Chapter 11: Wealth and the Poor

There is a way of reading the Bible that treats money as a side subject, one of many topics the Book gets around to when it has finished with the important ones. It is possible to sit in a pew for thirty years and come away with the impression that Scripture is chiefly interested in the interior life of the individual soul, and that its remarks about wealth and poverty are moral seasoning, sprinkled here and there for flavor. That reading requires a great deal of ignoring. When you actually sit down with the Book and count, money is the second most common subject in the Gospels, behind only the kingdom of God itself, and often the two topics are the same conversation. Something like one in every ten verses in the New Testament touches, in some way, on possessions. The Torah begins its social legislation with the poor. The prophets die on the hill of the poor. The Psalms sing about the poor. Jesus opens his ministry by preaching good news to the poor, and closes it by warning that the sheep and the goats are separated on the basis of what they did for the poor. If money is a side subject in the Bible, then the Bible has an unusual definition of "side."

I want to walk carefully through what the Book actually teaches about wealth and poverty, and then set that beside what a great deal of Conservative American Christianity teaches, and let the reader draw the line between them. This is not an argument about economic policy. This is an argument about what the Book says. If a movement wants to disagree with the Book, that is a decision the movement can make, but the movement should not then claim the Book as its warrant.

The Torah Tilts the Field

The first thing the Torah does with wealth is refuse to let it settle. The whole economic architecture of Leviticus and Deuteronomy is a set of levers designed to keep any one family, tribe, or class from accumulating enough advantage to grind the others into permanent poverty. The Torah does not idealize equality of income. It idealizes something more radical: the impossibility of permanent underclasses.

Read Leviticus 19:9-10 out loud. When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings after your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and the alien. That is not charity. Charity is what happens when the wealthy decide, on their own timetable, to give a portion of what is theirs to those who have less. This is different. The gleanings never belonged to the landowner in the first place. God, whose land it is, has already assigned a portion of every harvest to the poor and to the foreigner before the reaping even begins. The landowner's job is not to be generous. The landowner's job is to not reach into a portion of the harvest that was never his.

Deuteronomy 15 goes further. Every seven years, debts are canceled (Deut 15:1-2). Every seven years, Hebrew servants are freed, and they are not to be sent away empty-handed. You shall furnish them liberally out of your flock, out of your threshing floor, and out of your winepress (Deut 15:13-14). The reason is stated plainly: you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt (Deut 15:15). The whole economic memory of the nation is supposed to keep it from becoming to others what Pharaoh was to them.

Leviticus 25 raises the stakes again. Every fiftieth year, a Jubilee. Land returns to the families that originally held it. Debt slaves go home. The accumulation clock resets. The land is mine, God says, for you are strangers and sojourners with me (Lev 25:23). Human beings do not ultimately own land. They lease it from the God who owns it, and the terms of the lease include a periodic redistribution.

Whether Israel actually kept Jubilee is debated. Many scholars think it was more aspiration than practice. That is beside the point. The point is that this is what the Book put on the page as the ideal. This is the economic imagination the Torah wanted its people to carry. When Christians say they take the Bible seriously, this is what they are saying they take seriously. A tradition that reads Leviticus with a magnifying glass for the two verses about sexuality and blows past thirty chapters of economic legislation about the poor has not taken the Book seriously. It has taken the parts of the Book that flatter it seriously. That is a different thing.

The Prophets Do Not Whisper

If the Torah tilts the field, the Prophets patrol it. They walk the marketplace and the palace and they take names.

Amos, a shepherd from a small town, walks into the wealthy northern kingdom during a boom and gets loud. Hear this word, you cows of Bashan who are on the mountain of Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to your husbands, bring, that we may drink (Amos 4:1). The image is brutal on purpose. Comfortable people, fattened on the labor of the poor, calling for another round. Amos hates their worship. I hate, I despise your festivals, God says through him. Take away from me the noise of your songs. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream (Amos 5:21-24). If your religion is loud and your ethics are corrupt, God is not moved by the volume. He is offended by it.

Isaiah says the same thing another way. Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land (Isa 5:8). The prophet is describing what today would be called consolidation, the slow legal process by which the wealthy buy up everything until the neighborhood has one owner and no neighbors. Isaiah does not congratulate the winners. He curses them.

Micah asks the question directly. What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8). Not to accumulate. Not to prosper. Not to demonstrate God's favor through your bank balance. Justice, mercy, humility. Three things, and none of them appear on the prosperity gospel's mood board.

Ezekiel, in one of the most inconvenient passages in the whole Bible for the modern American conscience, names what actually destroyed Sodom. Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy (Ezek 16:49). If you had asked most American Christians what Sodom's sin was, they would have named something else, quickly and confidently. The Book names something quieter. Pride. Overeating. Comfortable prosperity. A refusal to help the poor at the gate. That is the sin the fire fell on. If a Christian is not shaken by that verse, that Christian has not read that verse.

