The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  This is Benjamin Franklin’s famous experience, of which he speaks in his autobiography, when he went to hear the famous evangelist George Whitefield preach in Philadelphia. It was said that Whitefield could make grown men cry with the mere pronunciation of the word Mesopotamia, and Whitefield on this occasion was soliciting funds for his orphanage in Georgia. Franklin was determined to resist his appeals. In Franklin’s words,

  I happened soon after to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.2

  Would that all sermons had that effect but they do not, and the problem of wealth, and the appropriate obligations of the believer in regard to faith and money, is one of the persistent problems of the age, which, in this most materialistic of times and with most spiritually ambitious people, is a problem that really ought to be addressed. Quite rightly we may ask whether in the Bible there is any guidance on the question of wealth and faith.

  What Does the Bible Say About Wealth?

  Perhaps this question should have been taken up in the previous section on hard texts, for much of what the Bible has to say about wealth, riches, money, or earthly treasure is not what many Christians, no matter how kindly disposed to charity and philanthropy, want to hear. A case in point is an invitation that I accepted some years ago, to spend a weekend with some very wealthy Christian businessmen in Texas. They wished to discuss the relationship between faith and wealth, and they asked me to take up with them some of the passages in the New Testament where the subject of wealth is considered. They were particularly interested in the views of Jesus.

  I could have taken up with them the story of Zacchaeus, in Luke 19:1–10. He was the chief tax collector, he was short, and he was rich, and Jesus dined with him and received much criticism for doing so. Zacchaeus repented of his sins and offered fourfold restitution to those whom he had cheated, and half of his estate he determined to give to the poor. Jesus celebrates his change of heart and life, and, most important, allows him to keep half of his fortune.

  I could have pointed out, also, that it Was a wealthy man, Joseph of Arimathea, who provided Jesus with his tomb and in the gospels is justly praised for this act of charity. We read of him in Luke 23:50–56. Then, of course, there is the instance in which Jesus does not rebuke the woman who anoints him with a very costly ointment, seeming to approve of such extravagance despite the objections of the disciples. In Matthew 26:6–13, he not only declines to rebuke her but commends her gesture with the memorable words, “Truly I say to you, wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.” The parallel passage in Mark 14:3–9 tells the same tale. The economic dimension of the anointing, of which much is made in Mark and in Matthew, is absent from Luke’s account (7:36–50), where the woman anoints Jesus’ feet with her tears and dries them with her hair. Her sins are forgiven her.

  A Perfect Candidate

  What the Texas businessmen wanted to hear about, however, was the rich young ruler found in Luke 18:18–30, with parallel stories in Matthew 19:16–30 and in Mark 10:17–27. The elements of the story are painfully clear: The rich ruler asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. The question is interesting, but even more interesting is the one who asks it. Here is a man—he would have to be a man in order to be described as a ruler—who is a member of the establishment or ruling class. He has position and authority, and he is quite a change from the usual rag-tag sort of follower whom Jesus attracted. He is just the sort of person that any modern church would seek out and grab at the coffee hour, somebody who is somebody and who can possibly make a difference. And he is rich. This is not just a metaphor. He is, as they say, really rich. He, in short, has much to offer.

  He is interested as well in spiritual things. He asks the ultimate question of Jesus: What shall I do to inherit eternal life? In Matthew the request is made more specific when he asks, “What good deed must I do?” Here is a man eager for righteousness. We learn more of this rich ruler when Jesus asks him if he knows and has kept the commandments, the whole moral law. The answer is as pleasing as everything else about this man: “I have observed them from my youth.” (Mark 10:20). This is not someone looking for an easy ride into heaven; he knows and has lived the good life, the virtuous life, if you will. He knows the rules and he has lived his life by them, and Jesus approved. How do we know this? Because Mark says, “And Jesus looking upon him loved him.” Only Mark contains this phrase of love, and it places the stamp of Jesus’ affection upon an already very impressive man.

  “One thing you lack; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Here is the answer to rich young ruler’s question, which comes in the form of an invitation to discipleship. As we know, the young man declined the invitation. “At that saying,” Mark writes, “his countenance fell, and he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions.” (Mark 10:22) After a moment of silence, two questions nearly always follow the hearing of this story. The first is “Why didn’t Jesus take him just as he was, which was very good indeed by the usual standards of discipleship?” The second is “Why did the young man fail to accept the invitation of an eternal lifetime, which he had so earnestly sought?” If this rich and righteous ruler isn’t good enough for the kingdom of heaven, then who is? The disciples themselves ask that question, knowing that they do not compare so well with the one who got away.

