The Hard Sayings: Luke 18:22

You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.

This article is part of a series explaining the sayings of Jesus that are hard to understand. This list was put together by the Lord's Library. To see the list an access earlier articles in this series, go to this page. It is also This part of a series on the Jesus verses that are similar, but not the same, in different Gospels. The list of articles in this series is here.

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This verse in English translation looks like a near duplicate of an earlier one, Mark 10:21, about which I have already written. In this article, I will examine the differences between these two versions. Before both, Jesus talks about accepting the realm of the Divine as a child, and in both, Jesus and the man have the same interactions.

The big question here is: did Jesus deliver two different but very similar lines to two different men after they asked the same question and described themselves in the same way? Or, is one version accurate and the other wrong? Do their differences reflect the level of accuracy of all of Jesus’s words in the Gospels, which I would describe as close, but not precise? Before we can see if these questions have any weight, we must examine these differences here and their nature.

Before we do that, a funny thing here is that after Jesus praised the virtues of childhood, this man says that he did not keep the commandments as a child. Apparently children are assumed to be natural law-breakers, despite Jesus recommending them as exemplars for us all to emulate (Luke 18:17).

A Comparison

Here are the two versions of this verse:

Luke 18:22 says:

NIV: You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.

Mark 10:21 says:

NIV: One thing you lack. Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.

• The words in boldface are explained below.

As we commonly see with biblical translations, these verses look more similar in translation than they do in the original Greek. The differences they show , which are highlighted at the beginning, hide many more serious differences below the surface. The “still” is from a Greek word that appears in this verse but doesn’t occur in the Mark version. It begins the verse and means “still” or “yet.”

The first major change we notice is the reversal of the subject, “you,” and object, “one thing,” in the first sentence. This reversal doesn’t happen in the source Greek. The subject is “one thing” in both. In Mark, the “you” is an object, but in this verse, the “you” is an indirect object, its sense is “for you.”

One Thing Lacking?

In these two versions, two different Greek verbs are translated as “lack.” Both verbs are rare. The one used here is used by Jesus only in this verse. The primary meaning of this verb in this form is to "leave", "quit", "leave behind" and "leave at home," but with the indirect object “for you,” here, the sense is “to be wanted,” “to be omitted,” and “fall short.” So, Jesus tells the man, ”One thing fall short for you.” This is the setup for a punchline that follows. The verb in the Mark version means “be behind", "to come later", "to come too late for", etc. Both have a sense of inadequacy, but neither means “lack.”

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