JESUS on MONEY

Introducing a new series of Reflections that go back to the basics that Jesus of Nazareth taught.

I thought it would be a good idea to do a series of Reflections that go back to basics, back to what Jesus himself taught. Although Jesus of Nazareth is remembered as a popular teacher arrested by the Jewish authorities as a heretic and executed by the Roman occupation as dangerous dissident, few people today examine his teachings. His biographers record that at the time people were ‘astonished’ at what he said because he spoke with authority, unlike their usual teachers. The first officers sent to arrest him returned without him with the excuse, ‘No one ever spoke like this man!’ Jesus said a lot about the power of money and how to control it: in fact, he spoke about this more than almost anything else and it deserves our careful attention.

It is widely thought that the ‘Jesus of faith’ is not the same as the ‘Jesus of history’: that is, the Jesus who people believe in today is not the man who actually walked in Israel 2,000 years ago. While that is often true, it should not be. People today believe some fanciful things about Jesus of Nazareth, some the result of well-meaning exaggeration and some out of a desire to discredit him and his legacy, but the Jesus we should believe in should be the same Jesus who is presented to us in the Gospels, which I think accurately describe the Jesus of history.

John’s Gospel is said to be less historically reliable because it attributes to Jesus more claims of deity than the other three Gospels that were written earlier. This, it is claimed, shows how the Jesus that people believed in had already evolved from the real person. But there is another way of looking at it.

I think John wrote his Gospel not to express something new but to preserve something that was being overlooked and forgotten. The storms of persecution were passing and Christianity was losing some of its stigma. Some of the problems John saw are described in the first part of Revelation, in letters to seven churches where Christian belief and practice were under threat. It seems to me that rather than teach something new, John wrote his Gospel to supplement the existing biographies already in circulation, in order to preserve truth that was at risk of compromise and corruption.

Towards the end of his Gospel, John explains how he selected his material from everything known about Jesus. His rationale was 'that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name'. This is the same reason I have for doing these Reflections. To believe that 'Jesus is the Christ' - or to use the Hebrew word, 'Messiah' - is to see him as the great redeemer of humankind; to believe that he is 'the Son of God' is to hear him speak with ultimate wisdom. And in the light of the fact that he said we cannot serve both God and money without despising one of them, it follows that freedom in Jesus involves liberation from a dependency on money. This is the subject of next weekend's Reflection.

The Reflections will not cover the technical skills necessary to handle money successfully (you can read about these in the free downloads on the Money-Ed page of the All Souls Clubhouse website) but consider issues that help us to develop a healthy relationship with money, to act more consistently with our own best interests and to relate with wisdom and deeper effectiveness to the people around us. And to be better disciples of Jesus.

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Revised 9 May 2014.
© Copyright All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre & Church and Philip Evans 2014.

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