Jesus Preaches Good News to the Poor

Jesus opens his public ministry, in Luke's telling, by standing up in the synagogue at Nazareth, unrolling the scroll of Isaiah, and reading the passage about the anointed one who has come to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor (Luke 4:18-19). That last phrase is Jubilee language. He is announcing, on his opening day, that he has come to do for the whole world what Leviticus 25 tried to do for one nation.

Then he sits down and says, today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing (Luke 4:21).

Everything Jesus says about money afterward is a footnote to that opening. In Luke 6, he does not say blessed are the poor in spirit. He says blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God (Luke 6:20), and then he adds a second half most sermons skip. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry (Luke 6:24-25). If those two verses were preached with the same energy as the verses about personal purity, half the megachurches in the country would empty by lunch.

The rich young ruler comes running up, kneels, and asks the eternal question. Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17). Jesus takes him through the commandments. The man says he has kept them all from his youth. Then Mark records a sentence that ought to stop every reader cold. Jesus, looking at him, loved him (Mark 10:21). This is not an angry Jesus. This is a Jesus who sees him and loves him and, out of love, tells him the one thing he does not want to hear. You lack one thing. Go, sell what you own, give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me (Mark 10:21). The man's face falls. He walks away sorrowful, because he had many possessions (Mark 10:22).

Jesus watches him go and turns to his disciples with the line that has been embarrassing wealthy Christians for two thousand years. How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God (Mark 10:23). And when the disciples look shocked, he doubles down. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God (Mark 10:25).

I have heard, over the years, more sermons on that verse than I can count. Nearly all of them work very hard to make it mean something other than what it says. There is the tour-guide sermon about a supposed narrow gate in Jerusalem, called the Eye of the Needle, through which a camel could squeeze with difficulty. That gate does not exist and never existed. It is a nineteenth-century invention repeated because it comforts the comfortable. There is the sermon about how Jesus was using hyperbole so we should not take the wealth part too literally. There is the sermon that pivots quickly to "with God all things are possible" and lets everyone off the hook. What there almost never is, in the average American pulpit, is a sermon that lets the verse do what it plainly does, which is warn wealthy people, in the strongest possible language, that their wealth is a spiritual danger to them.

The parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:13-21) does the same work in narrative form. A man's fields produce a great harvest. He decides to tear down his barns and build bigger ones, so he can store his surplus and say to his soul, take your ease, eat, drink, be merry. God calls him a fool and takes his life that night. So is anyone who stores up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God (Luke 12:21). Notice what the fool did not do. He did not commit fraud. He did not oppress anyone. He simply built bigger barns for his surplus rather than sharing it with the people who had none. That was enough for God to call him a fool.

Then there is Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31). The rich man wears purple and fine linen and feasts every day. Lazarus, a poor man covered in sores, lies at his gate, longing to eat what falls from the table. Both men die. Lazarus is carried to Abraham's bosom. The rich man is in torment. The rich man never insulted Lazarus. He never had him removed. The story does not accuse him of anything except this: Lazarus was at his gate every day, and he did not see him. That was the sin. Not seeing the poor man at the gate is a sin that damns.

None of this is subtle. It is not encoded. It does not require a specialized hermeneutic to unlock. It is on the surface of the text. The problem is not that these teachings are hard to find. The problem is that they are hard to preach in a room full of comfortable people who write the checks.

The Early Church Practiced What Its Founder Preached

The Book of Acts records something so radical that most American Christians read it and quietly assume it does not apply. All who believed were together and had all things in common; and they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need (Acts 2:44-45). A few chapters later: there was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need (Acts 4:34-35). The community of Christ, in its first days, took the Jubilee vision that Israel never quite implemented and did it, voluntarily, in Jerusalem. Not by legal compulsion. By the joyful conviction that resurrection had made private accumulation absurd.

James, writing to scattered believers, is even blunter. Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted, your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts (James 5:1-4). If your Bible has a page for that passage, look at it. It is in there. It is not marked "for other people."

Paul organizes an offering across his Gentile churches for the poor believers in Jerusalem and treats it as one of the central acts of his ministry (2 Cor 8-9, Rom 15:25-27). His theology of that offering is not "generous people go to heaven." His theology is that the church is one body, that abundance in one place is meant to relieve need in another, and that the goal, quoting Exodus, is that the one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little (2 Cor 8:15). Paul's economics are the economics of manna. Enough for everyone, none for hoarders.

Paul also tells Timothy that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and that some, in their eagerness for it, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs (1 Tim 6:10). That verse is often quoted in isolation to make it sound like a general observation. It is not a general observation. It is a specific warning to Christians about a specific danger that Christians are not immune to and are, in some ways, more susceptible to. Paul instructs the wealthy in the same chapter: charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share (1 Tim 6:17-18). Wealth in the New Testament is not a sign of blessing to be celebrated. It is a spiritual condition to be treated, and the treatment is generosity, humility, and an active refusal to trust in it.

