When we hear about Jesus’ teaching on the dangers of wealth and the evils of greed, I’m guessing many of us assume the teaching applies to other people, not ourselves. We tend to identify “the rich” as those who have more than we have. Few people identify themselves as rich, let alone greedy.
By global and historical standards, however, the majority of us in Western countries are rich—extremely rich. Only the wealthiest people throughout history had anything close to the standard of living middle class westerners enjoy today. When Jesus offers warnings to “the rich,” therefore, he’s talking about most of us. And his warning is that riches have a way of entrapping us.
All indications are that most Americans have become entrapped in wealth. Studies have shown that the wealthier people become, the lower percentage of their income they tend to give away. For example, in 2000 the gap between the average wealth of Americans and that of the poorest 25 percent of people on the planet was four times greater than what it had been in 1960. During this same period of time, the percentage of our country’s GNP (Gross National Product) that went to providing assistance to the poorest 25 percent of people on the planet decreased to about one tenth of what it had been in 1960. 1 While there are many incredibly generous Americans, as a nation we’ve clearly become entrapped by our wealth.
It’s sobering to compare America’s spending on the military with its aid to the poor. In 2005 America spent twenty-seven times more on its military than it did on alleviating global poverty. Some estimate that the amount spent on the Iraq war alone in 2006 could have fed and housed all the poor on the planet six times over. Its also sobering to consider that Americans spend enough money on entertainment each year to feed all the hungry people on the planet for a year.
What does God think about all this?
JESUS, THE POOR, AND THE GREEDY
There are literally thousands of passages in the Bible in which God warns against greed (hoarding more than you need) and in which he emphasizes the need for his people to share with the poor. In fact, the number one reason given in the Bible for why God brings judgment on nations is that they hoard food and wealth and neglect the plight of the poor. Not surprisingly the condemnation of greed and call to care for the poor also permeates the life and teaching of Jesus.
Jesus gave us an example to follow when he set aside the riches of his divine status and entered into solidarity with the poor. “Though he was rich,” Paul said, “he made himself poor.” Followers of Jesus who are wealthy by global and historical standards (most of us Americans) are to consider the poor our sisters and brothers whom we are responsible for.
Jesus repeatedly stressed the danger of riches and the need to live generously. He criticized the religious heroes of his day for being preoccupied with maintaining a nice religious exterior while their hearts were full of “greed and wickedness.” These people meticulously followed religious rules, but because they loved money they “neglected the more important matters of the law,” which include “justice” and “mercy.” In other words, their religious appearance notwithstanding, these people consumed and hoarded resources and didn’t share with the poor. Clearly, in Jesus’ view, this omission rendered the rest of their religious behavior irrelevant.
Along the same lines, when a man wanted Jesus to settle a legal dispute with his older brother over how much of the family inheritance he should receive, Jesus said, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” He was basically asking the man, “Do I look like your lawyer?” Jesus hadn’t come to settle legal and political problems. He had rather come to manifest the reign of God and revolt against everything that is inconsistent with it—including things like greed. So Jesus warned the man, “Watch out. Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”
“However you work out your legal and political issues,” Jesus was in essence saying, “make sure you’re not being motivated by greed.”
Jesus taught that while pagans naturally chase after material things, Kingdom people are to remain worry free as we trust our heavenly Father to provide for us. He repeatedly warned that those who try to store up treasures on earth and neglect the poor will face God’s judgment. By contrast, Jesus told his followers they weren’t to consider anything they own as their possessions. “Those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples,” he said. Since we have no possessions, we’re to share all we own with everyone in need.
When we throw a banquet, Jesus says, “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind.” Then “you will be blessed,” he says, for these people “cannot repay you”—but God most certainly will. If we come upon anyone in need, we’re to follow his example of “the good Samaritan” and offer what we have to help them. Even if our enemy is in need, Jesus taught, we’re to share what we have with them. According to the New Testament, we can’t claim to love God if we ignore the basic needs of people around us. James says that anyone who ignores the needs of the poor has a faith that is “dead.”
LIVING WITH OUTRAGEOUS GENEROSITY
If you’ve been conditioned by the typical, Western consumer mindset, the example of Jesus and the teachings of the New Testament regarding our responsibility to share with the poor may feel impossibly onerous. We’re conditioned to think that living with as much luxury and convenience as possible—attaining “the American dream”—is what life is all about. Whatever we may theoretically believe about God, Jesus, and the Kingdom of God, we’re conditioned to instinctively try to find our happiness, worth, and security in things.
Not only this, but we’re conditioned to feel as though we never have enough. The average American watches over 20,000 commercials each year and almost every single one of them is designed to convince us we need whatever’s being sold. For all of its economic advantages, capitalism thrives on people remaining discontented with what they have. If the American population as a whole ever adhered to Paul’s instruction to be content with what we already have (1 Timothy 6:8 – 9), our economy would collapse overnight.
