliest days I have known that Jesus really had a hang-up about money. His attitude is hard to miss because money and wealth keep cropping up in the gospels, and every time Jesus goes out of his way to make people feel uncomfortable. Take this man who was obviously sincere about inheriting eternal life. Jesus doesn't recommend that he share some of his wealth with the poor. No, it's all or nothing with Jesus: give it all away--everything! I could hardly blame the man for walking away. Couldn't Jesus have been a little more gradual about all of this? Couldn't we have some distinctions here?

And there's Jesus' comment about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. He never says: Blessed are you relatively comfortable folk who nevertheless act in a socially responsible way. It's always: Blessed are the poor! Blessed those who lend and don't even try to get it back! Blessed the widow who gives away her last penny!

Why this unrelenting hostility toward money? What did Jesus, with his amazing insight, know that we don't? What was he trying to tell us?

I bring this up because it seems lately that the acquisition and preservation of wealth has become not just the most important thing in our society but the only thing. Reading an airline magazine on a flight to St. Louis, I was deluged with ads for books and tapes that can increase my wealth overnight:

"High-tech research means high income."

"Surf the Web to financial freedom."

"Turn the world into your market."

Every page, it seemed, contained advice on how to keep the bucks rolling in: Through "Mega Speed Reading," "Advanced Mega Memory," and "Mega Math," I could maximize my daily earning power. And by discovering the secrets of "Global Wealth Building," I could squirrel my earnings away on offshore, tax-free havens in the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands, maybe even Aruba.

In a bookstore, I came upon a big seller: Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money, in which author James Buchan traces his family genealogy back through many generations to learn the thread, "frayed to a single twist," that connects him with all those who have gone before in this "muddle of time." The thread, he discovers, is money, and he argues that it's really the only thread that connects all families, rich or poor, happy or unhappy. The bottom line is always money.

A writer in The New Yorker magazine discusses million-dollar bonuses on Wall Street and the "teen millions" people are paying for condos on Fifth Avenue or overlooking Central Park. He laments "how very hard it is" for moderately rich persons like himself to maintain their "identity" in the face of such vast wealth. An associate of the writer with $10 million in investments confesses at a party that he feels "poor."

In a recent, hour-long ABC network news special, John Stossel celebrated the goodness of "Greed." He showed how it creates wealth, enhances the economy, and gives people a deep sense of satisfaction. Labor unions took a hit for nitpicking about top executives' astronomical salaries. In fact, argued Stossel, it's just such incentives that spur CEOs like Michael Eisner of Disney (owner of ABC) to increase the company's net worth by billions and billions.

There's a Web site, I discovered, where somebody keeps careful track of the mega-money of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. When Gates' net worth soared to more than $40 billion, site-keeper Brad Templeton did some intricate math to determine how much this reigning king of the hill has been earning per hour in the 22 years since he started the company. Concluded Templeton, "If we presume that he has worked 14 hours a day on every business day since then, that means he's been making money at a staggering $500,000 per hour, or about $150 per second. This, in turn, means that if Bill Gates saw or dropped a $500 bill on the ground, it wouldn't be worth his time to take the four seconds required to bend over and pick it up."

I suppose I could chuckle at all this crazy preoccupation with money except for the fact that I've got some myself (far less than Gates, I hasten to add), and it's invested in various money-market accounts and profit-sharing plans. I get statements every so often and discover my money is growing--sometimes in lumps of several thousand dollars. There are seasons when the lump sinks a bit, but mostly the pile keeps on getting bigger. It grows like crabgrass. You don't even have to water it--you don't have to do anything. Naturally, I find myself speculating on where it's coming from and what Jesus would say about that.

Although he lived a long time before the era of capitalism, it seems Jesus knew that wealth has this innate tendency to multiply. And he certainly was not opposed to growth and multiplication. From the gospels we know he saw the world as a beautiful, incomparably bountiful, multiplying kind of place--that there's more than enough for everyone (remember the loaves and fishes) and that the kingdom of God (like a fertile field) is already sprouting a hundredfold in the midst of everyday existence. But the bounty has to be spread around, as Jesus sees it. We have to keep it moving.

