“Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.”
The verse is from the King James Bible, Matthew 19:21, and it’s one of the ones most ignored by an awful lot of American Christians.
Especially the rich ones.
The problem goes back about 45 years, when Ronald Reagan saw televangelists as people who could help him get to the White House. Reagan had never been a churchgoer and his marital record was spotty, and ironically, the Democrat in the White House was the first one to refer to himself as a “born again” Christian.
The televangelists didn’t have much use for Jimmy Carter, though. Since Oral Roberts and Jimmy Swaggart, among others, had become popular, they were preaching something known as the Prosperity Gospel.
Forget what Jesus said about being rich. Forget that Christ said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:24). These dudes said God wants his followers to be rich. Roberts and Swaggart, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, all the way down to Joel Osteen in the 21st century, said anything their followers gave to them would be returned in spades by God.
And if you didn’t get rich, it was your own fault for not giving these Men of God enough.
As for Jesus, he was really kind of in the background.
Woody Guthrie said it, and Jackson Browne said it again in his Christmas song, “The Rebel Jesus.”
“We guard our world with locks and guns and we guard our fine possessions, and once a year when Christmas comes, we give to our relations. And perhaps we give a little to the poor if the generosity should seize us, but if anyone of us should interfere in the business of why there are poor, they get the same as the rebel Jesus.”
Jesus wasn’t a Communist, but it can be argued that he was at least a small-s socialist. So much of his teaching was about being unselfish and caring for the less fortunate, and I’m pretty sure he would be appalled by a society in which we refuse to forgive other people’s debt — student loans, for instance — because heck, nobody forgave our debts.
We have created an abomination of a society that worships the rich and greedy, and we try to convince ourselves that the reason people don’t succeed is because they aren’t good people.
They’re sinners.
News flash, Skippy. We’re all sinners, and the worst kind of sin isn’t loving someone of the same sex. It’s doing things that hurt — or at least fail to help — other people.
Would a gift of $10,000 make a huge difference in your life? The same sort of gift that forgiving $10,000 in student loan debt would do?
Well, in the last few years, many American billionaires have seen their wealth increase by billions of dollars a year.
As an example, the Koch brothers’ wealth climbed from $63 billion to $74 billion three or four years ago. If they had decided that $63 billion was rich enough, they could have taken that extra $11 billion and gifted 1.1 million people with $10,000 each.
It isn’t “sell that thou hast, and give it to the poor.” Not even close, but it would be an amazingly Christian thing to do, and it would be like shooing a fly away for all the effect it would have on someone still worth $63 billion.
Greed isn’t good.
He who dies with the most toys doesn’t win.
And the Prosperity Gospel might just be the biggest lie of all.
Just ask Jesus.