Luke 18:24 - it is easier for the camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.
Those who heard it said, "well then who on earth can be saved?"
My first response would be, "well the poor obviously!"
There is a reason why they didn't assume that Jesus was talking about poor people and that was because the Jewish belief was that being poor was related to being sinful and being rich meant God had blessed you for being righteous. If rich people couldn't go to heaven then no-one could!
What Jesus is tackling here is not related to being rich or poor. I believe Her is re-iterating the idea that people do not get into God's kingdom because of human effort related to how righteous they think they are. People get into the Kingdom because of God's action in Jesus' death to save us as sinners.
Jesus states this immediately afterwards, "For man this is impossible but not for God, for God all things are possible"
Someone once told me this passage related to a small gate in Jerusalem called the "eye of the needle" and which you could only get through if you took the baggage off of the camel! I don't like this for two reasons. Firstly, it smells like one of those convenient but dubious justifications for a difficult saying of Jesus from the book of "How to remove the cross from Christianity and make it all easy" and secondly because if it was this small gate then none of the rest of the passage makes sense. If it was a gate, Jesus would have said, "Only people who remove the baggage can enter". It was obvious that what he was saying appeared impossible rather than simply difficult and this links in with Jesus saying, "for man this is impossible..."
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