Tag Archives: wealth

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.

Working with Unjust Wealth

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There is much puzzlement about the parable of the mid-manager who is dismissed from his office. (Lk. 16: 1–9) Not least is the question as to whether we should called him “the Dishonest Manger,” as does the NRSV, or the “unjust manager” as many other English translations have it. The Greek word here is adikaios. This is in the dikaios word group which normally is translated as “justice “ or “righteousness.” Here, it is preceded by the alpha privative so that literally it means a manager without justice or righteousness. Dishonest mangers do have that lack, but since the word dikaios occurs frequently in the New Testament meaning justice and/or righteousness, I think it is preferable to say that the manager is unrighteous rather than dishonest. The unjust Judge who would only do justice for the widow when pestered by the widow was also described by the word adikaios, which is clearly best translated as “unjust.” (Lk. 18: 6) There is a significant difference in the two English terms and since this parable is very opaque, we can use all the clarity we can get. This understanding of the word gains more credence when we note that the unrighteous manager is not accused of embezzlement but of squandering the property of the rich man who had hired him. There is also the matter of the rich man acting on hearsay without apparently doing any independent investigation.

The unrighteous manager’s inner dialogue is realistic and pragmatic. He is quite clear about the ulterior motive behind his scheme of lowering the debts of his former boss’s clients: that these people will welcome him into their homes for what he has done for them. It appears that the unrighteous manger is cheating his former master, but it is possible that he was receiving a commission on the notes and was deducting what would have been his share. That the former master chuckles over what his fired employee has done suggests that he had not suffered further loss over these transactions. It’s hard to see how the Kingdom of God can be like this sort of moral muddle, and Jesus does not, in fact, say the Kingdom of God is like this. So what does a parable like this have to do with the Kingdom of God?

The parable suggests that handling money is intrinsically problematic, and the greedier one is, the more problematic it is. Both the rich man and the people who owe the rich man material goods come across as wanting best value for their money. Almost all of us do that and that is why this parable mirrors our involvement with money and other material goods. Calling the wealth “unjust” rather than “dishonest” better captures the systemic injustice of the world’s economic system. The unrighteous manger is the only one in the parable who acts generously even if that is only under duress: unless the “squandering” of the rich man’s property involved being generous with the goods he was responsible for. Given recent events, I can’t help but think of the refusal of some politicians to “squander” money on helping those most in need of assistance.

Indeed, Jesus shifts the focus from handling money in this world to the relationship between how generous we are with money in terms of our eternal destiny: “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” (Lk. 16: 9) Jesus then goes on with a few other comments, the most pertinent being “No slave can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (:Lk. 16: 13) The rich man and the clients who owe the rich man goods are caught in serving wealth, while the unrighteous manager seems to have freed himself from it to some extent. By mirroring the morally chaotic life of pursuing wealth, Jesus alerts us to the need to escape this rat race by aiming for “the eternal homes.” So where is the Kingdom of God? It isn’t here unless we all practice the generosity of the unrighteous steward which disrupts the system he was living in up to the time he was fired.

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.