It is noticeable that the New Testament begins from within the perspective of the Old and the Covenant. Although the Covenant is a two-sided arrangement between God and his people, the emphasis tends to be on what God has done, and will in the future do for them. This is especially true of those passages dealing with Messianic times. Then all will be gift. All will sit down to the Messianic banquet – provided by God. They will enjoy peace and prosperity – brought about by God. The sick will be healed; the blind will see; the lame walk and the poor will be blessed. It is only necessary to repent and to believe in order to accept.
But with Jesus a new note is heard – give. You have received, it is now your turn to give; to give of what you have – not even to ask back what is taken from you. Give of yourself, of your time and energy; above all, give witness to the Good News. The Good News is more than an announcement, or a proclamation. It is a new state of being. There is the feeling that here Jesus has similar advice to that of the Buddha. In practice his conception of what it means to be human is not very far from the Buddhist. For both self has to be lost. For Buddhists the pragmatic self is an illusion and it is necessary to see through this illusion. For Jesus the self is a hindrance, an obstacle in the way of salvation. The Parable of the Rich Young Man is very interesting here because it implies that there are different states of attainment. The young man asks what he has to do in order to be saved. He is told – keep the commandments, an answer straight from the OT. Keep the rules and you will receive. But the young man wants to do more than that. Why? He must have glimpsed something. He must have seen that being good in the sense of keeping the Law did not really change anything existentially. The Jews were not philosophers. They did not agonise over the nature of being, or the meaning of existence. In their most profound exploration of the mystery of suffering and evil (the book of Job) they could not arrive at any answers, or rather they found that all their answers were inadequate. They could only fall back on the inexplicable actions of an all-powerful and transcendent God. And this is where the OT perspective fails. The rich young man has found that neither wealth, nor living a good life is ultimately satisfying. There is an emptiness within him that neither of these can fill. So he asks Jesus, who tells him to give everything he has away to the poor and follow him. This the man cannot bring himself to do.
There are a number of interesting points here. Why does Jesus stress the importance of poverty? What does he mean by ‘losing one’s self’? And why could this good, well-meaning young man, who had glimpsed something of the transcendent, not let go of his possessions? To take the last point – it is not enough to say that the young man was possessed by his possessions. It goes deeper than that. He identified himself with his possessions. His existence depended on them. Without them he would not be himself. He would be destitute and utterly dependent on others. As a wealthy man he had never been dependent on anyone. He was being asked to let go of everything that sustained him and made him what he was and make a sustained act of trust in a person who had no visible means of support. Ultimately he was being asked to trust in God, but God was an item of belief, not a dimension of his existence. It was too much. Only by entering into a state of poverty would he be able to transcend the limitations of his wealth.