Jesus and His Bible, Part 14

The Messiah and Politics

In Mark 11, Jesus entered Jerusalem to wild acclaim, disrupted the Temple businesses by throwing the vendors out and overturning their tables, and signaled his sense that the temple system was fruitless and would die by cursing the fig tree. Subsequently, through Mark 12, people ask him a long series of questions.  The first, asking where he got his authority from, he answered with a question. The second, asking if it was according to Jewish law to pay taxes to Caesar, Jesus answered with the famous “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” The third, asking about whose wife the much married woman would be in the resurrection, and the fourth, asking which was the greatest commandment in the Jewish Law, we have already discussed.

Now Jesus poses a question of his own. “How is it that the scribes say that the Christ, the Messiah, is the son of David? David himself said in the Holy Spirit, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put thine enemies beneath thy feet.’ So if David calls him Lord, in what sense is he David’s son?” (Mark 12:35-37). 

The religious authorities do not answer this question. And it is a puzzler.  

Here is the context in Jesus’s scripture:

Psalm 110:1 “The Lord says to my Lord: sit at my right hand until I make thine enemies a footstool for thy feet.” This Psalm is full of political promises. God tells the king to rule over his enemies. Later in the psalm, God promises that he will be at the king’s right hand, shattering kings, judging nations, filling them with corpses. The scribes and religious leaders cannot safely talk about this psalm without sounding like rebels against Rome.  

Further, this Psalm is a promise made by God to the king, promising him a priesthood like Melchizedek’s, an ancient priest/king at the time of Abram.  Both Saul and David occasionally took priestly roles. Additionally, Melchizedek is also possibly a pun meaning rightful king (Jewish Study Bible, 1408, n.). I suspect its interpretation was controversial at the time of Jesus, and Jesus knew it.  

The way Jesus quotes it is to take David as the speaker and the “my lord” as a son of David.  This is not a self-evident interpretation. Some present-day Jewish commentary suggests instead that David is the psalmist writing about himself as king in the third person and reinforcing the idea that God is on his side. 

Though Christian commentators adopt the whole of this psalm as a prophecy for which Jesus is the Messianic fulfillment, it is in fact full of puzzles. For example, the victories described are military and partisan, in that God works judgment upon “the nations, crushing heads far and wide.” This does not accurately describe the work Jesus said he came to do. Further, expecting that Jesus in a Second Coming will be qualitatively different, even militant and violent, does its own violence to the character of Jesus demonstrated at his first coming. Jesus was militant against hypocrisy, greed, power-hunger, and pride when he came the first time, and these will be the great enemies he defeats when he returns.

Jesus quoted this verse to silence those baiting him. He asked the people how it is that the scribes say the Messiah is the son of David, particularly since David in his Messianic psalm calls his “son” my Lord.  The crowd enjoyed hearing him riddle the religious experts. (This reminds me of the religious debates so popular with the ordinary folks in the 17^th century in England, a time when people went to war over versions of the Christian religion.) 

But it is hard to imagine Jesus simply engaging in riddling one-ups-manship. Why this riddle at this time?  The immediate context in Mark is one in which Jesus was frequently quoting the Hebrew scriptures at his enemies, making clear that he knew they were opposing him, making clear that he would be the murdered son of the vineyard owner, who is God, and making clear that God is the God of the living, not corpses, and that death will not be the end. He also made clear that the mission of Israel was not self-involved purity but loving each other as neighbors and loving the stranger as oneself also.  They were meant to bring God to the world, not keep God to themselves.

He followed this quotation with specific criticism of the hypocrisy of the religious experts, who showed off their prayers while impoverishing the helpless.  This reinforces his teachings elsewhere about taking care of human need as being more important than religious observances.

This particular quotation spoke to the Jewish hope for military victory over national enemies, and Jesus invoked this in a way that both put his questioners on the spot and undercut this political understanding of the Messianic aspect of the psalm. 

