Beware of practicing your
righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you
will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to
the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues
and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you,
they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let
your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be
in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
If I give away all I have,
and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or
rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it
does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all
things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Matthew 6:1-4 & 1 Corinthians
13:3-7
I finished last weekend by saying that when we examine
what the Bible says about giving, we uncover economic principles that effect
not just Christians and churches but nations and global economics. I will try
to explain why as briefly as possible.
During the Advent Reflections last year, we looked at
how capitalism is not synonymous with free trade. To recap briefly what I
posted on Day 16, people have always traded for profit but, although there have
always been greedy people, on the whole most people were satisfied to earn
enough for their families to live in a degree of comfort. From time to time, a
businessman would devote himself to commerce with the intention of maximising
his own profit, and his competitors had to respond in kind in order to stay in
business, but when the greedy businessman died business gradually returned to
its normal pace. That is, until Benjamin Franklin: although people deplored his
approach as ‘gaining wealth, forgetting all but self’, gradually Franklin’s way
became the only way to do business. We call it capitalism.
I concluded the Day 18 Reflection by asking whether
the growing practice of social responsibility by businesses – charitable giving
to relieve poverty and to support education and the arts – is creating a form
of ‘compassionate capitalism’ for the 21st Century. To put it another way, is
it a return to a form of pre-capitalism business with goals other than profit?
I think the answer is to be found in the passages at
the start of today’s Reflection, where Jesus tells his followers to do good
works discretely and St Paul explains that if we do good works without love,
they do not work for our good and we gain nothing
Without losing sight of the fact that many businesses
make valuable and useful contributions to charities and other good causes, we
should see that they rarely do it unselfishly or discretely. I will conclude
this point tomorrow.
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2013.
Scripture
quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright
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