by Mako A. Nagasawa
Economy: We affirm that God’s purpose for money is for human flourishing and serving those in need. Because of Jesus’ challenge that it is impossible to serve both God and money, we reject greed and the use of power and influence for financial gain or political leverage. We commit to generously stewarding God’s resources for the common good and for the most vulnerable. (“Christ Alone: A Call to Faithful Resistance,” affirmation # 5)
The Problem—and God’s Vision
People with more wealth and power buy assets like second and third homes, land, and even water rights to profit off others in need and achieve that “other American dream”: passive income. They redesign tax and borrowing laws to further enrich themselves. They redesign corporate laws to impede competitors from starting small businesses to compete. In a short amount of time, wealth inequality accelerates quickly. Thus, in the days when free market meant the freedom from the “rent extraction” resulting from inequalities in the ownership of key assets, Judge Louis D. Brandeis (1856–1941), the great pro-competition and pro-democracy advocate, warned against “the curse of bigness” and large concentrations of private wealth in his 1934 book The Curse of Bigness. His thought coheres with the Hebrew prophets:
Woe to those who attach house to house
And join field to field,
Until there is no more room. (Isaiah 5:8; cf. Micah 2:2).
What vision inspired the prophets? God’s original vision from the creation—a vision Jesus reaffirmed.
Ancient Israel
God partnered with ancient Israel as a partial restoration of that creation vision. In the Jubilee Year described in Leviticus 25, God regifted the garden land to the people as if they were entering it for the first time. God wanted every Israelite to share in the garden land—its nourishment, wealth, beauty, and power to produce. In the Jubilee, God cleared intergenerational disparities of wealth and power. God claimed all Israelites as His own children—calling parents to go beyond a narrow affection for their own biological children and to share in His affection for all.
In the Sinai covenant outlined in various parts of the Pentateuch, God opposed the wealthy driving the poor into debt or social degradation. A creditor could not deprive a debtor of basic necessities, even if those necessities were pledged as collateral, or of basic dignity: a creditor could not enter the house of a debtor to collect a debt (Exodus 22:26–27; Deuteronomy 24:12–13, 17). God encouraged lending but banned interest between Israelites (Exodus 22:25; Leviticus 25:36–38; Deuteronomy 23:19–20). The usury ban prevented profiting from a fellow Israelite’s misfortune and request for aid. (God did permit interest on a loan to non-Israelites [Deuteronomy 23:19–20], presumably because of the risk that a non-Israelite, being untethered to a portion of family-land in Israel, might move away before repaying. But God also commanded the Israelites sternly to not exploit foreigners.)
Moreover, by banning the selling of a Hebrew ebed (servant) from one master to another (Leviticus 25:42), God barred the commodification of indebtedness; debt-service was irreducibly personal and an act of relational trust by both parties. To further protect people from paying off debts as servants, God commanded debt-forgiveness on the seventh year after borrowing (Exodus 21:2–6; Deuteronomy 15:1–18), or on the fiftieth year on the fixed calendar (Leviticus 25), whichever happened first. Holding people in long-term debt was like Pharaoh holding God’s children in bondage (Leviticus 25:55).
Elsewhere in the Ancient Near East, exorbitant interest rates on loans were the chief cause of people being sold into slavery. As one scholar has said, the law of Exodus 21:26–27 protecting the Hebrew ebed “from maltreatment from their masters . . . is found nowhere else in the existing corpus of ancient Near East legislation” (Nahum M. Sarna, Exodus). In addition, the runaway law of Deuteronomy 23:15–16 is unique in the Ancient Near East: “You shall not return to their owners slaves who have escaped to you from their owners. They shall reside with you, in your midst, in any place they choose in any one of your towns, wherever they please; you shall not oppress them.”
Finally, in the law of gleaning, God gave people without land (the stranger, the orphan, the widow) the right to glean—that is, to work—fruitful land. An “owner” of farmland did not actually “own” all its crops and fruit, or call the shots on who could work there (Deuteronomy 24:19–22). Thus, God opposed the power to monopolize assets—whether land or money to separate less fortunate people from their own dignity, basic wealth, and even work.
