Tag Archives: poverty

On Giving All we’ve Got

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The trick to preaching about the man who asks to follow Jesus but goes away when asked to give what he owns and give the money to the poor and then follow him, is to explain it without explaining it away. I’ll try to explain it, and see where that gets me.

I think we can get some help from Luke’s Parable of the Prodigal Son. (Lk. 15: 11-32) The Prodigal Son first takes his father’s money and then, rather than giving it to the poor, squanders it. Curiously, Luke uses the word ousia, which means substance, being. It is a term Greek philosophers use for this concept. That is, the Prodigal Son squandered his father’s substance. If we keep this in mind in considering the story about the man who was asked to sell everything, we can see that Jesus was asking him to give up everything he’s got. This calls our attention to how much our possessions seem to be part of our being, our substance. If I give up all of my possessions, my substance, what do I have left? Nothing apparently. This hardly softens or explains away Jesus’ admonition.

In Proverbs, the Sage gives us another angle of understanding Jesus’ admonition by urging us to seek wisdom “like silver, and search for it as for hidden treasures.” (Prov. 2: 4) Usually when we think of treasure, we imagine a chest full of gold dug up on a desert island where pirates buried it while continuing their life of crime. Even Tim Hawkins loses interest in treasure hunting after all the violence that accompanied the search on the island, suggesting he gains some true wisdom. Desirable as such treasure may seem to be in our dreams, the author of Proverbs redirects us to the ultimate treasure hunt: true wisdom. If we desire treasure, how much more should we desire wisdom? All the more as acquiring wisdom causes us to eschew the violence that goes with treasure hunting. It is worth mentioning that there is often economic violence of some sort with the accumulation of wealth. Jesus had told the man to follow the commandments, including not to steal or defraud. Had the man really followed these two commandments as he claimed? Unfortunately, systemic social violence is easily hidden, not least from those of us who practice it. When Jesus, elsewhere, compares the Kingdom of God to finding treasure, much like Treasure Island, he says that one sells everything to buy the field to get the treasure. (Mt. 13: 44-46) That is, to gain this treasure, we have to give everything we’ve got, which is what Jesus asked of the man who approached him. Contrary to the close parallels in Matthew and Luke, Mark only designates this inquirer as “a man.” He could be anybody. Maybe you or me. We only find out that he is rich when he leaves, shocked and grieving because of his many possessions. Perhaps being too rich to enter the kingdom of God is not about how much or how little we have, but how much we want to keep.

There is the saying: clothes make the person. Scripture suggests this is true, as the image of clothing is used frequently throughout the Bible, and not least in the writings of St. Paul. When he tells us to clothe ourselves “with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience,” and above all, to clothe ourselves “with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony,” (Col. 3: 12–13) he is telling us what kind of clothes we should be made of. We can only be so clothed if we give all we’ve got to bear such treasures on our person, and bearing such treasures involves bearing with one another and forgiving one another. Insofar as a community is built with such values, the community is a treasure more valuable than gold or silver. If we give everything we’ve got in this sense, we won’t be clinging to what money we happen to have.

Benedict, taking all of the above Scripture verses to heart, enshrines these values in his Rule. He is strict about personal ownership, but that doesn’t mean that a monastic should not have use of any material goods. He says that each monastic should be given a tablet by the abbot. That is very true today, even though the meaning of the word “tablet” has changed quite a lot since the sixth century. The point is that everything a monastic has use of, whether a communal object like a vacuum cleaner, or a personal item such as a computer, is a gift, and not something one has a personal right to possess. If everything we have is a gift, then we have nothing but gifts to hand on to others. Like Jesus, Benedict asks us to give everything we’ve got. It’s not enough to sell our possessions and give the money away. Echoing St. Paul, we are to support “with greatest patience one another’s weaknesses of body or behavior, to pursue what is better for others rather than ourselves, and to show pure love of our brothers and sisters.” To make these admonitions a little more concrete, Benedict would also have us give ourselves to mopping and vacuuming floors. Also like St. Paul, Benedict would have us “with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God”–a lot. (Col. 3: 15) What a treasure this is! And the more we give ourselves to it, the greater the treasure. We should prefer nothing whatever to Christ. (RB 72: 5–1) If we do that, what do we have left for ourselves? Jesus tells his disciples that by giving up everything, they will receive everything back a hundred fold. By giving up all of our substance, we become much more substantial in the hope that God will bring us all to everlasting life, our greatest treasure.

