JESUS and MONEY

One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much. If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful in that which is another's, who will give you that which is your own?...
You cannot serve God and money.

Jesus of Nazareth

In this and the next three Reflections, I want to look at a day in Jesus’ ministry that we’ve already touched on a number of times in this series. By taking some time to get a broad overview of the events that day, we can usefully tie together concepts and the dangers money presents in the context of what Paul called ‘the whole counsel of God’.

The day is the Sabbath when Jesus confronted the religious establishment about its love of money: the events were recorded by St Luke in his Gospel, starting at chapter 14 and ending in chapter 17 at verse 10. The quotation at the start of this Reflection is core to understanding everything Jesus taught but I’ll leave the analysis of it until we arrive at it as we go through the day chronologically.

Many of the Pharisees who met Jesus were religious hypocrites. They purported to love God but they loved money and served their own interests. They were the elite, the ‘establishment’ of their time, and they wanted to preserve their superiority. Their origin is not entirely clear but the movement seems to have been formed during the Maccabean Revolt of about 400 years earlier, when they were a group especially devoted to keeping the Torah, the ‘Old Testament’ law.

Not all of the Pharisees that Jesus met were corrupt but their way of life had been corrupted and by reflecting on what Jesus told them we hold up a mirror to our own lives. If might prove to be uncomfortable but it cannot be a bad thing to see if our way of life may have been corrupted by the same sorts of theological sophistication as their's had been.

The difficulties started that day when Jesus was invited to a meal at the home of a ruling Pharisee. The invitation was a set up. It was the Sabbath, there was a sick man present and everyone watched to see if Jesus would heal him. The sick man was not someone who would normally have been invited and, according to the Pharisees, it would be a sin for Jesus to heal the man because, they said, it would be work that was forbidden on a Sabbath. Jesus dealt with the theology head on by asserting the compassion of God:;he healed the man and sent him away.

Jesus then criticised the other guests for their pride in wanting to sit in the places of honour: ‘For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.’ He then criticised his host for only inviting people who could return the hospitality rather than people who were poor, sick or disabled and needed help: ‘You will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.’ He then told the Parable of the Great Banquet, to explain how the privileged that were complacent about their place in the Kingdom of God would be excluded from it but the poor, sick and disabled would be welcome. By the time he left, a crowd of onlookers had gathered.

The Pharisees’ wealth should have been their opportunity to help people less well off than themselves. As St John later wrote, 'If anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him?' (1 John 3:17). But it was the love of money, not the love of God, that ruled the hearts of many Pharisees. Notwithstanding their devotion to the Torah, they understood neither it nor the God who had given it to Moses. They sought to assert their theological superiority at the expense of a sick man and to promote themselves in public. In this, they followed in the footsteps of Lucifer, who worked for his own self-aggrandisement. This is why, on another occasion Jesus told them, ‘You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires’.

By contrast, we should reflect on Jesus’ own attitude, as described by Paul in his letter to the church at Philiippi. Jesus did not consider it necessary to cling to the privileges of Godhead but he took a downward course to help people who could not help themselves.

‘Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’ (Philippians 2:3-11)

Jesus did not stop being God when he was conceived as a human male in the womb of Mary; he only gave up his privileges as God. In response, the Father ‘highly exalted him’. God did for Jesus, who humbled himself, the very thing that Lucifer wanted when he began to promote himself! It is shrewd - Kingdom shrewd, not shrewd in the ways of society - for God's people today to follow Jesus' example of humility rather than the Pharisees' self-promotion.

© All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre & Church and Philip Evans 2014.

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