  The temptation is always strong to seek out some moral flaw, some hitherto concealed blemish on the character of the rich ruler, but the text does not permit us this conclusion. Both he and Jesus knew that he was good, and we are meant to know that as well. He was good, but not good enough. This doesn’t mean necessarily that he lacked faith in Jesus; we assume that he placed sufficient faith in Jesus at the outset to ask the fundamental question that begins the conversation. We can only conclude that he lacked sufficient faith in himself to contemplate a life without those things by which he has been sustained in his life: his riches. “His countenance fell,” we are told, upon hearing Jesus’ expectation that he would divest himself of all that he had, and that he would follow Jesus as a disciple. He recognized what was being asked, he calculated the expectation, and he didn’t dare take the risk. He may even have known that he had made the wrong choice, but he also knew that it was the only choice that he could make. Perhaps it was that moment of enlightened realization of his own limitations, that freeze-frame moment of self-truth, that caused his face to fall. He went away sorrowful, Mark goes on; and the explanation given for why he was sorrowful, is “for he had great possessions.”

  Why didn’t Jesus take him? Possibly because Jesus knew that the possessions would get in the way, that in some sense the rich young ruler was possessed by his possessions, not in an obsessive way but in a way that would be difficult to disentangle. Jesus does not condemn the man’s wealth. He does not deny his legitimate possession of it. The wealth in the story is morally neutral. The test of the man’s loyalty and sincerity is his willingness to give up even his legitimate wealth, not ill-gotten gains like those of Zacchaeus, in order to take up with Jesus. Indeed, it may well have been that the man’s virtues and wealth were in some sense hindrances to accepting Jesus’ invitation, for moral security at times can be like financial security in that it can contribute to a sense of smugness and self-satisfaction. Although we must take the rich ruler’s question of Jesus at face value and respond to it as Jesus did, as a genuine interest in eternal life, the ultimate test of virtue is to have it challenged and risk the loss of it. To give up moral and social securi
ty to follow Jesus is a risk less likely the more virtuous you desire to be. Jesus perhaps knew this, and gave the ruler a way out by making it impossible for him to come in.

  We really cannot speculate about the motivations of Jesus or of the rich ruler, but in the following verses we do not need to speculate, for in explaining to the disciples what has just happened, Jesus makes it fairly clear: “How hard it will be for those with riches to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:24). If that were not clear enough, he offers one of the most vivid figures in all of the Bible: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:25) The impediment is clear: riches. In case my Texas friends hadn’t yet quite caught it, which was possible, as I doubted that this text had been much expounded upon from the pulpits of many of their churches, I put it this way: Wealth is not a sin, but it is a problem.

  It is not a problem only in this particularly vivid story, but it is problematic throughout all of scripture. Here is where one of W. C. Fields’s loopholes would come in handy, for it is not very easy to avoid the problematic relationship in the Bible between faith and wealth. It is not as if there is a biblical view on wealth; there really could not be a systematized philosophy of economy in the Bible, for this is after all a collection of books written over the course of a thousand years under widely diverging social and economic circumstances. The problem of wealth is common to them all, but the variety of ways in which wealth is addressed requires more than the simpleminded statement that the Bible either is for it or against it. In certain parts of the Bible, for example, wealth and riches are signs of God’s approval and blessing: “You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth.” (Deuteronomy 8:18) In I Chronicles 29:12, “Both riches and honor come from thee, and thou rulest over all.” In Ecclesiastes 10:19, we read that “bread is made for laughter, and wine gladdens life, and money answers everything.” Among the blessings God bestowed upon Solomon, in addition to his reputation for wisdom, was the great wealth that made him so easily admired. In Psalm 112: 1, 3, we read, “Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments…Wealth and riches are in his house; and his righteousness endures for ever.”

  In the New Testament Jesus himself teaches a hard lesson in the advantages of investments over savings when, in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14–30, he excoriates the man who hid his talent in the ground and did not put it out to collect interest. “So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents.” Then, in probably one of the most frightening verses in the Bible, he says, “For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” (Matthew 25:29) This is certainly an exercise in the redistribution of wealth, but not in quite the way we have come to expect, or to expect of Jesus.