The Prosperity Gospel Reads a Different Book

Set that testimony beside what a large sector of Conservative American Christianity has taught for the last two generations, and the contradiction is not subtle. The prosperity gospel, which began as a fringe teaching in the middle of the twentieth century and is now a mainstream religious product in the United States and around the world, teaches that God's will is for his people to be wealthy, that poverty is a sign of insufficient faith, and that giving to the ministry is a spiritual investment that will return material dividends. The version of Christianity broadcast from certain arenas and cable channels tells the sick that they are ill because they have not believed enough, tells the poor that they are poor because they have not sown enough seed into the right offering plate, and tells the wealthy that their private planes are the visible proof of God's approval.

There is no serious way to reconcile any of that with the actual Bible. It is not a matter of interpretation. It is not a matter of emphasis. It is a matter of the words on the page. The prosperity gospel takes the verses that promise blessing in the Old Testament covenants, ignores that those promises were made to a specific nation under a specific covenant, ignores that the same covenants attached those blessings to caring for the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner, ignores that Jesus told his followers not to store up treasures on earth, ignores that James warned the wealthy to weep and howl, ignores that Paul called the love of money a root of all kinds of evil, and preaches, on the strength of a few dislocated verses, a religion that is essentially the American dream with a stained-glass window pasted onto the front.

Even outside the explicit prosperity gospel, a softer version of the same distortion has become the ambient theology of a great deal of Conservative American Christianity. It shows up in the moralizing of poverty, in the reflexive assumption that the poor are poor because they are lazy or immoral or making bad choices, in the resistance to any public policy that would move resources toward the poor, in the theological suspicion of the word "redistribution," in the strange willingness to defend the wealth of a boastful leader as if it were evidence of God's favor. It shows up in the way churches invite the wealthy to sit in the front row and quietly move the poor to the pantry in the back. It shows up in the way pastors preach against luxury in the abstract and drive luxury cars in the concrete.

What the Book Would Ask of a Church That Believed It

If a church actually read what the Book says about wealth and the poor, and let that reading form its life, several things would change quickly.

It would stop preaching wealth as evidence of God's approval. It would begin to read wealth, especially large wealth, as a spiritual condition that requires the treatment the New Testament prescribes: humility, generosity, and detachment.

It would stop treating charity as an optional add-on and start treating it as an obligation embedded in the ownership of anything. The gleanings never belonged to the landowner. The Jubilee resets the clock. The tithe of the harvest is not the whole of the requirement. If your congregation is not, as a matter of ordinary practice, actively moving resources from those who have to those who do not, your congregation has not read Leviticus.

It would stop moralizing poverty. It would notice that the prophets never explained the poverty of the poor as their own fault. It would notice that Jesus never once told a poor person he was poor because of his sin. It would notice that the Book blames poverty on the wealthy far more often than it blames it on the poor.

It would stop letting the wealthy hide inside their wealth. It would ask, gently but persistently, what portion of your income is being kept back from the workers who produced it, whether by law or by custom or by the polite arithmetic of contemporary corporate practice. It would ask what portion of the surplus is being stored in bigger barns rather than being distributed to those in need. It would ask whether your comfort is being purchased by someone else's discomfort, somewhere down the supply chain, in a field or a factory or a warehouse you have never seen.

It would preach, from the pulpit, the actual words of the actual Jesus about actual money, without softening them and without explaining them away. Sell your possessions and give to the poor (Luke 12:33). You cannot serve God and money (Matt 6:24). Blessed are you who are poor. Woe to you who are rich. And when a wealthy person came to it wanting eternal life, the church would tell that person the truth Jesus told the rich young ruler, and then it would love him enough to let him walk away sorrowful, if that is what he had to do, and it would not chase him with a modified gospel that let him keep everything and follow Jesus too.

None of this requires the church to become a political party. It does not require the church to endorse a specific economic system. It does not require the church to hate the wealthy or romanticize the poor. It only requires the church to read its own Book and to let the Book form its imagination about money.

The reason it does not is not that the Book is unclear. The reason it does not is that the Book is very clear, and that clarity would cost the movement most of its donors, most of its buildings, most of its influence, and most of its comfortable arrangement with the way things are. A movement that decided, tomorrow, to preach the Bible on wealth would look, within a decade, nothing like the movement that exists today. That, and only that, is what stands between the American church and the Bible on this subject.

You are the one holding the Book. You do not have to wait for the movement to turn. You can begin to read what is on the page and let it work on you, in your own accounts, in your own giving, in your own imagination about your own money. The Book has been waiting on the shelf for the movement for a long time. It is not going anywhere. It will be waiting for you when you open it.

Where do your ethics actually live?

That question is coming for us in a few chapters. On the subject of money, it may already have found you.