Possession and Non-possession

Jesus looked at him and loved him. "One thing you lack," he said. "Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." (Mark 10:21)

Jesus told to the rich man who declared he had kept the commandments since he was a boy, “One thing lack.” He might be so much perplexed for Jesus’ answer because he had lived the most exemplary typical life style of Judea society. According to the Lord’s saying, what he lacked to possess eternal life was his complete surrender for his possession.

Do you agree with Jesus’ saying that the complete surrender for our possession is the way to eternal life? I explained earlier that Jesus command to the rich man to surrender his possession plainly revealed his false consciousness. I wonder a little my explanation could be sounded to justify a possession oriented life. There might be a possibility of misunderstanding that Pastor Jung is justifying ‘the theory of clean rich’ that a pastor called Kim asserted.

It is not so. The assertion to be a clean rich man is wrong logically and religiously. Rather than affluent possession, a force has to be a clean rich man is really matter. Such force nothing but isolates in both, the possessed and the non-possessed from the center of life.

On the contrary, an assertion that Christian has to be a poor also cannot get unconditional assent. If we think seriously about solidarity with our neighbor and future of the earth, better to live a poor but honest life even the rich man but we cannot make it absolute. There are many reasons here but one of them is a difficulty to establish a universal and an objective standard of a clean wealth. Compare to the public life of North Korea, South Korean publics all are living in luxury.