Christ and Community, 3: “Sell Whatever Thou Hast”

Stephen Fleming

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So here I present an idea about Christ’s injunction to the rich young man that I read in a book I really like. We all know the story and know it’s often used to as bludgeon to declare that Christians are coming up short of their charitable obligations.

In Morton Smith’s Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (1973), Smith does a close examination of Mark 10 because of his claim that “secret Mark,” or a longer passage that was sacred because it referred to a secret ritual, fit into Mark 10. Secret Mark has long been debated, and, yes, these claims sound pretty Mormon.

Smith argues that the requirements that Jesus gives the rich man in verses 17-22 fit the early Christian requirements for baptism, including “renunciation of property” (170). Smith explains, “Whoever joins the group enjoys its common property and is a member of its common family…. So the ancient Church understood the passage (Cramer; Theophylact) and so, generally do modern commentators (cited by Lagrange, ad loc.)” (172).

In other words, Smith argues that the requirement to “sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor,” was a baptismal requirement to give all to Christ and his followers, what Smith calls “primitive communism” (172). In fact, “the poor” was a name for early Christians: the Ebionites’ name derives from the Hebrew Ebyonim, “meaning the poor.”

Acts 2:44-45 and 4:32-37 is similar in that giving all to the church is a requirement. Ananias and Sapphira “kept back part of the price” and were smitten” (5:1-5).

To me, requiring the rich man to give all to the community makes more sense than what Smith calls “indiscriminating charity” (173) that is often assumed. First, because it’s really hard to get by on nothing. My understanding is that some eastern monks attempt this but aren’t able to do much. It seems much more functional to “enjoy … common property” as “a member of [a] common family.”

In Mark 10:28, Peter states “we have left all, and have followed thee,” but the apostles seem to either have a boat or frequent fare for a boat: Mark 4:1, 36–41, Mark 6:32, 45-54, Matthew 8:23–27, Matthew 14:22-33, Luke 8:22–25, John 6:16–21. This would make sense if the boat or the fare were “common property” held by the “common family.”

So for me, I really think that Morton Smith’s claim fits the evidence. The rich young man was asked to fulfill the requirement of giving all to the community, but turned away because he had many possessions. “How hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God!” (24). Smith defines the kingdom of heaven as Christ and his followers, not necessarily the afterlife (Smith, 169). The rich young man refused the requirement to join Christ and his followers.

Communal living is quite difficult to maintain; I’ve heard that 90 percent of communes don’t make it past 18 months. Our church’s attempt in Missouri fit that category. So early Christians attempts probably didn’t last long but were nonetheless was part of the memory of Jesus’s teachings (Smith, 172).

Therefore, it appears to me that this “Christian” requirement of the rich young man was also a communal one: a requirement and characteristic of the kingdom of God that’s quite difficult to achieve. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (10:25). Christ’s followers were “the poor” because very few of the rich joined.

Comments

7 responses to “Christ and Community, 3: “Sell Whatever Thou Hast””

  1. Jonathan Green

    This reading makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t eliminate all the ethical obligations arising from Mark 10, but it provides another way to think about them.

  2. SDS

    Agreed. This is an illuminating perspective.

    More generally, just on their face, some of Jesus’s teachings famously look to be so demanding that it seems almost impossible to live by them in our actual world. If you always turned the other cheek, gave your coat to anyone who asked you, forgave relentlessly and unconditionally, never resisted unjust treatment, etc., could you realistically raise a family, perform your civic duties, and so forth? So I think Christians have always struggled to know what to do with these teachings.

    Maybe these teachings serve to show us how far short we inevitably fall from living truly godly lives, and thus how much we are in need of grace. But it’s also possible that we sometimes misconstrue them by reading them out of context. (Although even in context Jesus’s disciples constantly seem to have misunderstood him.) And there is a risk that by making such teachings too idealistic and unlivable, we actually weaken their force and render them practically irrelevant; it’s easy to think, “Well, that may be okay for Mother Theresa, but for me and my spouse and five kids . . . .” So I think there is value in interpretations that seem to make sense and to make such teachings more realistically livable. The interpretation offered in this post seems to fit into that category. (Actually, it’s still more demanding than ours or virtually any other Christian community has found to be viable over a sustained period.)

