The Eye Of The Needle

"Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit the kingdom?" asked the rich young ruler when he met Jesus on the way to Jerusalem, and Jesus said unto him "Follow the commandments and you shall inherit the kingdom" and the man readily answered "Master i have been following them since my childhood, what else do i need to do?" and then Jesus said "If you want to be perfect, go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor, and you will have riches in heaven; then come and follow me."

So when the man heard this, he left away sad, because he was very rich. And then Jesus started to teach from this incident  to his disciples saying "Its much harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle"...this passage can be found in Mat 19:16-23..

Here, we often tend to take the metaphoric meaning and are not aware that Jesus dint mean it metaphorically... Yes....! this is true. In Jerusalem, the place they were going to, the gates through which they have enter the city were called as needles and the shape looks like the eye of a needle. So when the camels enter these gates they have bend down and crawl through them. Doing so is not that easy because the camel as it is already loaded with heavy goods has to bend down and again rise up with all that weight, which is quite difficult.

So Jesus uses this comparison to describe how difficult it is for rich people to give up their riches, which is nearly impossible. But  as we go on with the rest of the reading, he also says that nothing is impossible with GOD, all we have to do is to accept him and welcome him in our hearts and this task of giving up the worldy things will be easy....