This is one of the wittiest stories in the Bible and must be read with some sense of humor. The tenant farmers of a great estate paid their rent in shares of the produce. This elastic system offered the steward a chance to make something on the side. He was found out and discharged, but while he was closing up his accounts he still had a short spell of authority.
Things looked dark. He did not care to blister his white hands with a hoe-handle, nor his social pride by begging. So he grafted one last graft, but on so large a scale that the tenants would be under lasting obligations to him. The scamp was a crook, but at least he was long-headed. Jesus wished the children of light were as clever in taking a long look ahead as the children of this world. In that case men would get ready for the new age, in which mammon loses its buying power, by making friends with it now, and their friends would take them in as guests after the great reversal.
How do you like the humorous independence of Jesus?
Seventh Day: Stranded on His Wealth
And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? none is good, save one, even G.o.d. Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor thy father and mother. And he said, All these things have I observed from my youth up. And when Jesus heard it, he said unto him, One thing thou lackest yet: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me. But when he heard these things, he became exceeding sorrowful; for he was very rich.
And Jesus seeing him said, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of G.o.d! For it is easier for a camel to enter in through a needle"s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of G.o.d.-Luke 18:18-25.
A fine young man, of clean and conscientious life, but with unsatisfied aspirations in his soul. Jesus invites him to a more heroic type of excellence, cutting loose from his wealth and devoting himself to the apostolate of the Kingdom of G.o.d. It was a great chance for a great life.
He might have stood for G.o.d before kings and mobs, and ranked with Peter, John, and Paul as a household name. He did not rise to his chance. What held him? Jesus felt it was his wealth. A poor man would have had less to leave, and might have left it cheerfully. So Jesus sums up the psychological situation in the saddened exclamation that it is exceedingly hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom where men live in justice, fraternity, and idealism.
Have you noticed that in recent years an increasing number of this man"s grandsons are trying to cut loose and find the real life, eternal life?
Can you name any?
Study for the Week
Evidently the dangers connected with property were much in the mind of Jesus. He seems to have emphasized them more fully and frequently than the evils of licentiousness or drunkenness. The modern Church has reversed the relative emphasis. Why?
Of course we must not look for the methods or viewpoints of political economy in his teachings. His concern was for the spiritual vitality and soundness of the individual, and for the human relations existing among men. He was interested in property only in so far as it corrupted the higher nature or made fraternity difficult. But let no one underestimate the importance of these considerations. These things are the real end of life. All the rest is scaffolding. We should be farther along if the economic and social sciences had kept these fundamental questions more sternly in sight.
I
Plainly Jesus felt that the acquisitive instinct, like the s.e.x instinct, easily breaks bounds and becomes ravenous; there is even less natural limit to it. It absorbs the energies of intellect and will. As with the rich fool, the horizon of life is filled with chances to make the pile grow bigger. Life seems to consist of money, and the problems of money.
People are valued according to that standard. Marriages are arranged for it. Politics is run for it. Wars are begun for it. Creative artistic and intellectual impulses are shouldered aside, fall asleep, or die of inanition. Property is intended to secure freedom of action and self-development; in fact, it often chains men and clips their wings. This is what Jesus calls "the deceitfulness of riches" and "the darkening of the inner eye."(2)
In addition to the blight of character, wealth exerts a desocializing and divisive influence. It wedges apart groups that belong together. Dives and Lazarus may live in the front and rear of the same block, but with no sense of solidarity. Dives would have been deeply moved, perhaps, if one of his own cla.s.s had punctured a tire in the Philistian desert and gone for two days without any food except crumbs. The separation of humanity into cla.s.ses on the lines of wealth is so universal and so orthodox that few of us ever realize that it flouts all the principles of Christianity and humanity.
In the case of the young ruler Jesus encountered the fact that wealth bars men out of the world of their ideals. The question was not whether the young man could get to heaven, but whether he could have a share in the real life, in the kingdom of right relations. It is hard to acquire great wealth without doing injustice to others; it is hard to possess it and yet deal with others on the basis of equal humanity; it is hard to give it away even without doing mischief.
We have seen that Jesus believed profoundly in the value and dignity of human life; that he sought to create solidarity; that he was chiefly concerned for the saving of the lowly; and that he demanded an heroic life in the service of the Kingdom of G.o.d. But wealth, as he saw it, flouted the value of life, dissolved the spiritual solidarity of whole cla.s.ses, and kept the lowly low; the wealthy had lost the capacity for an heroic life.
