Rich & Kingdom of God | Matthew 19:16-30

The Rich Young Man

16 Then someone came to him and said, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” 17 And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is one who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” 18 He said to him, “Which ones?” And Jesus said, “You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness. 19 Honor your father and mother. Also, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 20 The young man said to him, “I have kept all these; what do I still lack?” 21 Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” 22 When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, 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.” 25 When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, “Then who can be saved?” 26 But Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”

27 Then Peter said in reply, “Look, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?” 28 Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 29 And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my name’s sake will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. 30 But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.

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Every summer for my 9 years as a Pinecrest camper, I had a ritual.

On the very first day of camp as I walked from registration to my cabin, before I knew what the week would hold, I would take the $100 I had saved for months and hand it over to the canteen. All of it. Up front. 

One hundred dollars is not a fortune. But at Pinecrest, it might as well be $1 Billion. $100 in my canteen tab meant something specific: I would never have to wonder if I had enough. Not once, all week. So, every night when the canteen opened, I would get a Reese’s peanut butter cup. Every. Night. 

Plus, if a friend was short, I could cover them. If someone hadn’t thought to bring money, I shared. By the end of the week, whatever was left I put back into supporting the canteen’s ministry, because every dollar there goes right back into camp, right back into the community that formed me.

I did not do this because I was especially generous or thought about a devotion I would write for Pinecrest a decade later. I did it because I really liked my daily Reese’s and I knew I would lose the cash if I carried it around. But because of this annual practice I learned an important lesson: when you give first, before you calculate what you might need, something shifts. You stop living in scarcity. You stop protecting your pile. You start looking around to see who else might need a Reese’s (or starburst or a pretzel).

I did not know it at the time, but that was a lesson in what it means to follow Jesus.

In Matthew 19, a young man runs up to Jesus with a question: “What good thing must I do to get eternal life?” He is “young”, probably in his early to late twenties. He has kept every commandment. He is not a fraud. By every standard his world offered, he was righteous, faithful, and favored by God.

He was also extraordinarily wealthy. Not just comfortable or “doing well.” In first-century Roman Palestine, his kind of wealth meant land… multiple estates, tenant farmers working soil his family had held for generations. Those farmers handed over 25% to 50% of everything they grew as rent so his household could flourish. In today’s terms, we are talking about a net worth north of $25 million. And he had done nothing to earn it. He was simply born into the right family, inside the right system. 

Here is where the text gets sharp. In the time of Jesus, wealth meant God’s approval. To be rich was to be blessed. To be blessed was to be holy. His estates were not just property. They were his theological evidence to his divine right to have so much wealth. So, when he asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, he is not really asking an open question. He is asking for confirmation of what he already believes about himself. He thinks he has everything and has done everything. 

Jesus looks at him and says:

“If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

This is not a pledge drive. This is not an offering plate. Jesus is asking the young man to hand it all over to the very people his wealth had been built upon. Jesus is asking him to step down from the system that had defined his identity, his security, and his picture of how God works. To become, economically, one of the people he has used to build his own financial portfolio.

The first will be last. The last will be first.

The man goes away grieving. He was young. He had a whole life ahead of him. And the cost he was asked to give was not just financial. It was the death of his own self. Every proof he had ever held that God was on his side was wrapped up in those holdings. He could not let go.

One of my favorite authors and researchers is Matthew Desmond, a sociologist who looks primarily at the economic inner workings of our own society. In Poverty by America,¹ Desmond makes a claim that is hard to sit with: poverty in the United States is not a condition some people fall into by bad luck or bad choices. It is produced by rental markets built to extract, by tax structures that shelter the wealthy, by supply chains designed to pay as little as possible. His central argument is simple and devastating: we make poverty. Not through malice, necessarily, but through participation. Through the arrangements we accept because we are on the comfortable side of them. 

The rich young man’s abundance and his tenants’ poverty were not two separate stories. They were the same story. Desmond asks us to apply the same lens to our own lives: what systems do I participate in that produce poverty for others? It is an uncomfortable Lenten question. It is supposed to be.

Another of my favorite writers is Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer. She is a botanist, member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a teacher at SUNY ESF, and author of Braiding Sweetgrass² and The Serviceberry.³ She writes about what she calls the gift economy: a way of living organized not around accumulation and transaction, but around reciprocity and gratitude.

In a gift economy, wealth is not measured by what you hold. It is measured by what you give away. Abundance is not hoarded but instead it circulates. The honored person in the community is not the one with the most, but the one who gives most freely. Kimmerer draws this from her own Indigenous tradition and from the natural world itself. The serviceberry tree does not calculate how much fruit to release. It simply offers to birds, to bears, to the soil, to the next generation of trees, and the whole ecosystem is sustained by that generosity.

That is what I stumbled into at the Pinecrest canteen. Give first. Share freely. Return the rest. Not because the math worked out. Because that is how the ecosystem of community flourishes.

That is what Jesus was asking of the young man. Not generosity as a tax incentive. Not charity as a bonus activity. But a healing transformation.

If you want to go deeper on the gift economy as a framework for your life, Kimmerer’s books are the place to start. You can also listen to her interview “Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Manifesto for a Gift Economy” on the podcast Freakonomics, just one of many of her interviews available online.

So what does Jesus ask of us?

Give first. Before you calculate what you might need. Before you know what the week holds. This is the discipline the canteen taught me, and it is the discipline Jesus names. Generosity is not a surplus activity. It is the first move. 

Ask the hard question. Not just “am I generous?” but “what systems do I benefit from that cost others?” Not to manufacture guilt, but to curate honesty within ourselves and our world.

Hold it loosely. The young man’s problem was not that he was wealthy. It was that his wealth had become his identity, his security, his proof of God’s love. What are you gripping that tightly? It may not be money. It might be comfort, certainty, or a way of life you have never questioned.

Give back the remainder. At the end of the week, I put what was left back into camp. What would it mean, in your household, your congregation, your community, to live that way: to return the surplus, investing in the community that has formed you?

Prayer:

God of the first and the last, we confess that we have confused your blessing with our accumulation. We have built, and benefited from, systems we have rarely stopped to examine. Open our eyes to see what our abundance costs others. Open our hands to hold it more loosely. Teach us to give first, share freely, and return the rest. And when the cost of following you feels like too much, remind us that with you, all things are possible. In the name of Jesus, Redeemer of the world. Amen. 

Rev. Dan Potaznick, CFRE (he/him)

Volunteer Director of Development, Pinecrest Lutheran Leadership Ministries 

¹ Matthew Desmond, Poverty by America (New York: Crown, 2023).

² Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants(Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).

³ Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (New York: Scribner, 2024).