  These verses of course do not tell the whole story, and one of the least likely places to look in the search for verses sharply critical of wealth is Psalms, that collection of hymns and poems which to many is the most loved book in the Bible because it appears to be so free of doctrine. The tone of many of the psalms, however, is sharply critical of establishments, the combination of the wealthy and the powerful, those syndicates who prosper in their wicked ways while the faithful remain poor and have a hard time of it. There is a high degree of economic envy, even anger, in these psalms, and high hopes of spiritual vengeance and turning of the tables. Psalm 73 is perhaps the most vivid example of this kind of economic class warfare, and it is in the “sanctuary of God,” at verse 17, that the pious worm begins to turn. At verse 3, the condition of the psalmist is made very clear: “For I was envious of the arrogant, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.” A familiar theme is introduced in this particular psalm which occurs again and again throughout both the Psalter and the Old Testament: the association of prosperity with wickedness. The virtuous are by definition under this rubric virtuous, and the wicked prosper because they have cheated the poor and have no conscience to convict them. They thus enjoy their ill-gotten gains without guilt. “For they have no pangs; their bodies are round and sleek. They are not in trouble as other men are; they are not stricken like other men.” (Psalm 73:4–5). “Other men,” of course, meaning the likes of the virtuous psalmist. As if to make the case for moral compensation in the face of material deprivation, Psalm 37:16 says, “Better is a little that the righteous has than the abundance of many wicked.” The same theme appears again in Psalm 49:5–6, where the psalmist asks, “Why should I fear in times of trouble, when the iniquity of my persecutors surrounds me, men who trust in their wealth and boast of the abundance of their riches?”

  In a rebuke to the mighty man who would boast, Psalm 52: 1, 5–7 asks, “Why do you boast, O mighty man, of mischief done against the godly? …God will break you down forever; he will snatch and tear you from your tent; he will uproot you from the land of the living. The righteous shall see, and fear, and shall laugh at him, saying, ‘See the man who would not make God his refuge, but trusted in the abundance of his riches, and sought refuge in his wealth!’ ”

  The psalms may be full of consolation, but the consolation is often recompense against the sense of injustice often expressed in terms of justice and power, and couched in the language of anger and violent vengence.

  In the New Testament we have the revolutionary line in the Magnificat, where gentle Mary, overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit’s news that she will have a child, sings to the Lord, who among many other things “has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.” (Luke 1:53.) There can be no question about the redistribution of wealth here. Those who have it will lose it; those who have it not will get it. Jesus says that you cannot serve God and Mammon, meaning that the spiritual and the material are mutually exclusive (Matthew 6:24), and his parable about Dives and Lazarus—the rich man who had everything on earth and nothing in the next life, and the poor man who on earth suffered and in heaven feasted—is well known, and it is clear that the story favors earthly deprivation over earthly wealth.

  The epistles are no less reassuring, and from the First Epistle to Timothy comes perhaps the most famous verse on money in the Bible, although it is frequently misquoted: “Those who desire to be rich fall into tempation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evil; it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs.” (I Timothy 6:9–10)

  In case the rich don’t get it, Martin Luther’s least favorite epistle, that of James, which Luther called a “gospel of straw” and inferior to the rest of the New Testament, reads: “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days.” (James 5:1–3) This last verse also applies to the scene outside the place in which the last rites of the church were said for the fabulously wealthy Aristotle Onassis. His super-rich friends all gathered about after the funeral, and the chief speculation was how much he had and who had got it. One exchange went like this: “How much did he leave?” The anwer? “Everything; he left everything.” Wealth is not a sin, but for the living Christian who is interested in wealth, it is a problem.

  What Does Jesus Have to Say?

  In many churches at the time of the offering, it is the custom of the minister to read “offertory sentences,” phrases from scripture that lay upon the people the sanction of the Bible as encouragement in their giving. While it is very important liturgically to remember that in eucharistically centered churches the offertory is the time in which the gifts of bread and wine are offered as gifts from God to the people, it has become a habit of long standing, particularly in American churches, to see the o
ffertory as the offerings of the people for the work of God. These gifts were originally the “alms and oblations” for the relief of the poor, based on the theory that those who receive the gifts of God in the Eucharist have an obligation also to give support to the worldly necessities of their less well-off brothers and sisters. In certain branches of Protestantism, such as the so-called free churches with strong congregational low-church traditions, this practice on those Sundays where Communion was a part of the morning service resulted in two offerings. This was the case in my Baptist church, where the regular offering consisted of tithes and pledges for the support of the work of the church, and at the Communion a separate offering was received for the support of the poor and the needy. The first offering was administered by the trustees, the business side, as it were, while the second was administered by the deacons, who with the pastor saw to the spiritual side of the church. Today, however, most churches make do with one offering, which may be put to various uses.

  The offertory sentences in the Book of Common Prayer (1979) include these words of Jesus from Matthew 6:19–21, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” This teaching on the futility of earthly materialism occurs early in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, his most systematic teaching, where it comes shortly after the Lord’s Prayer and is painfully explicit. Neither a parable nor an aphorism, it is a clear and direct command: Do not accumulate earthly wealth, which is subject to the vagaries of the human experience and is at best only temporary. Invest in heaven, which is eternal.