Mark 10:27 — what exactly is impossible in the sentence Jesus says
27And Jesus, gazing at them, said: “With men it is impossible; but not with God. For with God all things are possible.”
The line is an answer to a question the disciples asked out loud. Knowing the question is what defines what is being called impossible.
Short answer
Mark 10:27 answers a question the disciples asked: if even the rich man does not enter, who can be saved? Jesus answers by separating two capacities, that of human beings and that of God. What is declared impossible there is saving oneself, not any particular thing a person might want.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 2 min read
Few lines in the Gospels turn up as far from home as this one. It gets used as a guarantee of any outcome — the job, the recovery, the approval — and the paragraph it belongs to is about something else.
Saying that does not shrink the verse. It changes its size: the line stops being a blank cheque and starts answering the one question nobody settles alone.
Where this verse appears
A man had just asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life. He was told that what he lacked was to sell what he owned and give it to the poor, and he walked away sad, because he owned a great deal.
Jesus then remarked to the disciples how hard it is for those with riches to enter the kingdom of God, using the image of the camel and the needle. The disciples were more astonished still and asked among themselves who, then, could be saved. Verse 27 is the answer to that question.
What it says
The first half is a verdict on human limits. Under the terms the disciples were assuming — merit, resources, effort — nobody gets in. It is a hard answer, and it comes before the comfort.
The second half does not widen the menu of requests: it changes the subject. What shifts is not the list of things that might happen but who is able to bring about the thing under discussion, which is the saving of a person.
That is why the popular reading stretches the text. Applied to any wish, the line becomes a promise of results, and the Gospel does not cast it in that role. Applied to what it answers, it is far more radical: it takes off your hands a task you never could have done.
The following verses insist that none of this amounts to ease. When Peter points out that they left everything, the reply promises a hundredfold in this life — and puts persecutions on the same list, which is rarely quoted alongside it.
What to do with it today
If you live trying to earn your own standing before God, this verse closes that account. Not because effort is despised, but because effort was never what decides.
And the opposite caution matters too, especially on an anxious day. Using the line to secure a specific outcome asks the text for something it does not offer — and sets up a disappointment that later reads as a crisis of faith, when the problem was only the address of the quotation.
A prayer to carry with you
Jesus, I wear myself out trying to handle what only you can do. Today I stop negotiating for my place and accept receiving it. Amen.