And that's precisely our problem with wealth. We don't keep it moving; we let it pile up; we like to watch it accumulate. So instead of running freely through the body of the human family like a healthy blood supply flowing from the heart to the lungs, out to head and feet, and back again, accumulated wealth acts like a kind of bad cholesterol, blocking the passage of bounty and, in the process, seriously harming the one who has set up the blocks.

When Jesus looked at that man (and loved him), I think he feared what all that accumulation would finally do to the man. Perhaps he saw him many years in the future: worried sick about his investments in cedars of Lebanon lumber; disappointed with his new, lavish summer home on the Dead Sea; anxious about the fortune he's hidden over in no-tax Samaria, reluctant even to pick up a stray denarius off the street lest he lose his financial focus; and dreading the day when he'll have to leave his hard-won accumulation to a raft of ungrateful relatives who never really knew him because he didn't have the time.

Jesus realized what money can do, how it can choke and kill. And I think that's why he spoke so bluntly to the man.

Of course, I'm not in that situation. My accumulation is relatively modest, and I hardly ever think about it--except for a quick glance at the report when it comes in the mail just to see how everything's coming along (the report is late this quarter). I don't even know the difference between a money market and an annuity. So I have this very conscientious, professional financial advisor who helps me invest some of the profits in socially aware companies. That way, at least, I'm not supporting the people who make weapons of mass destruction or who manufacture the planes and ships that deliver the weapons. Yet I strongly suspect that would not be enough to satisfy Jesus.

Because there's a whole other side to this accumulation thing. The issue is not just how the accumulation of money affects the owner, it's also what my accumulated wealth does to non-owners--to those branches of the human family who are receiving less--or none--of the world's great bounty because of my blockage. Namely, those poor people Jesus kept referring to as "blessed." I usually manage to steer around this difficulty by recalling that it's the big-money holders who cause major blockage down the line--the milliondollar-bonus types, the top corporate CEOs, the too-small-a-bill-to-pick-up tycoons.

They're the ones who suffer from major cholesterol problems, and they're the ones who organize society so as to prevent the easy, free flow of money (and what it can buy) through the whole system. They are the dam builders who create the international economic systems so that the rich get richer precisely because the poor get poorer.

I read that 358 people in the world own 42 percent of the world's wealth, while the other 5.8 billion people share the rest. I don't know who the 358 are, but I'm quite sure I'm not one of them. Which was somewhat comforting until I heard Detroit Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gumbleton at the convention of the Call to Action organization last year. He was talking about the exploitation of the poor that results from unjust political and economic structures.

He told how women in the sweatshops of Haiti make 28 cents an hour producing shirts that sell for $11.98 at Wal-Mart, how the sub-Saharan countries of Africa paid off debts of $13 billion to the United States and other First World nations in the 1980s, only to find themselves owing more when they finished than when they started because of the excessively high interest rate on the debt. "That is what greed does to people," said Gumbleton. "It is a terrible sin, a social sin."

The crowd was mentally cheering him on until he suddenly shifted directions and caught us off-guard. "If I live in a society that benefits from social sin," he said, "and I do nothing about it, that social sin becomes my personal sin! No one has the right to keep extra possessions for himself when others lack the vital necessities to live." He went on to cite various social encyclicals on the subject, but he had gotten his point across.

You could almost hear us all squirming in our seats, all of us with our "extra" possessions--maybe the two cars, maybe the new television set, maybe the small summer house (by that tiny lake), and certainly those modest-but-ever-growing investments that make all this possible and life just a little more bearable. Did he say "personal sin"?

We all applauded Gumbleton when he finished, but the feeling of discomfort does not go away easily. It stays.

I don't want someone to say, "There, there, it's all right, you work hard, you have a right"--because that's just Gumbleton's point: You don't have a right. I believe it's Jesus' point, too.

These days I'm reevaluating my accumulating of extras, trying to find a way to get them back into general circulation. And oh, is that hard to do. Sometimes I wish Jesus had fixated on something else during his public life.