This is radical teaching. What shall we say to it? Jesus is backed by the Old Testament prophets and the most spiritual teaching of the Hebrew people, which condemned injustice and extortionate money-making even more energetically than did Jesus. Medieval Christianity sincerely a.s.sented to the principle that private property is a danger to the soul and a neutralizer of love. Every monastic community tried to cut under s.e.x dangers by celibacy, and property dangers by communism. This was an enormous misinterpretation of Christianity, but it shows that men took the teachings on the dangers of private property seriously. The modern Christian world does not. It has quietly set aside the ideas of Jesus on this subject, lives its life without much influence from them, and contents itself with emphasizing other aspects.
Has the teaching of Jesus on private property been superseded by a better understanding of the social value of property? Or has his teaching been suppressed and swamped by the universal covetousness of modern life? "Our moral pace-setters strike at bad personal habits, but act as if there was something sacred about money-getting; and, _seeing that the master iniquities of our time are connected with money-making_, they do not get into the fight at all. The child-drivers, monopoly-builders, and crooked financiers have no fear of men whose thought is run in the moulds of their grandfathers. Go to the tainted-money colleges, and you will learn that Drink, not Graft, is the nation"s bane" (Edward A. Ross, "Sin and Society, an a.n.a.lysis of Latter-day Iniquity," p. 97-the italics are his).
II
The machinery for making money which Jesus knew, was simple, crude, and puny compared with the complicated and pervasive system which the magnates of modern industry have built up. There was probably not a millionaire in all Palestine. What would he have said to our great cities?
We need a Christian ethics of property, more perhaps than anything else.
The wrongs connected with wealth are the most vulnerable point of our civilization. Unless we can make that crooked place straight, all our charities and religion are involved in hypocrisy.
We have to harmonize the two facts, that wealth is good and necessary, and that wealth is a danger to its possessor and to society. On the one hand property is indispensable to personal freedom, to all higher individuality, and to self-realization; the right to property is a corollary of the right to life; without property men are at the mercy of nature and in bondage to those who have property. On the other hand property is used as a means of collecting tribute and private taxes, as a club with which to extort unearned gain from laborers and consumers, and as the fundamental tool of oppression.
Where do we draw the line? Is it true that property created by productive labor is a great moralizer, and that property acquired without productive labor is the great demoralizer? Is it correct that property for use is on the whole good, and property for power is a menace?
What is the relation between property and self-development? At what point does property become excessive? At what point does food become excessive and poisonous? At what point does fertilizer begin to kill a plant? Would any real social values be lost if incomes averaged $2,000 and none exceeded $10,000?
To what extent does a moral purpose take the dangers out of acquisition?
Is any life moral in which the natural capacities are not sincerely taxed to do productive work? If a man"s wealth is destined to cut his descendants off from productive labor, is it a blessing? What is the moral difference between strenuous occupation and labor? How large a proportion of our time and energy can be devoted to play and leisure without softening our moral fiber?
At what points does private property come to be anti-social? If we could eliminate the monopoly elements and the capacity to levy tribute, would there be much danger in the remainder?
Does private property, in the enormous aggregations of today and in control of the essential outfit of society, still correspond to the essential theoretical conception of private property, or have public properties and public functions fallen under private control? "Much that we are accustomed to hear called legitimate insistence upon the rights of property, the Old Testament would seem to call the robbery of G.o.d, and grinding the faces of the poor" (The Bishop of Oxford).
III
The religious spirit will always have to call the individual farther than the law can compel him to go. After all unjust and tainted portions have been eliminated from our property, religion lays its hands on the rest and says, "You are only a steward over this." In the parables of the talents, the pounds, and the unjust steward, Jesus argues on the a.s.sumption that our resources are a trust, and not absolute property. We manage and control them, but always under responsibility. We hold them from G.o.d, and his will has eminent domain. But the will of G.o.d is identical with the good of mankind. When we hold property in trust for G.o.d, we hold it for humanity, of which we are part. We misuse the trust if by it we deprive others of health, freedom, joy, hope, or efficiency, for instance, by overworking others and underworking our own children.
Suggestions for Thought and Discussion
I. _The Love of Money_
1. Define graft. What is wrong in it? Where do we see it? Where are we myopic about it?
2. Why did Jesus have so much to say about money and so little about drink? Why does Paul call the love of money "the root of all evil"?
II. _Jesus" Fear of Riches_
1. On what ground does Jesus fear the influence of riches and of their acc.u.mulation?
2. Summarize Jesus" teachings regarding wealth.
3. In what respects is his att.i.tude different from the ordinary viewpoint of the modern world?
4. Was Jesus opposed to the owning of farming tools or fishing smacks?
Where would he draw the line between honest earnings and dangerous wealth?
5. Was his teaching on wealth ascetic? Was it socialistic?