God’s Economy

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Money comes up in the Gospels more frequently than one might expect for writings that are supposed to be “spiritual.” Just last week’s Gospel featured a parable about financial mismanagement on the part of a roguish manager. The Gospel before that included a short parable about a lost coin. Maybe that wasn’t mismanagement, but just carelessness. Sandwiched between those parables was a parable of a son who asked for his share of the inheritance and then lost it all, another case of financial mismanagement. Money and wealth come up yet again today in the parable of the Rich Man and the beggar Lazarus. Since the Rich Man was successful with money, one might think that mismanagement wasn’t his problem, but maybe his wealth itself was the problem. The roguish manager, after all, ameliorated his circumstances by reducing the debts of his master’s clients, which made him more generous than his master, and much more generous than the Rich Man who ignored the poor man at his gate. Actually, the Rich Man didn’t ignore the beggar altogether. After all, he recognized him resting in the bosom of Abraham and apparently was used to giving the beggar orders without giving him anything in return. If so, not paying his errand boy would indeed be a misuse of financial resources.

The writer of the First Epistle to Timothy famously says that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” (1 Tim 6: 10) More dramatically, the author warns that “those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.” Amos denounces the wealthy many times, sneering at people who “lie on beds adorned with ivory” and “dine on choice lambs and fattened calves.” (Amos 6: 4,5) Sounds the Rich Man in the parable. In the preceding Parable of the Roguish Manager, Jesus uses the term “dishonest wealth “ several times, suggesting that it is the only kind of wealth there is. That this is so is capped with the warning: “You cannot serve God and wealth.” (Lk. 16: 9-13)

But isn’t money in itself neutral, and it’s a matter of how we use it? After all, God’s creation is good, meaning that material goods are good as and we only need to use them well. Yes, but how do we use money and material goods well? It is our desires, of course, that distort the use of material goods. Desiring so many butterscotch sundaes that one gets sick is a distortion of desire. But more precisely, it is our desires in relation to other people that tend to get distorted, such as “needing” to have more butterscotch sundaes than somebody else. However, money is not a material good in the sense that wheat and lambs are material goods that one might consume. Money is the medium of exchange that connects us to each other as we negotiate our desires. That is., money itself is created straight out of our desires in relation to other people. Transactions can indeed be fair and charitable exchanges, but they easily degenerate into competitions where we each try to outdo the other.

When being wealthy is an end in itself, as it seemed to be for the rich man who wouldn’t even give Lazarus a scrap from his table, then there is indeed a “great chasm” in our human relationships created by the discrepancy of wealth. The rich man’s placement in Hell is not the act of a vindictive god; it is simply the reality of the rich man’s alienation from humanity, not only from Lazarus’s humanity but from his own as well.

It is true enough that one needs some material goods in order to survive and that normally one needs some money to obtain these goods. The warnings in scripture about money are warnings of a lust for wealth, a lust that destroys human relationships. The author of First Timothy suggests that we be content with the necessities of food and clothing. (1 Tim 6: 8) This sort of contentment and a concern for other people go together. When we are content with what we have, it is not necessary to have more than others. On the contrary, our contentment will make us all the more concerned that others also have enough for their basic necessities. As Jesus stresses time and again in the Gospels, serving God is tantamount to serving other people and God’s creation. That is why it is not possible to serve God and wealth. Only if we stop serving wealth as our master will we serve God through serving God’s people. So, it is indeed the case that our use of money has much to do with spirituality.