  3. Curtis Pew

    Since some of my ancestors were part of the Missouri LDS settlements, and others lived in Orderville when it was living the United Order, I’ve given some thought to communal property ownership and how it might work today. Some of my thoughts, noting that I’m talking about voluntary communities and not about government-enforced property sharing:

    * It seems to work best with small communities, where there is a reasonable expectation that everyone knows everyone else. Something like Dunbar’s number seems to apply here. I’ll note that the church seems to try to keep ward sizes not too far over this number, so if we ever try something like the United Order again it should probably be at the ward level. Which would, of course, complicate ward splits and reorganizations, which would still need to happen.
    * Socializing children to accept communal ownership can be difficult. There’s a story that in Orderville when a new style of pants became popular the young men would sneak out at night and run them against a grindstone so they’d need new, more fashionable pants sooner. You might need to do something like the Amish and have a period in young adulthood where they can go off on their own and experience the outside world.
    * An April 15 special: figuring out the community’s income taxes would be fraught. (My great-great grandfather’s biography attributes the breakup of the United Order in Orderville to the Edmunds-Tucker act’s provisions for confiscating church property.)

  4. Stephen Fleming

    Indeed, it would seem to change the command from extraordinarily difficult that’s pretty much never followed, to something also really hard, but has been attempted and sometimes successfully. Indeed, my understanding is the the Hutterites have been living in Bruderhofs (their communes) for nearly 500 years. I believe that makes the Hutterites the most successful communitarian group in history. I also understand that they’ve influenced many others.

    So it IS possible even if 90 percent of communes don’t make it past 18 months.

    Those are good points to consider, Curtis. Historically, communes have been little agrarian villages (Bruderhofs are usually that way) so trying to implement something like that in our pretty big church and modern economy just wouldn’t work.

    Also, I think it’s becoming more and more of a challenge to make money at agriculture (a lot of the Hutterites have shifted to manufacturing, which is also a challenge). We just have a very different economy now.

    It reminds me of a comment from a guest of Ezra Klein’s discussing this topic. Around the 25 min 30 sec mark, she said something like, “intentional community [the generic name for attempting such things] may be more doable if the community isn’t also trying to create an economy.” In other words, is there a way to live in something like an intentional community where people keep their regular jobs, but figure out someway of having some kind of shared community?

    https://open.spotify.com/episode/0TyYzJXmnNUf4UVxAoAaxZ?si=i37DXuAJSnixVpL5rA-VuA

    Shared goods under those circumstances would be hard, but Plato said that if you can’t pull off fully shared goods, it’s okay to try what he called “the second best city” or still attempting a form of communalism without fully shared property. Plato talks about that in his LAWS where people have shared meals and are assigned to be stewards of property that belongs to the city. (Yes, Mormon stewardship sounds like this).

    Mormon wards do have a communal aspect which is important. Could individuals attempt something a bit more communal and see how it goes?

  5. Jack

    That’s a cool interpretation–and one that should resonate well with latter-day saints. That said, I think the key to keeping the community going is found in how and where the covenant of consecration is positioned in the church today. To my mind it suggests that we must be–or at least striving to be–perfect in Christ for such a system to continue.

  6. PNWReader

    Not to be flippant, but I wonder if asking members to clean the meetinghouse is a gauge of how willing we are to approach any sort of communalism. Or maybe it’s a token of the practice, accepted in lieu of signing over one’s property.

  7. Dr Cocoa

    Interesting. This interpretation of the phrase “the poor” would also make Judas’ objection over the spikenard, and the subsequent explanation regarding it, (John 12:5-6) make a bit more sense.

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