Jesus and His Bible, Part 13

 The First of All Commandments and the Second, As Well

After the last round of thrust-parry-thrust-touché between Jesus and the Sadducees, a scribe asked his question. He asked it because he liked how Jesus had dealt with the previous question, and it was this: “Which is the first commandment of all?”

Jesus answered, “The foremost is, ‘Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ And the second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Mark 12:29-30). 

The first part of this quotes from Deuteronomy 6. Significantly, Jesus included this theological prologue—“the Lord our God is one.” This recapitulated his answer to the Sadducees, God’s self-identifying formula to Moses (Exodus 3:14), “I am who I am.” The present tense, Jesus said, shows that God is present and presence. Jesus required his Sadducee questioners to confront the enigma that all of time is present to God, all humans are present to God, all of God is present at any time; to admit that their model of the past is not God’s reality. This is such a mystery.  It may be one of the questions a human can pose but, when answered, cannot understand. 

“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! And  you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4-5). This particular quotation from Deuteronomy 6 has two words for God in it: Elohim, which is plural (remember “Let us make human in our image…male and female”) and Yahweh, which is singular. Specifically, “Yahweh, our Elohim, is one Yahweh.” (This nuance is lost in Mark, written in Greek, in which the words are Kyrios and Theos, both singular.)

Again, we are plunging into an ocean of mystery.  This is (or is like?) the mystery of the Trinity, the three-in-one, affirmed by Christian creeds for centuries, often in response to challenges to trinitarian belief. Jesus emphasized the unity of purpose between himself and his Father, and in John’s Gospel, emphasized the unity of substance between himself and his Father, and said that when he was no longer physically present,  the Father would send the Spirit of truth to guide them.  The Trinity fits in well with the Elohim part of the Deuteronomy quotation.

The rest of the quotation is about loving God. Robert Alter says that this emphasis on love in Deuteronomy is new, that it is an addition to the traditional “fear of the Lord.” He also adds that it is the word used in treaties which pledge loyalty. 

Alter goes on to explain that the heart is the seat of understanding and is also associated with emotions. The “soul” is better translated “life-breath” or the “essential self.” And the word “might” is usually an adverb “very,” meaning “over the top.” (Alter, Moses, 641, n.) So if I put this into my own words:  You shall love the Lord your God with all your understanding and feelings, with your essential self and your life-breath, and with an unbreakable and complete loyalty.

I notice that Jesus added “with all your mind” into this list.  The questioner responded with his own list, which I suspect we are to consider parallel: “the heart, the understanding, the soul, the strength.” They were on the same page, despite the differences—Love God with all you are. This is the most important of all.

The second, which Jesus said is like the first, is to love your neighbor as yourself. This also derives from the Torah: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Lord” (Lev. 19:18).

This positive command occurs in the Levitical context of many “thou shalt not” admonitions centering on the following:

• Do not reap all your field, but leave some for the poor and the stranger
• Do not steal
• Do not deal falsely
• Do not lie to one another
• Do not take false oaths in God’s name
• Do not oppress your neighbor
• Do not rob your neighbor
• Do not withhold the wages of the day-laborer overnight
• Do not curse the deaf
• Do not trip up the blind
• Do no injustice in judgment
• Do not be partial to the poor
• Do not defer to the rich
• Do not slander others
• Do not take vengeance nor bear a grudge

All these are implicit in loving the neighbor as one’s self, but are made explicit for those of us who want to limit our love for our neighbors. Further on in the Leviticus chapter this occurs: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.”  There is no exception to the command, in other words. 

The questioner and the crowd before Jesus were well aware of the context of this second command and likely squirmed over their own failures to love. Even if we can say, “Oh, I love God wholeheartedly and more than anyone or anything else,” can we say, “I love my neighbor as myself, and my behavior toward my neighbor is in line with the expectations of Jesus’s Testament?” I’m feeling a little uncomfortable right now.

