By Thomas H. Groome This is the rhetorical question that the
disciples asked Jesus after he declared that “it is easier for a
camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is
rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). Their concern
could not have been that they were rich; they were poor
peasants. Rather, they recognized that everyone needs salvation,
that we cannot save ourselves and that the camel is smaller to
the needle’s eye than our sinful baggage to eternal life. Jesus
replied, “For human beings this is impossible, but for God all
things are possible” (24-26). Those first disciples came to
believe that God was saving the world through the life, death
and resurrection of Jesus Christ. They embraced faith in Jesus
as God’s own Son and the Savior of the whole human family, the
divine intervention that turned the course of history toward
God’s reign. They remembered Jesus stating his own sense of
purpose as life “more abundantly” (John 10:10), and they began
to search for ways to commun