Jesus says a lot of hard things. Some are things that are hard to understand. Some are things that are hard to do.

A teaching of Jesus that definitely falls into the latter category is Luke 14:33: “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

Heinrich Hofmann, Christ and the Rich Young Ruler

Most people are familiar with a version of this saying in the context of the Rich Ruler. In that story, narrated in varying ways in Matthew 19:16-22, Mark 10:17-22, and Luke 18:18-23, a rich man comes to Jesus and asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus tells him to follow the Ten Commandments (and some Christians today are like, “Wrong answer, Jesus”).

The rich ruler responds by saying he’s kept these since his youth, and Jesus doesn’t insist he must be mistaken for no one can fully keep the Law (“Doesn’t Jesus know how to do this?”). Instead, Jesus says the rich man only lacks one thing: “Sell what you own, and give the money to the poor. (“What?!”) Then come, follow me.”

With this version of the saying—“Sell everything you own and give the money to the poor”—we could be forgiven for saying, “Ah, that’s just for the Rich Ruler. Clearly he had a greed problem.” But Luke 14:33 doesn’t let us off the hook like that. This is for all Jesus’ would-be disciples: “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

What do we do with this?

Well, the first thing we should do is to sit with this hard teaching of Jesus, and really wrestle with the possibility that it is calling us to do the very thing it seems it is calling us to do. Even if, in the end, we conclude that Jesus is using hyperbole, or exaggeration for effect (which is very much a Jesus thing to do), we need to sit with the full challenge of this hard teaching.

Yet, having done that, I think there are good reasons for thinking Jesus is using hyperbole here, that not every disciple of Jesus literally has to give up every last one of their possessions.

The first reason is that, just a few chapters later, we see this put into practice. Zacchaeus, that diminutive but wealthy tax collector, determines he wants to be a disciple of Jesus. Yet he doesn’t literally give up every last denarius in his vast collection of denarii. No, but he does give up half of his wealth for the poor, and commit to paying back anyone he’s defrauded four times what he took from them. That’s good enough for Jesus, who resolutely declares, “Today salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:1-10).

Second, we know of other people in Luke’s double narrative who have wealth and, while being very generous, do not literally give away all of their possessions as Jesus’ disciples. There are the women who support Jesus and the Twelve out of their resources, for instance—this is a continuous reality, which means they didn’t give everything away in one shot (Luke 8:1-3). In Acts also, for example, there’s Lydia, the wealthy businesswoman who sells purple cloth to the upper crust—there’s no indication she gave away all her wealth (Acts 16:13-15). And even in those halcyon days of the early Christian movement, when people shared their possessions with such joy and zeal, Peter makes clear that there was no requirement that the wealthy sell all their property—it was theirs to do with as they wished (Acts 5:4).

This last story can help us come to a solution in our wrestling with Rabbi Jesus’ teaching. In those early chapters of Acts, we’re told that “no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common” (4:32)—yet clearly, as we’ve just seen, that doesn’t mean everyone was literally required to give up their property. Rather, statements like this—and, I’d suggest, Jesus’ teaching in Luke 14:33—call us to a different perspective on our possessions and property than we’re told in the dominant economic narratives of our day.

Capitalism suggests private property is the cornerstone of economic wellbeing.

Communism insists there should be no private property at all, only collective ownership.

The Jesus way, embodied by Jesus’ early disciples, is different than either of these: we may own possessions and property, but ultimately they aren’t ours alone. Ultimately, they belong to God, and thus they can and should be used for the good of God’s people, and for the good of all.

This way of understanding Luke 14:33, I think, gets to the spirit of Jesus’ teaching. And it remains a hard teaching for us, challenging us always to examine our relationship to our possessions and property, holding them loosely, always open to opening up our hands to give generously to those in need—even if it means selling our possessions and property to do so.