Through the Eye of a Needle

“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.”
—Jesus (Matthew 19:24)

The first time I really experienced the joy of Christ was in a sub-Saharan village called Manna, in Mali, West Africa around 1996. I was 13 years old at that time.

These were the poorest people I had ever seen. Families with no electricity, no running water, and not enough food. And yet they danced. Singing. Rejoicing in Jesus with their whole bodies. I still remember the laughter and the harmonies. I can still remember the tune of the songs they sang (not the words though).

It messed with my brain. How could people who were starving, powerless, and sick praise Jesus with something deeper than I could ever muster.

30 years later, that experience gives me a new lens for Jesus’ words about the camel and the needle and the nature of the Kingdom of God.

When He spoke to the rich man who asked how to inherit eternal life, Jesus didn’t condemn him. Mark tells us, “Jesus looked at him and loved him.” What followed—“Go, sell all you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me”—wasn’t a condemnation. It was an invitation.

Jesus was saying, There’s a life waiting for you on the other side of all that stuff. Come be free.

But the man couldn’t do it. He walked away, grieving. Jesus didn’t slam the door shut to the kingdom—the man’s hands were too full of the life he’d built to turn the handle. A life of control, wealth, comfort, and status. That man looks a lot like me. Maybe like you.

Jesus says the Kingdom of God belongs to the poor. To the childlike. To the ones who have nothing to offer. It’s not that the kingdom is unavailable to the wealthy—it’s just that our world is too full to receive it. We rely on our wealth, our structures, our systems. It’s baked into our way of life. And without even knowing it, we’ve built lives where we don’t actually need God to come through. Our savings will. Our government will. Our credit cards will.

But the poor and the powerless don’t have that illusion. All they have is Jesus—and somehow, that proves to be more than enough.

I tried to explain this to my son on the weekend, after we read this passage and told me I should just try to be more grateful when God provides for us. And he’s right—I should. But the truth is, I will never feel the same kind of awe standing in a grocery store in Alberta as a Malian father would, if somehow transported there. He would fall to his knees in the cereal aisle alone, overcome with gratitude. To him, the grocery store itself would be a miracle.

So maybe we can’t reasonably sell everything. But we can take Jesus’ invitation seriously. We can seek out the poor, the vulnerable, the joyfully dependent. We can learn how to party like them. How to pray like them. How to trust like them.

Because there’s a kind of joy that only takes root on an empty stomach.

A kind of faith that’s born when Jesus is your only provider.

A kind of kingdom that only opens when you walk in without status.

I still remember eating a feast with the village, comprised of pork and rice, eaten communally around big bowls with smiling families—read: no plates or forks! Somehow that meal still feels more like communion than anything I’ve had in church. Maybe the feasts of the poor give us a taste of heaven. Could it be that the kingdom of God is designed for them more than us.

Yet Jesus still extends the same invitation to rich and poor: Come, let go. Follow me.

And the door is still open—what do you have to set down to turn the handle?