Jesus and His Bible, Part 12

The God Who Is 

This chapter 12 of Mark describes Jesus in one confrontation after another. After the one about the unfaithful vine-growers, the Pharisees and Herodians (unlikely allies) tried to trap Jesus about paying taxes to Rome, and then the Sadducees came up with a long story about a woman who married one brother after another until she finally followed the seventh in death.  I speculate that this was one of those perennial points of debate between the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the Pharisees, who did. Their participation together in trying to trap Jesus reveals that in their time as well as ours, politics made strange bedfellows. (Also, to me, it resembles the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.)

Jesus answered first by saying to the Sadducees, “You don’t know the scriptures nor do you know the power of God.” Once again, hardly conciliatory. This was a confrontation with the priestly establishment who were in positions of political as well as religious power, and Jesus described them as ignorant of their scriptures and of what God can do. (He went on to say that resurrected people are no longer involved in marriage, and are like angels, a fascinating statement, but beyond what we’re working on here.)

And then he said this: “But regarding the fact that the dead rise again, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the burning bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’?” (Mark 12:26). Again, “Have you not read”—Jesus asked those in charge of religious observance if they were even reading their scriptures.  

Jesus asked them a good question which goes right back to the rescue of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. The question exposed their superficial reading of the scriptures that were basic to their national identity, their claim of being chosen by God. 

The context for the quotation is the story of Moses and the slavery in Egypt of the Hebrew people.  Moses was born at a time in Egypt when the Pharaoh had decreed that all Hebrew boy babies were to be killed at birth. The heroic midwives Shiprah and Puah refused to obey the edict and instead reported to Pharaoh that Hebrew women delivered too quickly to need their services. Then Pharaoh required his own people to throw Hebrew sons into the river. When Moses was born, his mother hid him for three months, then placed him into a small woven and waterproofed boat and floated him on the river. 

Pharaoh’s daughter took him out of the water and had compassion on him, even knowing him to be a little Hebrew boy.  His birth mother became his wet-nurse for pay, and the princess adopted him and named him Moses. Moses grew up in safety, even privilege, though he knew of his Hebrew origin, and when he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, he killed the Egyptian and hid the body.  The Hebrews denied his authority and Pharaoh wanted to kill him, so he fled the country to Midian, where he found water, a wife, and a job as a shepherd.  

Some time later, he saw a bush burning without being burnt to ashes, and he went to investigate. God called him by name from within the burning bush.

It is worth wondering what Moses’s exact religious upbringing had been. It seems likely that  his mother taught him about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, and the God they worshiped. It seems likely also that the princess taught him about Ra and Isis and Osiris, and the rest of the Egyptian pantheon. But this is the flashpoint of his understanding who his God is and will be going forward.

“I am the God of your father—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6). This reminds Moses of his immediate father in Egypt as well as of his ancestors. So much history is embedded in those three names, so much of their personal relationships with this God. I think of Abraham leaving his homeland to wander at the word of God; of Abraham taking his son Isaac to be a sacrifice at God’s command; at Isaac being rescued from that sacrifice by the messenger of God; at Jacob running from the consequences of his duplicity only to be met by God in a dream, and then years later on the way back home wrestling with God’s messenger into permanent lameness. So much that could be explored, too much for this post. All of their stories are implicit in Jesus’s quotation, and he requires his opponents to look at the history of personal relationship and responsibility to God embodied in those patriarchs.

The emphasis on “I am”  in the list is an insistence on the present tense of God.  It also looks forward to the point in Moses’s story when he asks, “Who shall I say has sent me?” The reply, I AM WHO I AM, doubly emphasizes God’s irreducibility and presence, God’s creative and sustaining power.  

Further, Jesus went on to say that “God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.” He linked this to an affirmation that the dead are alive with God, which his Sadducee questioners denied. But it is more profound even than that. 

What else could this have meant to Jesus’s hearers?  I think it meant that his questioners needed to look at their own personal relationships with the God of their patriarchs: each of them had had personal encounters with the “I AM WHO I AM” who spoke to Moses.  They needed to acknowledge God being immediately present in the moment in which they were questioning Jesus. They needed to admit God’s claims on their obedience and loyalty. But what they did was take refuge in tradition and traditional understandings that allowed them to maintain their status quo. This is a lesson for all of us.

