Today I’m starting a little mini-series remixing some older reflections on wealth and justice and faith. It’ll run for the next three or four weeks, I think. This first one is about the “investment advice” Jesus gives his followers, including us.
Jesus talks a lot about money, at one point naming it as a power that takes on a life of its own, almost like a rival god: Mammon (Matt 6:24). The fact that the teachings and practices of Jesus, the apostolic community, and the early church about money sound absolutely crazy to us today speaks to how thoroughly Mammon has diseased our imaginations and twisted our assumptions about how to live as disciples of Jesus today.
One of the the metaphors Jesus uses that I find fascinating is giving to the poor as making an investment. After warning the crowds against the insanity of running after money, Jesus speaks to his disciples who have committed themselves to following him:
Don’t be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights in giving you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to those in need. Make for yourselves wallets that don’t wear out—a treasure in heaven that never runs out. No thief comes near there, and no moth destroys. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be too (Luke 12:32-34).
Several years ago a friend told me that she had begun a practice of always giving money to people she encountered begging on the street. She told me she used to worry that they might use it to buy drugs or alcohol, and that she would feel responsible for their bad choices. But at some point she felt convicted that it wasn’t her job to track how they were spending the money she gave them. Giving money to the poor was a simple act of mercy, and it reflected God’s heart. So she started carrying cash, and started giving it to those who asked her for something as a discipline of mercy.
With all necessary caveats regarding working for justice and not just charity, etc., there’s a lot I appreciate about the simplicity of my friend’s practice. According to Jesus, giving to those in need isn’t just “the right thing to do,” but is an actual investment one makes in storing up a “treasure in heaven that never runs out.” It’s as if Jesus is saying, “You want secure storehouses of treasure that will provide for you in perpetuity? Give your money to the poor!” In so doing, you will be participating in a material way in the political economy of God’s kingdom, which is bringing holistic flourishing for all people collectively and eschatalogically.
To give to the poor is to invest in God’s kingdom “fund” from which we trust God to distribute goodness justly and abundantly. To give to the poor is to reliquish private ownership and control of our resources, trusting God who does what is right and delights to give good gifts to the children of the kingdom. St. Basil the Great saw the lovely logic in this way of living:
For if we all took only what was necessary to satisfy our own needs, giving the rest to those who lack, no one would be rich, no one would be poor, and no one would be in need… When wealth is scattered in the manner in which our Lord directed, it naturally returns, but when it is gathered, it naturally disperses. If you try to keep it, you will not have it; if you scatter it, you will not lose it.
But again, notice how naïve and impractical that sounds to our ears! Fearful thoughts of being taken advantage of quickly follow the investment advice of Jesus. This is why Jesus says wealth is so dangerous to faith. Possessing great wealth, stored away in barns or bank accounts, inexorably draws your heart toward it, and being drawn toward protecting and growing your privately-owned wealth is always also being drawn away from the life God shares with us (a.k.a. faith). You really cannot serve God and Mammon.
In other words, hoarding wealth is a kind of slavery that separates us from the life God shares with us and wants for us. Giving to those in need, by contrast, is freedom—a freedom rooted in a confidence in God’s care and provision for us. It’s a freedom that issues forth in sharing abundantly for our brothers and sisters, and for the poor, since we all share in God’s abundance together. If you need something, and I possess it, to hold it back from you for any reason would frankly be unthinkable, since we are organically connected as one Body.
Mammon would try and convince us that we are merely self-interested individuals who only interact with other self-interested individuals in actions of economic exchange when our mutual self-interest dictates it. But Jesus reminds us that we are all more connected than we realize, on every level. So giving to the poor is storing up treasure in heaven, for all of us, that will never run out. St. Basil again comments, from a homily on Jesus’s parable of the rich fool who wanted to build bigger barns to hoard his abundant harvest:
What could be more ridiculous than this incessant toil… If you want storehouses, you have them in the stomachs of the poor. Lay up for yourself treasure in heaven.
The bread you are holding back is for the hungry, the clothes you keep put away are for the naked… the silver you keep buried in the earth is for the needy. You are thus guilty of injustice toward as many as you might have aided, and did not.
Standing in solidarity with the poor, treating them as our own body, is to be with Jesus, and to make the smartest, most secure investment you can make. Even though it’s hard to know exactly how to do this when our lives are so tangled up with Mammon in a structural/systemic way, I want more of that in my life and in my church.