The Eleventh Commandment

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monksinChoir1The rich man who asked Jesus what he needed to do to inherit eternal life and then walked away grieving when Jesus told him to sell all that he owned (Mk. 10: 21) is a warning to all of us, rich or poor. Jesus’ added warning that 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” only makes the warning all the more dire. Paul strengthens the warning further when he tells Timothy that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil,” (1 Tim. 6: 10) Bucking these warnings is our formation from earliest childhood that money is both good and necessary and more of it is always better than less.

Money is not an individual matter; money is a system. It has to be if it’s going to be a medium of exchange. As a system, money gains power over all of us who use it. This is a power that easily distorts the moral conscience. In this regard, it is telling that in the commandments Jesus lists to the rich man, all are from the Ten Commandments except “You shall not defraud.” (Mk. 10: 19) Perhaps this is an eleventh commandment, or perhaps it is a version of: “You shall not covet.” (Ex. 20: 17) The more power money gains over us, the more likely it is that we will defraud others in order to get more of it. Indeed, most rich people in Palestine gained their wealth at the expense of poor farmers during hard times. Amos denounces those who “ trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain.” (Am. 5: 11) Such people turn “justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground.” (Am. 5: 7) Here we see courts of justice and the spoken word brought in with oppression of the poor as one knotted system.

The thought of the French thinker René Girard demonstrates that economic systems, like other interlocking social systems, are part of an all-pervasive system generated by what Girard called “mimetic desire.” That is, when one person wants something, other people are more apt to want it. The more somebody wants something, the more other people want it, not because of the intrinsic vale of whatever is valued but because something is valued. The interlocking of shared desires permeates society, making society a more tightly knotted system than the economical one. This is what the tenth commandment not to covet is all about. Jesus’ eleventh commandment deepens the tenth: you shall not steal what you covet because you have the social and economic power to do so. Coveting is not a vice only for the rich. I am among those who are seriously offended by what some preachers call “the Prosperity Gospel,” which seems to contradict Jesus’ words to the Rich Man. Somewhere (sorry, I can’t remember where), I read that many people who are attracted to the “Prosperity Gospel” are not rich but poor. In mimetic desire, other people model desires for other people. That is, other people tell me and show me what to desire. In the case of the “Prosperity Gospel,” rich people model to the poor what they should desire. We see the same phenomenon among Jesus’ disciples when, after being told how hard it is for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God, asked Jesus: “Then who can be saved?” (Mk. 10: 26) The economic system, then, is fueled by the deeper system of mimetic desire wherein everybody wants to be like the rich landlords who break the tenth and eleventh commandments.

Jesus, then, is not inviting one person who happens to be rich to change; Jesus is asking all of us to change in such a way that the system is changed. The omnipresence of mimetic desire makes it clear that, important as it is to reform economic structures, it isn’t enough to do the job on its own. Our hearts need a makeover individually and collectively. It is this new system of the heart that Jesus inaugurated at the beginning of his teaching ministry when he proclaimed a Jubilee of freedom from being either a debtor or a creditor. (Lk. 4: 16–21)

St. Paul’s collection for the Church of Jerusalem (2 Cor. 8: 1–15) can be seen as an example of what economy can look like if we give our hearts to the tenth and eleventh commandments. Interestingly, the Macedonians, out of their poverty “overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part.” (2 Cor. 8: 2). This makes one wonder if the Macedonians were more able to thread the eye of the needle than the Rich Man. Paul adds a Christological dimension with the example of Jesus who, though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty we might become rich. (2 Cor. 8: 9) Jesus was asking the Rich Man and each of us to do what He Himself had already done by coming into our world and its systems driven by mimetic desire. Here mimetic desire becomes redirected to desiring the good of other people, giving new vitality to Jesus’ famous words quoted by Paul: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” (Acts 20: 35)

See also my blog post: Paul’s Collection for Jerusalem.

For an introduction to René Girard and his theory of mimetic desire, see: Violence and the Kingdom of God and Living Stones in the House of the Forgiving Victim.