[bitbang]

That’s not what that means at all, your inserting modern values into the parable. In the culture of that time, the rich were viewed with high regard. The understanding was that if you were rich, then clearly you were in a favorable relationship to God because he was blessing you with wealth. With that understanding, the sentence that directly follows the parable makes a lot more sense: “When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished, saying, ‘Who then can be saved?’” A modern telling of the parable would replace the rich man with a monk who’s taken a vow of poverty to run an orphanage in a God-forsaken third world country. The parable was intended to portray an absurdly impossible standard to entry; the whole point being that human merit, status, or morality, regardless of however the cultural context may define that, does not afford one any distinctive advantage before God.

[akomtu]

The rich is firmly attached to wordly things, they would rather sink with their gold than let it go. The monk that you've described is attached to his self by training it with sophisticated hardships. He hoards inner peace just like the rich hoards gold. Both are practicing the culture of personality. They need to leave that baggage behind, their self-centered life and their polished personas, and reorient their life around helping others. Once they do this, an enormous internal conflict will emerge - the struggle between their selfish and selfless sides, and at the end of this path they'll enter the kingdom of God.

Those who want to climb to the mountain top need to leave everything behind. The higher they climb, the longer will be the fall if they look back for a moment and slip on this narrow path, longing for what they left behind.

[michaelmrose]

Got some links to support this interpretation?