Jesus Changes Everything: What About Wealth?
None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.
Luke 14:33
To be rich and a disciple of Jesus is to have a problem. Christians have often tried to deal with this by arguing that it is not what we possess that is the problem but our attitude toward what we possess. Some recommend, for example, that we learn to possess what we possess as if it were not really ours. This means we must always be ready to give out of our abundance or even to lose all that we have. Christians are told that it is not wealth or power that is the problem; we must just be good stewards of our wealth and power.
However, Jesus is very clear. Wealth is a problem. “You cannot serve both God and mammon” (Matt 6:24). That capitalism is a system justified by the production of wealth is therefore not necessarily good news for Christians. Christians have rightly criticized capitalist systems for wrongs done to the poor and to those exploited in the name of producing wealth. But as Alasdair MacIntyre observes in his book Marxism and Christianity, the biblical point of view is such that being or becoming rich is an affliction, “an almost insuperable obstacle to entering the kingdom of heaven. Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them.”
MacIntyre’s observations are obviously contentious and controversial, but they are right in line with Christ’s warning against riches. “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!” (Luke 18:24).
We pray for our daily bread, not our comforts and wishes. In other words, we must learn what it means to live in a community of trust. Such a community teaches us habits that draw us away from the forms of greed given legitimacy by capitalist practices and ideologies that are sustained by each person pursuing his or her self-interest. To be formed in the virtues and by the prayer for our daily bread means that followers of Christ cannot help but appear as a threat to those invested in a system that aims to generate wealth and personal profit. Jesus’ disciples do not seek to be subversives; it just turns out that taking Jesus seriously cannot help but challenge the way things are, not to mention how we use our credit cards.
The parable of the sower (Matt 13) is about wealth. Interestingly, this parable is not often considered by those concerned with the decline in the church’s status and membership in our increasingly secular society. It is hard to imagine, however, any text more relevant to our situation today. Why the church is diminishing and dying, why Christian witness has become so anemic and co-opted, seems very simple. It is hard to be a disciple and be rich. Surely, we may think, it cannot be that simple, but Jesus certainly seems to think it is. The lure of wealth and the cares of this world produced by wealth quite simply darken and choke our imaginations.
Too often those who propose strategies to recover the relevance of the church do so hoping that people can be attracted to Christ without facing the demands of self-sacrifice. For a time, they may be joyful about being saved, but such joy cannot survive persecution, nor can it survive “the deceitfulness of wealth.” The shallow character of many strategies for renewal is revealed in the fact that Christians cannot imagine how following Christ might put them in tension with a middle-class way of life. They mistakenly assume that securing a “good life,” if not a sign of God’s blessing, is at least a legitimate pursuit.
Accordingly, I do not think it a radical suggestion that this parable rightly helps us read the situation of the church in America as Jesus’ judgment on that church. Today’s church simply is not a soil capable of growing deep roots. It may seem odd that wealth makes it impossible for the word to take root. Wealth, we assume, should create the power to do much good in the world. But wealth stills the imagination because we are not forced, as the first disciples of Jesus were, to be an alternative to the world that only necessity can create. Possessed by our possessions, we desire to act in the world, often on behalf of the poor, without having to lose our possessions.
According to Jesus, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God (Matt 19:24). Our temptation is to think that Jesus’ further remark, “with God all things are possible” (v. 26), is intended to let us off the hook. Yet such a response fails to let the full weight of Jesus’ observation about wealth have the effect it should. Jesus’ reply challenges not only our wealth but our very conception of salvation. To be saved, to be made a member of the church through baptism, means that our lives are no longer our own. We are made vulnerable to one another in a manner such that what is ours can no longer be free of the claims of others. As hard as it may be to believe, Jesus makes clear that salvation entails our being made vulnerable through the loss of our possessions. As followers of him, we are actually meant to depend on each other. My plenty supplies your need, and my need is supplied by your plenty (2 Cor 8:13–15). A wealth that depends on and ensures our independence from each other is in stark contrast to the new creation.
The story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 makes clear that Jesus means what he says. Ananias and Sapphira are members of the church. They sell a piece of property, but they keep some of the proceeds for themselves, refusing to tell the church all that they had made from selling their property. When Ananias brings some of the money to the church, Peter challenges him for lying to the church. In response to Peter’s accusation, Ananias drops dead, soon to be followed by his wife, who undergoes the same sequence of events. Note well: it is our possessions that encourage us to lie, making impossible the trust necessary to be Jesus’ disciples. To be saved, to be part of the body of Christ, is to participate in a people who make truthful speech with one another not only possible but necessary.
If you want to know the Christian commentary on “You shall not steal,” read James 5:1–6:
Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure during the last days. Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.
Of course, our defense is, “We’re not really rich. The really rich are those with millions, whereas we just have thousands. We, moreover, give to this or that charity. We do not think of ourselves as deserving such harsh judgment as James pronounces. We’re simply trying to get along.”
We take no pleasure in pointing out that we fail to tell ourselves the truth about our wealth. There is every reason to want to hide the truth from ourselves. Lying and riches seem to work hand in hand. Indeed, to be wealthy is to be encouraged to hide the truth from ourselves. For example, what is more deceptive than the presumption that I really don’t want all that I have, that I’m just trying to prepare a good life for my children?
We are told, “Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you” (Matt 5:42), and we do not think that could be a policy. But just to the extent that we do not think it always could be enacted in our lives, we become thieves. As Saint John Chrysostom declared, “Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours but theirs” (Homily on Lazarus 2.5).
We can offer no easy solutions, since we ourselves feel so caught. We know that at the very least we must cease telling ourselves lies about our position. Calvin noted that there is more to being a redeemed rich person than simply not wanting to increase one’s gain; rather, it is imperative for us to be poor in our hearts. “Unless we . . . be content with our goods, which God has put in our hands, without abandoning our hearts to them, of necessity we will always be thieves.”
Of course, the great trick is to know how to have possessions without “abandoning our hearts to them.” We can tell ourselves we are ready to lose all that we have, or at least a good deal of it, but how would we know?
Christians have always thought the development of the virtues of temperance and justice to be crucial for not being possessed by our possessions. Temperance—that is, moderate attachment to the world’s goods—and the pursuit of justice—limiting our desires in order to pursue our neighbors’ good as well as increasing our desire to render them what is their due—are the ways we learn to be a people who are not guilty of theft. To be able to say “enough is enough” and to see our neighbor’s need as a claim upon our possessions are great, though difficult, virtues. Such virtues are necessary if we are not to be possessed by the lust for gain that otherwise seizes our lives.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Jesus Changes Everything: A New World Made Possible (Plough Publishing House, 2025). All rights reserved.