riches

Love scatters money

The lover of money sneers at the Gospel, and is a willful transgressor. He who has attained to love scatters his money. But he who says that he lives for love and for money has deceived himself. — St. John Climacus

Comment: the overturning of the moneychangers tables is a sign of this.

The Eye of a Needle

EdieI once had a spiritual advisor, Edie, and among the things that she helped me with was this: I was starting to lose heart, because I was poor. The people around me had been saying that it’s a sign of God’s judgment on me, and that I should be ashamed because I couldn’t pay my bills, and was in debt, and had to pay late fees all the time. It’s so easy for the poor to become demoralized about being poor, but especially when the people of God are against you. But Edie gave the scriptures back to me. She read the Gospel to me and asked me, “Who are the poor?” Then she answered, “They are those who cannot pay their bills, who are in debt, and who have to pay interest and penalties all the time. It was this way even when Christ walked among the poor.” She added, “you cannot despise yourself for being poor, because then you would be despising the very thing that Christ does not despise. And as for judgment, it is those who despise the poor that Christ said he would judge. So love the poor, and be poor, and don’t despise anyone, and be saved.”

Anthony CampoloOver the years, I began to hear another luminary, Tony Campolo. He showed me how I live in the wealthiest nation in the world, or at least the most gluttonous, even if it is really on borrowed loot. “You know and I know that most of what we spend in any given year is spent on stuff that we don’t need.” Campolo showed me my poverty as riches compared to the truly poor of the world. I have always been able to eat, but there are mothers watching their children wither in their arms and their whole families die, because they cannot even find water. Here, it would be hard to find a poor dwelling without cable TV. Others in the world can’t even imagine owning something so valuable as a TV; an inexpensive one here would feed a family there for a year.

Then eventually, I began again to listen to the Gospel itself, with ears unstuck, and I could hear Christ. I don’t mean any kind of ecstatic vision. I mean I could hear the simple words and see them in the present. And that’s when I realized that the poor are not only the hungry. They are those deprived of friendship or status (the stranger), of peace and comfort (the afflicted), of refuge (the naked and homeless). They are all those everywhere who want of grace, of the grace it has been given us to give them. The poor are covered with sores. They are the man of the tombs. They are the born blind and held in institutions. They are the abandoned spouse – the widow. The unwanted child – the orphan. The immigrant. They are those with a demon, the mentally ill, antisocial, illegal, hunted, turned against themselves and all men. And it is ever to the poor that Christ goes, ever with them that he concerns himself. I can hear Campolo say, “And you can’t be a Christian, unless you do likewise.” I can hear Edie say, “woe to those who despise the poor.” I can hear Christ, “inasmuch as ye have done it to the very least of all these – these my brethren…”

I look now on the emptiness of my years, the meaninglessness of what I have spent so much of myself upon, since that is the currency for which even the ‘poor’ man can give account. I have been given the riches of my life, the abundance of my temporal existence. On what have I spent such wealth? And isn’t it that, my very existence, I threaten to forfeit in the Judgment?

That’s when I hear Campolo again, saying, “He condemns people like me with words like these, for I hear him echoing down through the corridors of time: ‘it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.”

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