The Rich Young Man

George Frederic Watts captures the melancholy of his title, taken directly from Mark 10:22/ Matthew 19:22, ‘For he had great possessions’. He has, it seems, inherited material wealth; now he asks to inherit the kingdom of heaven. The painting provokes hard questions that walk beside this familiar story. Might the rich young man (or ruler in Luke) be wondering why his achievements—prestige, education, and virtue—should burden his pursuit of holiness?

Watts’s figure, with his slumped shoulders, might suggest to us a childlike sadness. Maybe too it awakens a theological realization: eternal life, the greatest possession, cannot be owned, or accomplished from our own resources. The man gazes downward, his shoulders weighted by fur trim and a golden chain. Only one hand emerges from the sumptuous fabric, poised ambiguously in a half-closed, half-open position. To give away favourite things feels like loss, perhaps even the anxious sacrifice of a longstanding identity in which much has been invested. Can this would-be disciple imagine himself apart from what he owns?

We never learn the rich man’s name in the Gospels; Watts, as though in keeping with this fact, hides his face from view. We know the subject of Watts’s portrait only from titles and garments: just those great possessions that Christ now asks him to give away. But what point in the story, exactly, has Watts shown us in this moment of apparent mourning? The spare background has a single vertical line to organize perspective with shadows near the bottom. Watts implies bare walls, possibly the corner of an empty room. We might imagine the narrator’s ‘he had great possessions’ describing the rich man’s sigh in preparation for an immediate estate sale.

Nevertheless, we know he is a quick learner. He corrects himself from ‘Good Master’ to ‘Master’ after only a single injunction from the Teacher (Mark 10:20). The painting invites us to grieve the difficulty of this next assignment, but also to hope that this nameless man will sell his great many things and join Jesus’s crowd of followers. His hand might not be clutching at all, but rather in the middle of the first intensely hard act of letting go.

At first, Paul Klee’s New Harmony may appear rigidly four-square, but a closer inspection could lead us to notice imprecision in these ‘squares’. Can we imagine how the colours and shapes—interpreted by some as Klee’s response to musical theory—might undulate, dance, and play together? When Jesus enumerates familiar commandments, do they work like these discrete colours? What does it mean to keep all of the commandments?

Perhaps the rich young man (or ruler according to Luke) in this passage imagines God’s instructions as something like Klee’s patterns. Jesus rearranges the music of the law in a way that is analogous to the way our eyes might move about Klee’s painting. Harmony emerges in relation, not isolation.

Klee, too, might help us find the harmony in those words of Jesus that connect the rich man to the other disciples; all are addressed as ‘children’ (Mark 10:24). No one can win the inheritance of eternal life through their own isolated brilliance, zeal, or action.

The more memorable lesson of this passage may be about money, but the Gospel cautions against all sorts of self-centred focus. Jesus calls for a hard a way of keeping commandments—with a love suitable for building the kingdom of heaven rather than a concern with one’s own success. The rich man must learn to see and hear others; he must be harmonized in a new way. Peter and other disciples, too, must be wary of ‘owning’ their discipleship as though it were a clear-cut or finished work. Peter exclaims that the disciples have already met the terms of Jesus’s amazing request to the rich young man: ‘Lo, we have left everything and followed you’ (Mark 10:28; see also Luke 18:28; Matthew 19:27). Jesus replies with yet another inversion. Overconfidence in the eventual harmony of eternal life might refuse to see and respond to the interim dissonance of ‘persecutions’ (Mark 10:30).

Mark’s Gospel continuously rearranges what was already known. Its ‘good news’ takes us beyond the known, asking more of us than we are prepared for, and directing us to love what is beyond our habitual horizons. Do we know what keeping all of the commandments looks like? It might be more like listening between colours.

This Composite Camel with Attendant represents an anonymous miniature manuscript illumination, potentially from late-sixteenth-century Iran. Lavish colours and textures are used to suggest the sky, ground, and cargo which frame its central subject, the camel, whose outline circumscribes a visual puzzle in browns and beiges.

Using a popular technique, perhaps an image of the oneness of all creatures in God, the camel consists of animals, fantastic beasts, and people of differing cultures. Caravans connected the world and its wealth through the profits of foreign trade and cultural exchange. Could we imagine this camel as a Silk Road stitched together? In talking about camels and eternal life (Mark 10:25; Matthew 19:24; Luke 18:25), Jesus adapts a well-known proverbial motif in which a big animal squeezing through a tiny space is used to suggest something impossible or surreal (Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 55b; Marcus 2009: 731, 736). The metaphor of the camel, needle, and entrance to the kingdom of heaven also appears in the Qur’an (al-A’rāf 7.40). Ideas and scriptural poetry spread by trade, as well as commodities. Does this image point us beyond the comforting boundaries we often impose on the Gospels?

This patchwork vision of a camel might also invite us to juxtapose Jesus’s challenge about the salvation of the rich in Mark with the camels of a Nativity scene: Matthew’s caravan of royal magi following a star. They were the first Gentiles to recognize Christ. Here too something new is stitched into the story, and again we may ask: what role will wisdoms from other cultures and traditions play along the way to eternal life?

‘Then who can be saved?’ (Mark 10:26; see also Matthew 19:25; Luke 18:26). Impossible combinations may also be scary and unsettling—not unlike Jesus’s promised ‘persecutions’ (Mark 10:30). This multiplex camel has a single attendant, but his identity too is ambiguous. We may imagine him as a figure for Christ, for the rich young man, for us who ‘attend’ to the story and each other.

The least expected are suddenly revealed as first (Mark 10:31). Perhaps the ‘hundredfold’ gifts in the ‘age to come’ will arrive like a composite kingdom (Mark 10:30): a quilted-camel greater than the sum of its parts. Perhaps this paradoxical composite camel—monks and lovers, demons and dogs, rabbit-hooves and fox-tails—suggests, in one moment, the whole of Creation’s long caravan toward God.

References

Marcus, Joel. 2009. Mark 8–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press)