Jesus and His Bible, Part 11

 The Rejected Cornerstone

Immediately following the parable of the faithless vine-growers, Jesus carried the confrontation into the religious leaders’ camp.  He asked them: “Have you not even read this scripture: ‘The stone which the builders rejected, this became the chief corner-stone; this came about from the Lord, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?” (Mark 12:10). 

Let’s not ignore the implications of how Jesus introduced his quotation.  “Have you not even read this scripture?” Not conciliatory in the least.  And you can tell this is so by their reaction, which is to move toward assaulting him, only restrained by their fear of the crowd. I wonder how often today God’s Holy Spirit says to each of us, “Have you not even read this scripture?” Do we respond with defensiveness or do we sit down to listen? I remember when the Spirit brought these verses into my heart and said, “Have you not even read these scriptures?” And I had not actually let them sink in to form the foundation of my faith until that point.

Hebrews 10:1 The Law foreshadowed good things to come but could not bring them about.

Ephesians 2:15 Christ abolished in his flesh the law. 

Romans 7:4-6 We are dead to the Law by the body of Christ; we are delivered from the Law.

Romans 7:25-8:2 The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free from the law of sin and death.

Hebrews 7:18-19 The earlier commandment has been annulled and replaced by a better hope in Christ as our high priest, through whom we draw near to God.

Galatians 2:16-21 We are justified by the faith of Christ, we believe in the character and work of Jesus Christ; we are dead to the Law so that we may live to God; we are crucified with Christ, and now Christ lives in us and we live by the faith of Christ who loved us and gave himself for us. We do not annul or reject the grace of God by saying that righteousness comes through the Law. 

So Jesus’s question to religious people of his day is still resonant today.

The passage Jesus quotes is from Psalm 118. This Psalm celebrates the everlasting kindness of God. The psalmist says that he called to God and God answered, that the Lord is for him, and that with the Lord’s name he cut down all the nations. “You pushed me hard to knock me down but the Lord helped me. My strength and my might is Yah, and he has become my rescue.” He claims the Lord as his rescuer. Then comes the passage that Jesus quotes: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. From the Lord did this come about—it is wondrous in our eyes. (Psalm 118:22-23).  The psalmist then petitions the Lord for rescue and prosperity and then this: “Bind the festive offering with ropes all the way to the horns of the altar.”

By quoting this passage, Jesus identified himself with the psalmist as one who fears the Lord. He asserted that God has answered his call, that God is for him, that God is his strength and might. Yet at the same time, the faint echo of the coming offering/sacrifice is hinted at as well.  

Jesus also calls his critics to account—do they fear the Lord? Can they point to where God has answered their call?  Are they rejecting the cornerstone, the stone from which the whole building is measured out and built? 

Jesus and His Bible, Part 10

The Faithless Vine-Growers

Mark 11 ends with the priests, scribes, and elders asking Jesus who gave him the authority to do such things as clear the merchants out of the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple.  He “answered” them with a question about where the baptism of John came from, whether heaven or humans.  They refused to answer, because he had trapped and immobilized them. 

Mark 12:1 And He began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard, and put a wall around it, and dug a vat under the winepress, and built a tower, and rented it out to vine-growers and went on a journey.” 

The parable goes on to tell how, each time he sent servants to collect the rent, the vine-growers beat them, stoned them, shamed them, and killed some of them. So he sent his son, thinking they would respect him. But instead they reasoned that killing the son would make them the de facto owners, so they did kill him and throw his body out of the vineyard. 

Jesus asked the crowd, “What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the vine-growers and give the vineyard to others.”

Jesus’s Bible has so many references to vines and vineyards that they cannot all be brought to mind here.  The references are particularly prevalent in the Prophets, and we will look at just one, Isaiah:

“Let me sing now for my well-beloved a song of my beloved concerning his vineyard.  My well-beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hill. 

