Sayings of Jesus: ‘What Must I Do To Inherit Eternal Life?’

OK, so this is obviously not a saying of Jesus as such; it’s a question that he was asked. And although it’s self-evidently an important question, I would hazard a guess that it’s one that many (perhaps, most) Christians misunderstand. It’s also a question most Christians would answer differently from how Jesus did.

We see the question being asked in three places in the Gospels: Mark 10, Luke 10, and Luke 18. It would appear that the Mark 10 and Luke 18 accounts are describing the same event, since the contexts and conversations are almost identical. The Luke 10 account is sufficiently different to suggest that rather than reflecting a different recollection, it’s a different occasion (where substantially the same question was being asked by someone else).

The repetition may be reflecting that this was a widespread concern of people in Israel at the time. What we do know is that the 613 commandments in Torah frequently required interpretation, in how to apply them in new social circumstances that weren’t envisaged when Torah was originally given to Israel as a nomadic people. Respected rabbis such as Jesus were being asked all the time, “What’s your take on this? What do you say?” (there were two principal rabbinical schools at the time, those of Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai, who, it was famously said, could be almost guaranteed to say the opposite on questions of interpretation; divorce being one example and hence, Jesus being asked about it, for his opinion). Such questions to Jesus were not always to ‘catch him out’ (though sometimes the text tells us that was the case), but rather because the questioner was genuinely wanting to ‘do the right thing’. As we shall see, it’s the latter that’s happening here.

Before we go any further, though, let’s address the common evangelical misreading. In neither case is the questioner asking, “How do I become a Christian?”, or “How can I go to heaven when I die?” That much ought to be clear in Jesus’ response in each case. Or put differently, if those were the question, Jesus gives a very unsatisfactory answer by modern evangelical standards (good thing that twentieth-century evangelicalism has created the Sinner’s Prayer and the Four Spiritual Laws to correct it). It wasn’t a timeless universal question, applicable to all people everywhere, that Jesus is answering with a corresponding timeless universal truth. The question, as asked and answered, is rooted in first-century Judaism.  

In its context, the questioner is asking, “How can I be sure that I am part of God’s covenant people? How can I know that I am in right standing with God within that covenant?”— the covenant of Torah given by God through Moses which served as ‘the covenant charter’.

The main ‘clue’ to this meaning lies in the word ‘inherit’—eternal life was the inheritance of God’s people, Israel. Hence, for an individual to be assured that they were, indeed, included within Israel—‘true’ Israel, or ‘faithful’ Israel—in right standing within the covenant, was very important.   

Perhaps the questioner especially has in mind the competing opinions coming from the two rabbinic schools. Perhaps his dilemma is, “How do I know I’m following the right ones?” Perhaps he has his doubts about some of the ‘add-on’ interpretations and applications of the commandments that the religious elite of his day were famous for: the so-called ‘traditions of the elders’ with which they ‘supplemented’ the commandments.           

This way of interpreting the question in the Mark 10/Luke 18 account is affirmed by Jesus’ (evangelically-unsatisfactory) answer, which starts from the commandments (as God’s expectations of his people on their side of the covenant commitment): “You know the commandments: …” says Jesus, and then gives six examples. Interestingly, Jesus only cites the latter six of the so-called Ten Commandments: those that were focused on people, rather than the first four, which were focused on God. This selection—with its emphasis on people—may be a further clue as to why Jesus says what he says next to the man.

The man replies that so far as he is aware he’s always kept those. Many evangelicals today will assume this means he is self-righteous and thinks his good works will save him. But that’s only because they’re reading it through a Reformation-influenced lens and coming up with an anachronistic reading (no faithful Jew ever thought that was in any way the role of Torah). The man is sincere in wanting to be sure he is pleasing God through doing his very best to fulfil God’s expectations of him—the same expectations that God himself gave Israel through Moses.  

Rather than Jesus then calling the man out for being legalistic and telling him he needs to have faith instead—as Reformed evangelicals today would probably have said, based on their anti-Jewish reading of Paul—Jesus affirms what the man says; so far as it goes. The problem is not the commandments as such, it's that this man has missed something important underlying the spirit of the commandments: the heart of God for the poor, who were everywhere around him.

Because there was no specific commandment addressing such conspicuous wealth (just generic tithing, offerings, and such like), the man was too focused on being in compliance with the letter and insufficiently focused on the heart of God which underlay Torah. So, Jesus challenges him with a completely unexpected ‘over-the-top’ attention grabber (I think that if I’d been him, it would have grabbed my attention, too): “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

Why that last bit (“Then, come follow me”)? Probably because, if the man does that, he will begin to ‘get it’.  

Notice, here, that although Torah is Israel’s governing constitution (the boundary rope) defining what it looked like to be in right standing with God (‘in’ versus ‘out’), this additional commandment that Jesus gives him is not in Torah. Why, then, would Jesus ‘add to’ Torah? Isn’t that unfair and unreasonable? No, not if sacrificial generosity and a heart for the poor was always the heart of Torah, rightly understood—not if it was always the heart of God driving Torah.

Torah was never the full definition or boundary of God’s heart laid out in practice; rather, it offered guidelines and examples. Since God’s heart for people went beyond the letter of the texts, so, too, should the heart of wealthy people like this man. The spirit of Torah was always supposed to be engraved on human hearts, not just the letter on tablets of stone. Torah was to be dynamic, not static. Remember the famous new covenantal prophecy of Jeremiah 31:33: “I will put my Torah in their minds and write it on their hearts” (my emphasis).

How might this understanding correlate with the other instance in Luke, where the same question is asked? I think, rather well. In Luke 10 the question is asked by “an expert in Torah.” And here Luke tells us that the man is ‘testing’ Jesus on Torah. The passage is worth reading in full, not least because of the parable that follows it and relates directly to it. Jesus begins by answering the question with a question: “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” The man answers, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind”; and “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Has the man been present on an earlier occasion when Jesus was asked what the most important commandment in the Torah was, when he answered in exactly this way? We don’t know (Luke’s Gospel doesn’t include the story—it's in Matthew 22 and Mark 12). Jesus responds, “You have answered correctly; do this and you will live.” But if the man had indeed heard Jesus offer that same answer—and I suggest he probably had, because it’s not necessarily how another rabbi would have answered, and not least by taking two commandments from different places in Torah to offer them as a composite answer, when asked just for one—then this man had clearly missed the heart of it. We see that reflected in his response: “So, who is my neighbour?” The sense I get is that the ‘expert’ is looking to define ‘neighbour’ as narrowly as possible (as ‘literally’ as possible, perhaps?). Whereas the heart of God, as reflected in Jesus’ answer to the rich young man in the other story is all about a wide and expansive (generous) definition of neighbour.

It’s in response to this subsequent question that Jesus offers the Parable of the Good Samaritan, with its very shocking challenge (to the ears of those listening at the time)—defining not only ‘neighbour’ but also ‘love for neighbour’ very differently from that which would have been expected. And, Jesus completely subverts the expectations of who the ‘good guys’ are and who the ‘bad guys’ are. In its original form, it’s largely sanitised to our ears. To get the full dramatic impact of the characters that Jesus chose to feature in this parable, we would need to substitute present-day characters that would be equally shocking to the ears of our evangelical audiences today. The kind of parable and choice of characters that got people executed in Jesus’ day.    

But all of that is another blog for another time …