Jesus has a message that should disturb us. He is reversing a long-held Jewish belief, one that many evangelical Christians still hold. By way of introduction, we need to know that Jewish Scripture was clear that righteousness (meaning just deeds) lead to blessing. From that conclusion, Jewish thinkers had adopted the reverse inference, which is the false premise that the extent to which you are wealthy reflects how much God loves you. If you are obscenely wealthy, that cannot have happened because of sharp dealing or oppression of others, rather God must be mad about you. If you are in the middle, then you are ok. If you are poor, God disapproves of you: you must have done something wrong or be paying for your parents' or grandparents' sins, and so you deserve your poverty. This notion in turn goes back to the primitive, unacceptable ancient Jewish view of their tribal deity, the idea that God is a super-sized version of us on a bad-hair day. Angry, jealous, quick to judgement and rage, capricious, and cruel and -- more importantly -- micromanager of the cosmos. I am not acquainted with a god that is worse than any human father I know, and I hope you aren't either. Jesus helps us discover the God of unconditional, radical love who calls us to be all we can be in life.
In our pericope [Lk. 16: 7 et seq.] Jesus says crazy things like, "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God." And, on the other hand, "Woe to you who are rich." Jesus and His Mother are very good at these radical social reversals. They tell us a time of reckoning is coming.
The bad news in all this for us is that we are rich, in first century terms. We have many financial benefits, live comfortable lives, have discretionary income, and save for rainy days. As Jesus tells us elsewhere in the Gospels, the accumulation of wealth is the greatest spiritual danger. And the author of First Timothy tells us that the love of money is the root of all evil. Why would that be? Well, because when we are relatively well-off, we lose our sense of reliance on God. At one point the Psalmist tells us that we are cursed when we trust in human resources. The poor do not have the resources standing in the way between them and God, whereas we rich people do. And we soon start to believe that we can work, think, and save our way into happiness, that we can buy joy and peace. That is a devilish delusion.
The good news is that wealth itself is morally neutral. Money is just money. What we do with it remains the issue. The problem comes when we trust in our wealth, rely on it, and hoard it, while others are in need. Our happiness and our power lie in just the opposite: surrendering to the will of God and making real the obligation to love our neighbours as much as we love ourselves.
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