Mt 5:3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.”
Let’s face it, who wants to be poor? For the most part, we all want to accumulate wealth; our reasons may differ, but we still want it. In most societies, it is a symbol of power or social status. You may be the dumbest person on earth, but if you have money, nobody really cares how stupid you are. Even in agrarian societies, a person is as important as the number of animals he owns. It is an environmental thing.
Poverty is a sign of being desperate; one would rather be dead than poor. A wise king once wrote, Pr 19:4 “Wealth brings many friends, but a poor man’s friend deserts him.” In times of desperate economic turmoil many billionaires around the world take their own lives because for them life is measured in terms of a bank balance. Some cheat their way to the top of millions money worth because the thought of not having money can be terrifying. For them the maxim is true, “Better a rich devil than a poor saint.” Spouses are known to underwrite their partners for large sums of insurance money and then plot to murder them. People can do unimaginable things for money.
Long before Adam Smith people have been on the rush to the “gold fields” just in case king mammon is smiling; perhaps they too could receive financial healing by pushing through the crowds and touching the edge of his garment.
Jesus and his non-sense.
The disciples were often tempted to resort to their five senses, Christ told them many times that he will be crucified, and that he will rise on the third day. When the women came to report that he had risen, Lk 24:11 “they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense.” That confrontation of the spiritual and the sensual is presented many times over in our lives—we struggle and juggle between natural sense and spiritual non-sense.
So what did Jesus mean? In a world turning on wheels of wealth, what does poverty have to do with anything? As in everything else, the Master had a different perspective on the subject of poverty or wealth for that matter. In his usual paradoxical way of teaching he said a person is blessed not in his/her wealth but in spiritual poverty. That is why he refused Satan’s kingdoms of the earth. He was tempted where many of us would have loved falling on our knees at first call. After all, it happened in the mountains where nobody would know about it. The bigger question is, “What did Jesus know about poverty and wealth that has eluded us?”
In the parable of the rich fool, we see a competent farmer who is preoccupied with his own small picture and gets ready to recline and enjoy the fruits of his ingenuity and hard work. Life is measured in the abundance of his wealth. In the meantime he ignored that his real life was what he could not control. Then a question was asked, Lk 12:20 ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ He prepared for the future and forgot about eternity. In the irony of paradox; if he prepared for eternity, his future would have been taken care of.
There is a principle buried deep in what Christ said to the rich fool, “The core of material abundance is squarely situated in one’s spiritual abundance.” All things must proceed from the richness of one’s knowledge of God. When we embrace eternity, we embrace life in all its abundance, including the smaller picture of life on earth.
Jesus was not talking about money as in hard cents and dollars; he was talking about the person. If you are poor in God, you are poor even with your coffers full. Money is a blessing from God, but many curse themselves with it when it defines who they are outside of God. 1Ti 6:10 “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”
His whole ministry focused on changing and turning natural perspectives right side up, trying to get people to see that reality is not sensual but spiritual, that if you focus on what you see you miss out on what you don’t see, and that what you don’t see is more powerful than what you see.
That was not a rejection of the need for money, but a correction of a perspective. We all need money for one reason or another, and anyone can be rich if they put their mind to it—but we can’t deny that some have indeed pierced themselves with many griefs. It is not money, but the love of it that sends people spinning in a whirlwind of greed. The same fire we use to cook a meal can bring a house down.
Christ taught that the ultimate measure of a person is not in how much the person owns but in how rich the person is in his/her relationship with God. Right here we are caught with our backs against the wall. The twist is not so much in the contest of economic ideologies as it is in our hearts. We are chasing sensual vanities in real terms and spiritual realities in vain terms.
Christ refused to be caught up in those silly earthly games; he was here to point humanity to something greater beyond the seen and the measurable, to a place where the seen is discovered in the unseen, and every time he succeeded he would say, “Your faith has healed you.” Where people could not see his point, He said "Oh you of little faith.”
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