Some people think Jesus taught as ascetic message and idealized a a life of poverty or simplicity. But did Jesus really preach asceticism? Did he really castigate owning anything above the bare necessities and call for us to live a minimalist lifestyle? Is it true that the godlier you are, the more you’ll pare down?
Those who hold this view would say that desiring anything above the essentials is greed. They will tell us if we have worldly goods that another person lacks, we have effectively stolen them from the person with less.
Those who take this view see Jesus as a quasi-socialist, a kind of first century Fidel Castro or Bernie Sanders, who attacked wealth and privilege and championed the poor unconditionally. They point out that Jesus elevated the pursuit of heavenly treasure above earthly treasure. Jesus, and Paul after him, called on God’s people to give generously and (at least at times) radically to help others in need.
But then there are those who say Jesus taught a message of abundance. He said “seek first the kingdom of God…and all these things will be added to you.” What are those things that will be added to us? In the context of Matthew 6, they are earthly goods. Just as the lilies are clothed in splendor greater than Solomon, so we can know our God delights in giving us an abundance of gifts. Luxuries do not have to be seen as evils for which we should be ashamed, but gifts for which we should overflow with gratitude.
Jesus promised an abundant life (John 10:10). He said that sacrifices made for him would be paid back, even to some degree even in this life (Matt. 19:29).
Scripture is full of righteous, godly men who were wealthy, from Abraham and Job to Joseph of Arimathea and members of Caesar’s own household. Jesus told parables in which the successful entrepreneur is the hero. He told parables about multiplying talents and making a return on investments and doing what you want with your own property. At times, Jesus sounds like a free market capitalist who has no interest in income equality.
How is it people can read Jesus’ teaching and come to such opposite conclusions? It’s not because Jesus contradicted himself but because his teaching on money is sophisticated, not facile. Who is right — those who teach as ascetic Jesus or those who teach an abundance Jesus?
It is certainly true that Jesus gave fierce warnings about wealth at times. But (following Jerry Bowyer and his magnificent book Takers Versus the Maker) we need to pay attention to when and where those warnings about wealth are given. His warnings about wealth and his attacks on wealthy individuals are concentrated entirely in the region of Judea when he is interacting with society’s ruling class. Note this carefully: Jesus’ warnings about wealth are not universal, they are focused on a particular group of people in a particular place. Every single example we have of Jesus speaking out against wealth and privilege occurs in or around Jerusalem where he meets powerful people who are part of the cultural and political elite — men like Zacchaeus in Luke 19, the rich young senator in Matthew 19, and the money changers in the temple. The people Jesus confronted about wealth are precisely those people who got rich off the backs of others, through a corrupt system of taxation and what we today would call cronyism.
This is not to say other groups of people are immune to the dangers of wealth. After all, other passages of Scripture (Deut. 8, Ecc. 5, various texts in Proverbs) do give more universalized warnings about the dangers and deceptions of wealth. But Jesus is polemical with the “takers” (as Bowyer calls them), not the “makers.”
We can draw easy analogies with our own day. Who would Jesus direct his harshest warnings about money against today? Not working class or middle class Americans who work hard producing something other people value. No, he would target the government bureaucrats and politicians who can use the state’s monopoly on violent extraction of wealth to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Have you ever wondered why two of the very wealthiest counties in the US are Montgomery County in Maryland and Fairfax County in the Virginia, two counties that happen to straddle Washington DC? Where does all that wealth come from? Not all of it is gained through corruption, but a lot of it is. The money comes from taxation (that is to say, from you and me), and from cronyism, e.g., backroom deals and insider information. This is what was happening in the first century and it drew the ire of Jesus. How is that people with rather ordinary levels of wealth get elected, go to DC, and 5 years later are ultra-wealthy? Why are those living inside the beltway so much better at picking stocks?
