The sentence lands on graduation cards and locker room walls, where it means that your plan can still work. In Matthew it is an answer, and the question it answers is who can be saved.
Somebody asked a question first
A rich young man had come to Jesus wanting to know what to do about eternal life, had been told to sell what he owned, and had gone away unable to. Jesus turned to the disciples, said that a rich man enters the kingdom with difficulty, and then said the thing about the camel. The disciples’ response is the hinge of the passage.
When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?”
Matthew 19:25 (NIV)
Greatly astonished. In their world prosperity was widely read as evidence of God’s favor, so if the people visibly doing well were in trouble, the sum left nobody standing. Their question is not who then can succeed, but who then can be saved.
The next verse is the reply.
Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
Matthew 19:26 (NIV)
The all things has an antecedent, sitting one verse above it with a question mark on the end.
The half that gets left off
Nobody prints the first clause. With man this is impossible, and Luke tells the same story, with the answer put in a form that makes the boundary even plainer. The King James has it: the things which are impossible with men are possible with God. A bounded set, described by its impossibility, handed to the one who can carry it.
A far stranger promise than the poster version, and much better. The poster says your ambition is within reach. The verse says the one thing nobody can manage for himself has been taken up by God, and the thing in question is getting a human being into the kingdom.
Which is a question about who you are standing with when you read it. The young man is well behaved, he is religious, he asks a serious question, and he owns more than he can put down. Nothing in that description excludes most of the people who will read this, and the disciples are the ones who get the comforting sentence at the end.
Peter proves the point in the very next verse. Before the sentence has finished landing he says, in effect, we left everything and followed you, so what do we get. The men who had just been told that salvation is impossible for anybody went straight to the accounts.
The gate that was never there
You will have been told that the eye of the needle was a low gate in Jerusalem, and that a camel could get through it by kneeling and having its load taken off. The story makes a fine sermon about humility and letting go of your baggage, and the passage will not hold it. If a camel could get through by kneeling, the disciples would not have been greatly astonished, they would have nodded. And Jesus would not have answered with the word impossible, which is the word he chose and the word the gate story quietly repeals.
The Greek is against it too. Matthew and Mark both have rhaphis, the sewing needle, and in the oldest manuscripts Luke reaches for a different needle word, belone. Neither one is a word for a gate.
An impossible thing is the whole point. Take the impossibility out and the answer in verse twenty-six has nothing left to do.
What he actually asked of him
Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
Matthew 19:21 (NIV)
Treasure in heaven, which Jesus had already told a crowd is where your heart follows what you store. The trouble was never money as such, which is a distinction Paul makes with one word. He was asked to be poorer here, and told where the difference would be waiting. He could not do it, and Matthew says why in four words: he had great wealth.
Then he went away sad. Not angry, and not arguing. Sad, which is how a man reacts when he knows the answer is right and knows he will not do it.
Mark tells the same scene and puts in a line Matthew leaves out. Before the instruction, in the King James wording, “Jesus beholding him loved him,” at Mark 10:21. Whatever the demand cost that young man, it was not made coldly, and the writer who reports the affection is the same one who reports that he walked away.
Both verses on the poster
This series has already looked at the other sentence people print on achievement, where Paul says he can do all things through Christ and has just finished listing hunger as one of them. The two get used the same way and they break the same way, by having their context removed and a future outcome inserted.
Neither one is a promise that the thing you are working toward will come off. Matthew 19:26 is an answer to twelve astonished men who had just worked out that if wealth does not secure a man’s standing with God, nothing they owned would either.
Both halves, in that order: with man this is impossible, and with God all things are possible. Read the second half alone and it becomes a forecast about your year. Read it after the first, the way Matthew wrote it. It is the only sentence in the chapter that gets anybody in.