And so, like the pagans of old that Jesus talked about—but undoubtedly with a much greater consumer vengeance—we westerners tend to addictively chase after things. Held in bondage to our consumer conditioning, the biblical teaching to own nothing and to sacrificially give to the poor may feel like absolute torture.
The truth is that the Kingdom call to live without possessions and with outrageous generosity is a call to freedom. While the Powers delude us into believing that possessing things gives us Life, the truth is that whatever we think we possess actually possesses us. The truth is that owning things doesn’t give Life; it sucks Life out of us. The truth is that the perpetual hunger for more that fuels capitalism is a form of demonic bondage.
We never experience more joy, and never feel more fully alive, than when we are sacrificially sharing with others. Possessing things may bring momentary happiness, but only sacrificing for others can bring true, lasting joy. The paradox of the Kingdom—and it applies to all of life—is that the best thing we can do for ourselves is to decide not to live for ourselves.
BEWARE OF GUILT AND JUDGMENT
Some who become aware of the massive discrepancy between their comfortable Western standard of living and the deplorable standard of living of the world’s poorest people become ridden with guilt. Judging from the statistics about how most Americans spend their money—98 percent of it on themselves—there’s no question that most of us Americans should feel guilty about our self-indulgent lifestyles. At the same time, we need to be very clear that guilt is not a Kingdom motivation for sacrificial giving.
We’re supposed to be imitators of God in all things. God didn’t set aside his advantages and enter into solidarity with us out of guilt. He did it out of love. So too, Paul says, everything followers of Jesus do is to be motivated by love.
When a person sacrifices for the poor out of guilt, it’s very easy for them to project their guilt onto people
who haven’t made the sacrifices they’ve made and to become judgmental. Honestly, some of the most judgmental people I’ve ever met have been people who have walked away from comfort and convenience to enter into solidarity with the poor. They developed a disdain for people who haven’t made the sacrifices they’ve made. Several I’ve known have become so judgmental they’ve sunk into a hole of cynicism toward the Church, and even toward Christianity as a whole.
Our job as Kingdom people is to obey what God calls us to do, not judge others concerning whether or not they are doing what God calls them to do. As each servant answers to their own master, Paul says, each person must answer to God on their own. If we’re in a covenant community with another who has invited us to hold them accountable, then it is appropriate to be concerned with how they steward their resources. But outside of this sort of relationship, our only job is to agree with God that each person we see—however rich and self-indulgent they may appear to us—has unsurpassable worth, as demonstrated by the unsurpassable sacrifice God was willing to make for them.
Related to this, while all Kingdom people are called to live sacrificial lives and share with the poor, the particular way we do this must flow out of our sense of what God is telling us and our community of fellow disciples to do. It can’t flow out of a set of ethical rules about wealth that we think apply to all Christians at all times.
There are no such rules. There is no absolute standard against which we can assess whether another individual is giving “enough” or not. The same judgmental logic that would rule out a two-million-dollar home could also rule out a fifty-thousand-dollar home. In fact, as long as a person has anything another doesn’t have, one could accuse them of not caring enough about the poor.
The call of the Kingdom is not to create rules that we think everyone should conform to. It’s simply to seek God’s will as to how he would have us live out Jesus’ self-sacrificial lifestyle.
WHERE SHOULD WE PLACE OUR TRUST?
In the same way that the Kingdom call to serve the poor can’t be reduced to a set of rules about wealth, it also can’t be identified with any political or economic program to rid the world of poverty. Kingdom people have no special wisdom about these things, for the New Testament is silent about such matters.
This isn’t to say that governments shouldn’t help relieve poverty or that Christians shouldn’t sometimes help them do it. Sometimes they can, and sometimes we should. Any clever political ideas about how people and resources can be better mobilized to relieve hunger and poverty are to be welcomed and, if proven effective, embraced.
But our confidence as Kingdom people should be rooted not in smart political and economic programs, but in God, who promises to use our individual and collective sacrifices to revolt against, and ultimately overthrow, poverty and the Powers that fuel it. Hence, our primary time and energy should be invested not in debating the relative merits of competing political and economic programs, but in individually and collectively imitating Jesus by bleeding for people who are in need.
If significant numbers of Kingdom people lived like this, it would in fact be politically revolutionary. But it would be so in a way that looks like Jesus rather than Caesar.
Along these same lines, it’s crucial we remember that the criteria for success in the Kingdom is not effectiveness, but faithfulness. Our job is to obediently “plant” and “water” as God leads us. It’s God’s job to “give the increase.”
Jesus made this point one day while he and his disciples observed wealthy people putting huge offerings into the temple treasury. They then saw a “poor widow” put in “two very small copper coins.” Jesus told his disciples, “This poor widow has put in more than all the others.” The reason was that the wealthy people “gave their gifts out of their wealth” while the widow “out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.”
