Attitudes to the Wealthy and the Poor. Luke 11: 1-13
Some of you may have noticed that the Archbishop of Canterbury has made the headlines because of his desire to tackle pay-day loan companies, particularly a company called Wonga.com. It’s this company that the Archbishop hopes to ‘compete out of business’ by creating a culture of credit unions that lend money at fair rates of interest and thus help to prevent people getting locked in a cycle of ever-increasing debt and poverty.
Unfortunately this announcement was followed by the embarrassing revelation that the Church of England has £75,000 of its pension fund invested in a company that helps to bank-roll Wonga.com.
Cue all sorts of articles and blogs about how the Church of England is mired in hypocrisy. Actually it depends on what newspaper you read – in some Archbishop Justin is portrayed as hopelessly hypocritical and in others he is at last taking a stand on moral issues that actually matter! Justin Welby: hero and/or villain.
I often read the Guardian, which is not noted for its accuracy when reporting on religious matters at the best of times and I sometimes get frustrated with what appears to be the journalists deliberate misrepresentation of the issue in order to get the ‘angle’ on the story that they want. I have to remind myself that a journalist’s job is ultimately to sell newspapers, not to necessarily tell us the whole story.
One of the great comments I often see is, “I thought Jesus threw the money-lenders out of the Temple, not set up a rival lending company at a better rate of interest!” – a masterpiece of totally misunderstanding what Jesus was doing when He challenged the culture of Temple Tax, and what Archbishop Justin is trying to do by encouraging credit unions.
What Jesus was doing was breaking down the barriers that prevented the poor from properly participating in the worship of the Temple – people would have to change their currency into Temple Money, often at excessive exchange rates, before they could make their offering.
By challenging this Jesus was in effect trying to stop money-lenders from profiting from people’s desire to worship God. Whenever Jesus talks about money, it is as a necessity of life, and He acknowledges that even religious institutions need to have money in order to operate, but whether you give money or not, or how much, should never be related to whether you can worship God or not – this was the central point Jesus was making.
When Jesus said that you cannot serve both God and Money he meant that faith and wealth are not two sides of the same coin (excuse the pun) – our faith is not measured by how much we give financially, neither is our material wealth a sign of how much God loves us. Wealth and prosperity are given to us to use for the benefit of all, but greed and wealth accumulation can threaten to alienate us from the purposes of God. Remember the story of the poor widow who puts two copper coins in the Temple coffers, and how Jesus says that she has given more than all the others who gave out of their vast wealth.
This attitude of Jesus towards wealth and the purposes of God stood in stark contrast to the Roman pagan understanding that the rich and socially superior were favoured by the gods. Jesus turns this idea completely upside-down, “Blessed are the poor”, and “woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your reward”.
But despite the fact that Jesus completely rubbishes this idea that material wealth is somehow a sign of divine favour, this pagan ideal lives on today – we still live in a society that considers rich people to be somehow better than poor people, that rich people are more deserving, and we hear this constant rhetoric of the ‘workers versus the shirkers’, the implication being that if you’re poor its because you don’t work hard enough.
And in that social climate it is easy to prey on people’s fear of not having money, of being seen to be poor. And that is where pay-day lending companies target their business – don’t have enough money for that new phone? Just borrow it, and pay it back next month. Sounds simple, but when loans are taken out to pay back other loans, then it quickly becomes like quicksand pulling increasingly desperate people further and further into debt.
So to provide a solution to this problem Archbishop Justin is suggesting that we need to accept the realities of credit but to use the fundamental basis of capitalism – that the market will regulate itself – to challenge the worst excesses of the capitalist system. In other words, if people need to borrow money let’s at least make sure that it’s at an interest rate that won’t trap them into a cycle of ever-increasing debt.
A pragmatic solution, one that echoes Jesus’ teaching on money – it is a necessity of life but it should not come to dominate us.
But what is left unspoken in Archbishop Justin’s plan, and what I think has largely gone unnoticed by the media, is Jesus’ challenge to how society views the poor, because it is not how God sees the poor. Taking a stand against those who profit from other people’s desperation is one thing, challenging the social convention that poor people are somehow inferior is something else. And yet today’s Gospel reading hints at how God sees not just the poor, but all people. All we have comes from God. In that sense we are all poor, because none of anything we have actually belongs to us, it belongs to God. If we ask for what we need, God will provide. What we NEED, not necessarily what we WANT.
Focussing on need and not want is a great leveller – we all need food, air, water, clothing, love. These things come to us from God. If we can challenge the idea that poor people are somehow inferior, then we also challenge the idea that wealth accumulation is a good thing, and we can start to think in terms of what we need again, instead of what we want. There will be no more trying to keep up with the latest things, whatever they might be. Instead we are able to reflect God’s concern for all people.
Amen.
Rev’d Phil Morton.