Camels and needles
How should Christians think about wealth?
After watching the latest “He Gets Us” ad on the Super Bowl and seeing the heated reactions from multiple Christian sub-cultures, I got to thinking about wealth. How does the Christian church, particularly the Evangelical church in America, use it and what does the Bible say about it?
$14 Million is a lot of money, especially for two super bowl ads. Christians on the right viewed the “He Gets Us” ads with derision as too “woke”. Matt Walsh even came out on X saying it was heresy. Christians on the left were appalled at the seeming bait-and-switch, due to the anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion stance of one of the ad campaign’s main backers, Hobby Lobby CEO David Green.
When we think about wealth in the Gospels we typically think of Jesus telling the rich man to sell his possessions and come follow him:
When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” But when he heard this, he became sad, for he was very rich. Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”—Luke 18:22-25
We usually hear this tale spiritualized in sermons in capitalist America. Money is an idol for this person, the pastor says, and we all must recognize the idols in our own lives and give them up to follow Jesus. Yes and amen, says the wealthy white crowd. We take lots of things literally in the New Testament, like Paul’s metaphors of the atonement, or Jesus’s parables about Hell, but for some reason, this one seems like it MUST NOT be literal. To be clear, Jesus could have been talking about idols as well, but he paid special attention to wealth, power and fame throughout his ministry. As did Paul. So maybe we shouldn’t ignore it.
It seems everywhere you go in America, you’ll find a mega-church using money in a sort of Machiavellian way to “seek and save the lost”. I grew up in the Inland Empire of Southern California where Greg Laurie’s Harvest bumper stickers were on nearly every car we saw. Interestingly, it was always Greg’s name and never Jesus on those cars. Most of them lifted pickup trucks. His church sported a massive campus, with a coffee shop, book store, multiple big screens, and event space for things like stunt shows with professional skate boarders. All of this with the goal of bringing in people by way of money. This is typical for Evangelical mega-churches in America.
These churches function and thrive under the capitalism in America. They are all very well-oiled business machines, taking in donations, investing in strategies that bring in more people, build bigger spaces to accommodate those people, give them content that they want, so they can give more donations. It’s a tried and true method and it works, which is why it continues. The problem is that it’s antithetical to the Way of Jesus. When you attract people to Jesus with money instead of his cruciform message of self-emptying love, you’ll end up with the same warped view of Jesus and the Gospel as the people who sold you on it.
If our gospel message requires selling instead of serving, we’ve rejected the Way of Christ for the way of capitalism, the modern day Babylon. If we’re selling the message of Jesus with wealth, power and influence, what we’re saying is that his Way is in fact inferior to the power that got them to listen to us. This is one of many distortions that has lead America straight into the cold embrace of Christian Nationalism. When we say yes to wealth and power as a means of spreading the message of Jesus, we’ve already rejected the message of Jesus.
So how should we think about wealth? We should see it as a tool to steward and use wisely to serve others. As Jesus said:
distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; THEN come, follow me
But this shouldn’t be done foolishly either. We do still live in a Capitalism and money does beget money. Simply giving it away may solve a problem well one time, but it also doesn’t steward the “talents” well. As Paul says:
For I do not mean that there should be relief for others and hardship for you, but it is a question of equality between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may also supply your need, in order that there may be equality. As it is written,
“The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.” — 2 Corinthians 8:13-15
The goal is equality. Not too much not too little. The churches in Paul’s day were given the task of distributing wealth amongst themselves with the goal of equality, and then also giving to other churches if they needed money. The goal was never for a single church to thrive over and above others as we see in capitalist mega-churches, but for the love and message of Christ to thrive.
To be specific, the problem with using wealth for Evangelism is that is skips a very crucial step: service. The “He Gets Us” campaign shows images of Jesus washing the disciples feet with the goal of showing people what kind of person Jesus was. The irony is that the backers do not, in fact, wash the feet of the oppressed and marginalized. In that same story of Jesus washing feet in John 13, Jesus says this:
I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.
—John 13:15
Jesus calls his disciples not to run a PR campaign for him, but to serve others in his name. We can’t control what other people think when they see Jesus, no matter how much money we throw at the problem. What we can control is how we use our time, talents and treasures. Are we going to use them generously to wash feet? Or are we going to buy air time sell Jesus?