Note that when Jesus was in Galilee where there were middle class and upper middle class and sometimes quite wealthy small business owners (e.g., Zebedee, who clearly had a prosperous fishing enterprise), Jesus never attacked people for their wealth. These were farmers, carpenters, fishermen, etc., who generally got their wealth in honest ways in a market economy. They provided for themselves fair and square by serving others and providing goods that others valued. Jesus never criticizes honest wealth gained through hard work — and he was around many of these sorts of rich people who had gotten their gain in legitimate ways. We know from archaeology that Galilee in general was not a poor region. Of course, he did find things to criticize in Galilee (e.g., their ethno-exclusivism in Luke 4), but greed was not the main problem.
But when Jesus got close to Jerusalem, his tone shifted with regard to money. As he encounter the elite, he found many wealthy people who got their wealth from others by using Caesar’s power for their own benefit (e.g, tax collectors) or by corrupting the temple system. These are people who enriched themselves by extracting wealth from productive people. They might have provided some benefit to society but their wealth was not gained through a process of free exchange but through coercion. They had the power to oppress others economically and they often did so.
This is the point: Those who have to compete in a free market to make a living are less susceptible to oppressing the poor than those who have their hands on the levers of political power and can take money by force. Not all taxation is theft since tax money can have legitimate purposes, but those who have the power to tax must be very scrupulous about how they use that power, lest they fall into the pit of greed. It is very easy to use the power of the state to abuse people economically. (In Jesus’ day, this was also a danger for Jewish religious leaders since the temple was a kind of liturgical monopoly, but that is not as much of an issue in our day.)
There are a lot of implications of all of this but here is one: So far from being a socialist, Jesus actually attacks the very type of people who would administer a socialist system. Jesus was not a proto-socialist, he was firmly anti-socialist. After all, socialists use the power of government to pick winners and losers, to redistribute wealth as they choose. The entire system is predicated on cronyism. The government uses its monopoly on taxation to gather up wealth from the “makers” and distribute that wealth as it sees fit to the “takers.” But the biggest takers of all are often the government elites and bureaucrats themselves. It is a system that is inevitably corrupt — but the greed of the takers is disguised as “generosity” or “equity” or with some other benign term. The people who would run the socialist system are the very people Jesus attacks in the gospels.
Judas is perhaps the best example of this — and Bowyer points out that his surname indicates he was most likely a Judean. We also know he maintained the moneybag, ostensibly for the purpose of helping the poor, but he actually stole from it to enrich himself. He acts like a “social justice warrior” in John 12 when he criticizes Mary’s anointing of Jesus with expensive oil. Judas disguised his greed as concern for the poor — just like so many politicians today. When Jesus tells the rich young senator to go sell all, imagine him confronting Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi — these are they types he is warning about wealth. They talk about helping the poor but they game the system in their favor. People are right to be upset about how the economy today is rigged by the well connected elites, just as the people hated first century tax collectors for running a corrupt system, overcharging what the state required and pocketing the rest since no one could stop them. The powerful elites who prey upon those beneath them are condemned by Jesus — and should be condemned by us as well.
All that to say: It’s certainly true that Jesus cared for the poor and taught us to do the same. It is also true that he elevated heavenly treasure above earthly treasure. Caring for the poor, particularly fellow believers, is a Christian responsibility. But Jesus did not intend to make us feel guilty for enjoying wealth gained through hard and honest work. Ecclesiastes stresses that we are free to enjoy the fruits of our labors. 1 Timothy 6 makes the same point when it teaches that God provides all things richly for our enjoyment. There is a kind of asceticism that is demonic (1 Tim. 4), just as there is a kind of greed that is idolatrous (Col. 3:5). Jesus could be for or against wealth depending on how that wealth was acquired and how it was used. Wealth can be gained righteously or wickedly, and it can be used righteously or wickedly. There are righteous and wicked rich people, just like there are righteous and wicked poor people. The rich are not automatically condemned and the poor are not automatically justified. The world is more complicated than that.
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