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God problems 3: WHEN JESUS accepts God’s call, one of the many things he gives up is security. Presumably, he could have been a carpenter, with a family business, a home, wife and children. Instead, during his earthly ministry, Jesus is without any visible means of support. We don’t know to what extent he lived simply on donations from followers and collections from the crowds to whom he spoke. He had, as far as we can see, no fixed home. “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” he says (Matthew 8.20). This is all very well for him, we feel. After all, he’s a single man with no dependants. But what about the disciples? On at least one occasion, he sends the disciples out on preaching and healing missions, with specific instructions that they are to take no money with them, and they are not to take payment for what they do, though they can accept hospitality (see Matthew 10.5-15). He obviously feels that this kind of insecurity is a necessary part of their training. And there are enough sayings about the dangers of wealth to make us realise that Jesus was very suspicious of the lure of money. (Matthew 6.21 and 19.21-26 are just obvious examples, which could be paralleled in the other Gospels, too.) “Money” is a shorthand word for all kinds of things to do with how we choose to live our lives, and, in particular, it represents all the things that mean security and status for us. In our society, money talks. Possessions, status and wealth are signs of how much we are valued. “What’s he worth?” we ask, meaning not, “What’s his worth as a person, a human being?” but “How much money does he have?” People who have no money are often people with no voice in our world. Money talks; poverty is silent. But the Gospels suggest that, for God, it’s the other way round. “It’s harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” we read. In God’s eyes, wealth is an impediment, not an enabler. So, as we face God’s call to us this Lent, money is going to come into it, I’m afraid, together with all the associated things that make up our security. The saying from the Sermon on the Mount is at the centre of this challenge. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Many Christians are like the rich young ruler. They try faithfully to keep all the commandments, and to be good and honest neighbours. They tithe, support charities, give generously to the Church. They talk of “stewardship”, paying proper lip-service to the idea that all that we have really belongs to God, and we just look after it for him. Yet we like to think that Jesus’s advice to the rich young man — go and sell all that you have, and give it to the poor — does not apply to us. Few of us feel called to a life of radical insecurity, and few of us, in our heart of hearts, believe that the starving people of Africa will find it easier, simply because they are poor, to get into the Kingdom of Heaven than we will, with all our good deeds. Yet that seems to be what Jesus is saying. Most of us who live in the West are fabulously wealthy and comfortable by the standards that most of the rest of the world has to live by. This is where our treasure is. Without it, we would hardly know who we were. We would not know our worth. Nor does this just apply to us as individuals. The institutionalised Churches, even in these days of comparatively straitened circumstances, are still hung about with possessions, palaces, silver and gold, in ways that are hard to justify in terms of the gospel. How can we be sure where our heart lies, when we have so much treasure? How can we preach the gospel of radical dependence on God alone, when everyone watching us can see that we actually measure people’s worth in exactly the same way as the rest of the non-Christian world? For us to have what we consider to be enough — in the bank, for a rainy day, in the fridge in case we get peckish — other people must starve to death. We know this, and we have decided to live with it. We won’t think about what God will say to us on the day of judgement. We need somehow to get our imaginations round the idea that God measures completely differently. When we depend upon something that is not him, we deny a basic truth about our created existence. We are here only because God made us and loves us, and, without his sustaining life, no bank balance, however enormous, would keep us in existence. In fact, our bank balances might have the opposite effect. Lent task READ Matthew 25.31-46. Hear God’s calling to live more generously. Give up one thing that you think you can’t manage without — a holiday abroad, a spare TV? Support someone living in much more radical dependence — give money and prayer to Christian Aid, Oxfam, or a mission society.
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