What You Keep Just In Case
"Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, 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.” When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”"
— Matthew 19:23-26
Many people in that world read wealth as a visible sign that God approved of someone, and hardship as the reverse. So the men listening were not worried about the wealthy. They assumed nobody had better prospects than that. Moments earlier a wealthy young man had walked away sad rather than sell what he owned. An ordinary household had no pension and no insurance behind it, so what you owned was the closest thing to a safety net anyone had. The camel was the largest animal people there handled day to day, and the hole in a sewing needle was about the smallest opening in an ordinary house. Putting one against the other named something that cannot be done at all, not something merely difficult. The popular story about a low gate in the city wall comes from writers many centuries later, with no trace of it in sources from his own time. Straight after this, one of the men following him says out loud that they left everything behind. Nobody gets in because of what they own, but God can bring anyone in.