And he dug it all around, removed its stones, and planted it with the choicest vine. And he built a tower in the middle of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; then he expected it to produce good grapes, but it produced only worthless ones. And now…I will lay it waste…For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his delightful plant. Thus he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry of distress…Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil…Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and clever in their own sight.” (Isaiah 5)

The context of this parable is the prophet Isaiah’s call to his nation to repent; his description of the suffering their sinfulness will call down on them; his prediction of the dissolution of their community and kingdom; his list of their sins, including a plea to “cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rebuke the oppressor, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow” (1:17). Interspersed among the warnings and accusations are visions of a blessed future, where war is no more, where Zion is holy and protected, which Isaiah so much wanted to be true. 

Isaiah  goes on following his parable of the vineyard to predict the defeat and downfall of the nation of Israel.

By quoting this passage, Jesus brought before the priests, scribes, and elders their worst nightmare—the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem and the nation.  It had happened before when Babylon invaded, and the Jews were dispersed out of their homeland. Isaiah’s prophetic vision was accurate.

Jesus essentially said to his hearers that the same conditions that provoked judgment before have occurred again, and even worse, and how can they hope to escape?  This was infuriating, and it confirmed their fear that Jesus’s message and person had both personal and political implications. Their arrogance and their will to power and their personal corruptions were laid bare by Isaiah’s words in Jesus’s mouth.

Jesus and His Bible, Part 9

Welcome and Worship in God's House

To summarize events between the last quotation and this next one: After his encounter with the rich man, Jesus educated his followers on how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Then he said that those who left their houses and relationships and lands would receive back  a hundred times their loss in this time, accompanied by persecution, and in the time to come, would receive eternal life.  He told the disciples he would be killed in Jerusalem, and the response recorded by Mark is that James and John came to ask for seats of preeminence in the kingdom. Jesus said they would have to share in his experience, and that they would indeed share it, but that he didn’t decide who was preeminent in the kingdom of God. (He had just said that the last would be first, so that’s a clue.) He also said that whoever wants to be great among Jesus’s followers must be the slave of all.  Then he healed blind Bartimaeus. 

He entered Jerusalem on a colt and the crowds hailed him as King. He looked around the temple and went back out of Jerusalem for the night.

On the way back into Jerusalem, he cursed a fig tree without fruit, and then returned to the temple. It is easy to connect the fig tree to the temple as an enacted parable, given what happened next.  He drove out those who bought and sold in the temple and turned over the tables of the money-changers.

And then he said: “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a robber’s den” (Mark 11:17). The picture invoked is that the merchants in the temple are like a band of robbers who hurry back to their safe hideout to count their takings, and the temple is that cave.  

Jesus quoted two prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah. The first is Isaiah 56:7. This quotation comes from a passage that begins “Preserve justice, and do righteousness, for my salvation is about to come and my righteousness to be revealed.” The passage promises blessing to those who do not profane the Sabbath and who do no evil. The blessing is also for the foreigner and the eunuch who keep God’s Sabbaths and choose what pleases God and hold fast to God’s covenant.  

Jesus invoked Isaiah’s inclusive prophecy as he cleared out all the hubbub and chicanery from the court of the Gentiles.  By his action, seen as a parable, Jesus took the holy interior of the temple where only Jews could go and extended it out into the outer court where Gentiles were allowed to visit. He invited outsiders into God’s presence, including them in the privilege of worshiping God. 

The second is Jeremiah 7:11. This comes from a word that Jeremiah was told to speak in the Lord’s house, the temple, to all the people of Judah who entered to worship. This is the immediate context: 

Amend your ways and deeds and I will let you dwell in this place. Do not think that because the temple is here, you are ok. You must practice justice, you must not oppress the foreigner, the orphan, or the widow, and you must not shed innocent blood or worship idols. But if you do wrong and then come here and say “We are delivered”—has this house, which is called by My name, become a den of robbers in your sight? 