Jesus and Christian Mission
Many Christians may not realize how much Jesus had to say about money and debt. Jesus critiqued indebtedness—especially as an instrument of coercion—even further than Moses did. Jesus commanded people to not just lend, but to give to anyone in need without expecting repayment (Matthew 5:42; 6:12–15). Jesus taught debt-forgiveness not just periodically, but for any and all times, embedding it into daily prayer (Matthew 6:12; Luke 11:4). Jesus proclaimed a debt jubilee (Luke 4:14–18), not just to re-gift the garden land of Canaan to all Israelites, but to regift the planet to everyone who shares it with him and like him (Matthew 6:19–34; Luke 6:12–49; 12:13–34; 14:7–35; 16:1–13). Jesus said he claimed everyone—not just every Israelite—as a child of God who deserves a good inheritance (Matthew 19:13–15; Mark 10:13–16; Luke 18:15–17).
Jesus made his kingdom community even more dynamic than ancient Israel because he was overcoming the “hardness of heart” that made ancient Israel fall short of the original vision for human life from creation (Matthew 19:4, 8). Jesus called his followers to share possessions (“house”), productive power (“farms”), and family (“brothers or sisters or father or mother or children”). He called this way of community life “the regeneration” or “renewal” (Matthew 19:28), that is, the re-genesis of human life in the midst of “this present age . . . and the age to come” (Mark 10:30). At a minimum, Jesus critiques unequal concentrations of wealth and power. He desires all to share in God’s good inheritance, to resume gardening the planet, and (as Paul would say) to garden one’s own character via the fruit of the Spirit (John 15:1–11; Galatians 5:22–23).
The apostle Paul called Christians to express economic solidarity with other Christians across the globe. In 2 Corinthians 8–9, he encouraged the Corinthian Christians, probably mostly gentiles, to financially support the famine-stricken Jewish Christians in Jerusalem and Judea, whom they had never met. Paul reminded the Corinthians of “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). Paul also reminded them that we do not live in family or national narratives of success; we live in God’s story: in “the wilderness” waiting for Jesus to return and renew the garden across the planet, even quoting the manna story. He calls us to express economic equality (2 Corinthians 8:13–15; Exodus 16:18).
Both Jesus and his forerunner, John the Baptist, call us to recognize power structures that make some people more vulnerable than others. For example, John the Baptist told tax collectors to collect only what the Roman Empire required, and no more, limiting the empire’s exploitation (Luke 3:12–13). Similarly, Jesus inspired Zaccheus, the chief tax collector, to be “childlike” by climbing a tree to see Jesus (Luke 18:15–17), then giving half his wealth away immediately, and offering to repay four times what he had stolen from anyone (Luke 19:1–10)—which was within the range that Jewish law required for restitution for theft (Exodus 22:1–15; 2 Samuel 12:6). In other words, tax collectors were to absorb as much of the injustice as they could; it was part of their love towards the people the larger system exploits. We should not be deceived by those who say the New Testament does not address structures, but only people, and only their souls.
Christian leaders in the first Christian centuries such as Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose of Milan, and John Chrysostom understood Jesus’ renewal of Genesis 1 as collective, not merely individualized. They believed in shared dominion, shared prosperity—applying that vision within the church to the sharing of wealth and the manumission of slaves. They also expressed that care in many civil laws. While they sometimes unfairly enshrined privileges for Christians over Jews and pagans, they tried to protect all people in a human rights-oriented, harm-reduction, social welfare, and anti-corruption strategy. We find this, for instance, as various scholars have demonstrated, in the emperors Constantine and Justinian and Theodora.
Conclusion: Christians Today
Jesus calls us to do far more than just individually work hard, give to our local church, and pay off our debts. We need to constantly raise questions such as these: How much inequality we are willing to tolerate in society and why? How are we emotionally and relationally impacted by inequalities? and How much inequality should we pass down to our children?—because they have done nothing to deserve all the advantages or disadvantages we place on them.
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Mako Nagasawa is the Executive Director of The Anástasis Center for Christian Education and Ministry, where he and his team teach about God’s restorative justice and Jesus’ healing atonement. He is also on the Elder Team at Neighborhood Church of Dorchester, in Dorchester, MA.
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