“Who Then Can Be Saved?” — Luke’s Account

Luke tells the same encounter Mark tells, but he has spent the preceding page preparing for it, and the preparation is the interpretation.

What Comes Immediately Before

Two things, back to back.

A Pharisee and a publican go up to the temple to pray. One recites his credentials — not an extortioner, not unjust, fasts twice a week, gives tithes of all he possesses. The other will not lift his eyes and says God be merciful to me a sinner. Luke’s verdict: the second went down to his house justified rather than the other.

Then infants are brought to Jesus, and the disciples rebuke the people bringing them. Jesus says: “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.”

And then a ruler comes and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life.

Luke has just shown two people who received the kingdom — a man with nothing to plead and children with nothing at all — and immediately introduces a man with a great deal.

“Good Master”

The exchange runs as it does in Mark. Jesus queries the adjective — why callest thou me good? none is good, save one, that is, God — then lists commandments, and the ruler answers: “All these have I kept from my youth up.”

Luke, like Mark, does not have Jesus contradict him.

But Luke omits something Mark keeps: the look of love. In Mark, Jesus beholding him loved him. Luke has no such clause. His account is cooler, and the effect is to keep the focus on the transaction rather than the tenderness.

“Yet Lackest Thou One Thing”

“Sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.”

Luke sharpens it by one word: all. Mark has whatsoever thou hast; Luke has all that thou hast.

And the response: “And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful: for he was very rich.”

Luke does not say the man went away. Matthew and Mark do. Luke simply leaves him standing there, sorrowful, in Jesus’ presence — which is somehow worse, and also leaves the ending open.

The Camel and the Needle

“For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

Luke, writing for a Greek reader, uses a word for needle that some have taken as a surgeon’s needle. The point is unaffected: the largest animal in common experience and the smallest hole in common experience.

The familiar softening — that the needle’s eye was a low gate in Jerusalem’s wall — has no support before the medieval period and destroys the sentence. Jesus is not describing something difficult. He is describing something that does not happen.

The Question and the Answer

“And they that heard it said, Who then can be saved?”

Sōthēnai — the saving verb, in its full sense. And the equivalence across the passage is complete: the ruler asked about inheriting eternal life; Jesus spoke of entering the kingdom of God; the hearers ask who can be saved. Three phrases, one reality.

The answer: “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.”

That is the entire resolution, and it is not a technique. Jesus does not tell them how to make the camel smaller. He relocates the possibility from the human side to the divine one.

Why Luke’s Placement Matters

Set the three scenes side by side and the argument assembles itself.

The publican had nothing to offer and asked for mercy. Justified. The children had nothing at all, not even the capacity to ask properly. Of such is the kingdom. The ruler had kept the commandments from his youth and possessed a great deal. Sorrowful.

Luke has arranged an answer to who then can be saved? before the question is asked. Those who receive the kingdom as a little child — which is to say, as a gift they did not earn and cannot reciprocate.

That is what the ruler could not do. Not because he was wicked; Luke gives no indication that he was. Because he was accustomed to acquiring things, and this could not be acquired.

Peter’s Interjection and the Hundredfold

“Lo, we have left all, and have followed thee.”

Jesus does not rebuke him. The promise that follows is generous and specific: no one who has left house, parents, brethren, wife, or children for the kingdom’s sake shall fail to receive manifold more in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting.

Luke, unlike Mark, does not include with persecutions here. He does include in this present time, which keeps the promise from being deferred entirely into the future. Whatever the hundredfold is, some of it is now — and in Acts, Luke will show what it looked like: households opened, meals shared, property held in common, a family assembled out of strangers.

What This Passage Establishes

Saved here carries its full weight: entrance into the kingdom, inheritance of eternal life. There is no narrower reading available.

And the answer to the question — the things which are impossible with men are possible with God — is the sentence this whole gateway keeps arriving at. The healings show a Savior who restores bodies. The rescues show one who intervenes in danger. This passage shows why a Savior is needed at all.

The ruler was not disqualified by wickedness. He was disqualified, if he was, by the ordinary human assumption that something this valuable must be obtainable by someone this capable.

This study is part of What Does It Mean to Be Saved?, an examination of every New Testament use of saving language in context, within Resource Cluster 3: Life in Christ. 91 of 91 passage studies are complete — see every occurrence.