This directly confronts any sense of being exclusively chosen to belong to God, the sign of which for the Jews is the temple. Sadly, however, their actions do not reflect justice and mercy to those who are other and those who are needy or helpless. If they are implicated in the death of the innocent and if they put anything (like wealth, see the rich man of Mark 10) ahead of God in their worship, they have made the temple a robbers’  hideout. (It is not hard to apply this to the many who make money out of religion in our time.) Jeremiah highlights the teachings of the Torah that specifically command justice and mercy to vulnerable groups of people and the many instances in the Hebrew scripture that insist on care for the innocent and putting God first. 

In both quotations from Jesus’s Bible, the context has to do with the fact that the chosen people have themselves chosen to act without justice and righteousness and they have thus obscured the intent of God, which is to invite and include the foreigner, the powerless, the eunuch in the knowledge and worship of the true God, and to protect the interests of the helpless, friendless, and innocent.  Instead, in Jesus’s time, the place these folks were welcome had become a marketplace rather than a place of worship, a place where the “protected” classes were taken advantage of in order to accumulate money.

Jesus and His Bible, Part 8

Mark 10:19 The Rich Man Wants Eternal Life

Question: Good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

Answer: Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.

“Why do you call me good?” This abrupt response puzzles me. I think, as with other surprising responses, it is tailored to the person with whom Jesus was speaking. It suggests that this conversation began with a compliment from one good person to another.  I recognize you as good, the rich man said, because I also am good. Jesus brought him up short when he asserted that “no one is good except God alone.” While this is not a direct quotation from Jesus’s Bible, it sums up multiple references to God’s goodness in the Psalms, and in many of those, God’s goodness is linked directly to his loving kindness, his mercy. This mercy, this care for the weak and helpless, is what the rich man is apparently specifically missing.

But first, Jesus made the “law-abiding” answer: “You know the commandments: do not murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not bear false witness; do not defraud; honor your father and mother.” Interestingly, Jesus did not begin with Exodus 20:3: “You shall have no other gods before me,” nor did he include the prohibition of sacred images, or swearing oaths falsely using God’s name. He omitted the positive command about keeping the Sabbath. Instead, he focused on the ethical commands, the ones which detail how we are to treat other people. (See Exodus 20:12-16; Deut. 5:16-20.)

Jesus concisely summed these ethical commandments up, with the interesting addition of “do not defraud,” which extends “do not covet”  into the actions that result from covetousness. Fraudulent practices are condemned in some detail in various teachings about honesty in business practices in both the Pentateuch and the Prophets.

Embedded in this story are numerous political and theological threads, making the answer a complicated one, despite its apparent simplicity. The questioner who asked about eternal life, if sincere, must have been a Pharisee. They were at odds with the Sadducees over this issue. The Pharisees also were strict followers of their interpretation of Mosaic Law, both the written and oral traditions. By agreeing that “eternal life” is possible, Jesus aligned himself with the Pharisees in their debate with the Sadducees. And yet he was in constant conflict with the Pharisees over how to fulfill the Law. Specifically here,  when Jesus summed up the “other-facing” laws so concisely, he confronted the complexity of the traditions followed by the Pharisees. 

Jesus’s assertion that “no one is good except God alone” confronted the rich man’s awareness of his own goodness, as exposed in the exchange in which the rich man asserts that he has kept the commandments from his youth. This came out of Jesus’s  love for the questioner, a love which insisted on his looking honestly at himself.

Then Jesus answered with “sell all you have and give it to the poor”; Jesus reasserted that mercy is an essential aspect of goodness. He challenged the rich man to radical generosity. Mercy goes beyond the law of Moses into the law of love; now it isn’t about stealing or defrauding but about giving.  

Further, Jesus said: “Take up your cross and follow me.” Crucifixion was the punishment for rebels against the civil power of the Romans. In this context, Jesus signified the need to rebel against the idea that legalistic fulfillment of the law is enough, the need instead to embrace the idea of a whole-self giving away of privilege and power. This rebellion, though figurative, would have made real the worshipful attitude the rich man began with (“good master”).  “You call me good, but none is good but God; if you really believe I am good (if you really believe I am God), throw away your life and follow me. This is the absolute best I can offer to those I love.”