“JESUS – RADICAL FOR OUR TIME”
"Jesus - The Nature of True Wealth"
Andrew Carnegie once wrote, "The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. The conditions of human life have not only changed but revolutionized within the past few hundred years....The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us today measures the change which has come with civilization....Much better this great irregularity than universal squalor....the 'good old times' were not good old times. Neither master nor servant was as well situated than as today."
Would Jesus agree with Carnegie that the problem is the proper admistration of wealth rather than wealth itself? Would Jesus advocate universal social "poverty" or "squalor" more than the tremendous gap between the palace of the rich and the cottage of the poor? Is wealth the problem or is equitable distribution of wealth the problem? What do you think? Why?
Well known Columbia University sociologist, the late C. Wright Mills, says in his book, The Power Elite, that "the idea that the millionaire finds nothing but a sad, empty place at the top of this society; the idea that the rich do not know what to do with their money; the idea that the successful become filled up with futility, and that those born successful are poor and little as well as rich - the idea, in short, of the disconsolateness of the rich - is, in the main, merely a way by which those who are not rich reconcile themselves to the fact. Wealth in America is direclty gratifying and directly leads to many further gratifications." Mills goes on to add; "For all the possible values of human society, one and one only is truly sovereign, truly universal, truly sound, truly and completely acceptable goal of man in America. That goal is money, and let there be no sour grapes about it from the losers."
How would Jesus respond to Mills? Would Jesus agree with Dr. Mills' assessment of American values? Do the poor consol themselves with the notion that the rich are empty and unhappy? Is not money the goal of the poor as well as the rich? Would Jesus' advice for egalitarianism be well received by either poor or rich? What do you think? Why?
In his seminal work, Escape From Evil, Ernest Becker says that money is "sacred." And, he adds, "the thing that connects money with the domain of the sacred is its power. We have long known that money gives power over men, freedom from family and social obligations, from friends, from bosses and underlings; it abolishes one's likeness to others; it creates comfortable distance between persons, easily satisfies their claims on each other without compromising them in any directly and personal way; on top of this it gives literally limitless ability to satisfy appetites of almost any material kind"
Becker goes on to add that money's "sacred power" is the power to deny mortality or death. In this sense "power means power to increase oneself, to change one's natural situation from one of smallness, helplessness, finitude, to one of bigness, control , durability, importance."
Does this not deny Jesus' concept of community and sharing and egalitarianism? Is this not the grand illusion Jesus was critiquing, namely that money rather than God, grants immortality: What do you think? Why?