The world would certainly be more impressed with a thousand dollars dropped in an offering plate than with two pennies. Obviously you can do a lot more with a thousand dollars than with two pennies, right? Yet Jesus tells us we’re not to assess things this way, for in the Kingdom what matters is not how much one gives, but how much it cost one to give it. The widow gave all she had and thus advanced the Kingdom more than all the wealthy folks whose gifts were larger but didn’t cost them as much to give.
So too, our confidence in addressing poverty must not be in things the world thinks are effective but in what God can do when people faithfully imitate Jesus and make costly sacrifices for the poor.
KNOWING WHAT YOU ARE—AND ARE NOT—RESPONSIBLE FOR
While most American disciples need to be challenged to assume more responsibility for the poor, some need to be challenged to assume less. I’m serious. It’s a lesson I had to learn the hard way.
My first visit to Haiti twelve years ago was emotionally and spiritually overwhelming. I knew the statistics about poverty in Haiti, but knowing about dehumanizing poverty and experiencing it are two very different things.
Cité Soleil, a seaside slum, exists on about one square mile of garbage-infested land and is home to over a quarter million people. It ’s among the most impoverished places on earth. As we were driving through Cité Soleil, at one point I caught the eyes of a young child rummaging through a three-foot-high pile of filthy, smelly garbage, looking for food. He glanced up as our van passed, and for a timeless moment our eyes were locked on each other.
I was immediately overwhelmed with grief and jolted by an acute sense of how grotesquely arbitrary life is. There was absolutely no reason why I was me instead of this boy, I thought. Nothing but sheer luck allowed me to be born in a nice American home rather than in this stench-filled Haitian dump. Nothing but sheer luck placed me inside this air-conditioned van looking out rather than on that smelly pile of garbage looking in. The absurdity of the situation made me feel nauseated.
I couldn’t get this sense of absurdity out of my mind once I returned home. I saw this boy’s malnourished face on every dollar bill. Whenever I was going to purchase anything, I wondered, “Is this purchase more important than feeding a Haitian child?” And of course, the answer was almost always no. If I purchased the item anyway, I felt like I was virtually killing a starving child!
That dollar could have been used to feed him.
For close to a year I had trouble spending money on anything that wasn’t absolutely essential: movies, nice meals, new clothes, even Christmas presents for my own children. I began to loathe American culture as a whole and despise my own participation in it. I fell into a black hole of cynicism.
This wasn’t particularly helpful to my marriage. My wife rarely buys things we don’t need, but her standard of “need” is a bit higher than it is for people in Cité Soleil. One time my poor wife wanted to replace the old shabby curtains in our living room. They really were in pretty bad shape. But my response was, “How many kids will go without food because we chose to buy curtains rather than feed them?”
It wasn’t the happiest year of our marriage.
I slowly realized I was shouldering far more responsibility than God had given me, and it was crushing me. Certainly those of us who are privileged by wealth have a responsibility to steward our advantages in ways that help the disadvantaged. But what I had forgotten was that, as a Kingdom person, I am to seek God’s will about how I’m supposed to do this. I’m not to assume responsibility for every impoverished child in Haiti. I’m to assume responsibility only for those God entrusts to me.
When I sought God’s will, I came to believe the Lord wanted Shelley and me to be content supporting the Haitian ministry a couple in our small group had started. This included helping to raise six children in a Haitian foster home and sending several hundred Haitian children to school each year who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to go. Having done what I felt God led me to do, I felt the Lord instructing me to turn over the responsibility for the desperate child on the garbage heap—and all other Haitian children—to him. His strong should
ers can carry this enormous weight. Mine cannot.
Shelley and I, along with our small group, have continued to be open to God calling us to expand our responsibility to the poor in Haiti and elsewhere and to increase our sacrificial giving. He has done this several times. But however much responsibility God leads any of us to assume, it’s crucial we leave to him what he has not called us to assume responsible for.
TROUBLING PASSAGES ABOUT WEALTH
As I’ve read books and heard speakers on the topic of wealth and poverty over the years, I’ve found that balance seems to be in short supply. On one hand, some rightly emphasize our need to shun greed and to care for the poor but then explicitly or implicitly rail against wealth, as though it were an intrinsic evil. This is where I was when I returned from my first trip to Haiti. On the other hand, some rightly see that God is not opposed to wealth as such but then minimize the need to shun greed and to care for the poor. In fact, many authors and speakers explicitly or implicitly promote capitalism and the accruing of personal wealth as a sign of “God’s blessing.” Both of these extremes are unbiblical and unhealthy.
Let me share how I gradually set aside my cynicism after my first Haiti trip.
At some point after returning to the States I became puzzled over several aspects of Jesus’ ministry. For instance, why would Jesus change water into wine—for a bunch of partiers who’d already gone through all the wine the host had to offer? Why would he waste a miracle for such a trivial cause? How many disabled children in Palestine could have used that nice, superfluous display of supernatural power? After all, what’s more important: helping wedding guests drink more wine than they need or helping a disabled child walk?
The Myth of a Christian Religion Page 13