Hilaire Belloc's Advice to the Rich: "Get to know something about the internal combustion engine and remember -- soon you will die."
The brief pre-Christmas homily on money, politics and
Christianity found below is long overdue.
I can’t be sure that the sort of millionaire who supports antagonistic
politicians, always anxious to hang him with the rope he so credulously delivers,
is a patriot or a scoundrel. I do know that, generally, money covers a
multitude of sins.
Jesus was indifferent about politics, economics and what we
would call sex: He knew the road to Heaven was not paved with gold or worldly
glory or condoms. He forgave the sins of the flesh readily, having first made inflexible
demands upon the spirit, but the materialist itch, He intimated often enough, could
be a hindrance. More than 2,000 years after God was nailed to a cross – “Were
you there when they crucified my Lord? -- it still is more difficult for a rich
man to pass easily into Heaven than it would be for a heavily-laden camel to
pass through the Needle’s Eye, which was a Jerusalem gate so narrow that camels
had to be unpacked before entering the holy city.
When Jesus said, “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, He really did
imagine that, were His rule to be scrupulously observed, God would have the
better of the bargain.
The Sermon on the Mount is full of blessings, punctuated
here and there with rapturous curses.
“Blessed are the poor, for yours is
the Kingdom of God” – “But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received
your consolation.”
“Blessed [are] ye that hunger now:
for ye shall be filled. Blessed [are] ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh” –
But “Woe unto you, ye that are full now! for ye shall hunger. Woe [unto you],
ye that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.”
This is not the happiest view in the world of worldly men
whom the world has festooned with honors and plaudits. Jesus prefers prophets
unloved in their own countries to kings and the powerful of the earth. The
worldly world of the New Testament is the Devil’s sandbox.
“Blessed are ye, when men shall
hate you, and when they shall separate you [from their company], and reproach
you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake. Rejoice in that
day, and leap [for joy]: for behold, your reward is great in Heaven; for in the
same manner did their fathers unto the prophets.”
Between men’s purposes in time and God’s purposes in
eternity, Soren Kierkegaard reminds us, there is an infinite, qualitative
difference.
This severity and these reprobations are part of the fabric
of Christianity, and it simply will not do to pretend they do not exist. Jesus
asks the wealthy to give up their wealth and follow him because those fixated
on wealth to the exclusion of spiritual matters – the true materialists -- are
nailed to the world, as if on a cross. The Christian, wealthy or poor, is NOT
to conform himself to the world. Acceptance or rejection by the world makes
conformity easy or difficult. Those whom the world rejects are more likely to
keep their character. Christians are to retain their “salt,” the Christian
character that distinguishes them from the local stockbroker, the used car
dealer, the well-nourished and overpromising politician, and -- may God save us
from him -- the tax gatherer, generally considered in both the New and Old
Testaments as the devil’s enabler (c.f. Mark 2:15-17):
“While Jesus was having dinner at
Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his
disciples, for there were many who followed him. When
the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners
and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: ‘Why does he eat with tax
collectors and sinners?’
“On hearing this,
Jesus said to them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.
I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’”
Christians unconformed to the world and saved from it by the
loving grace of God are, on the other hand, “the salt of the earth; but if the
salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good
for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.”
The character of the modern world and the ancient world of
Jesus’ time is exactly the same. If you allow it, worldly concerns – uninformed
by the love of God -- will suck you in, grind you down, and spit you out as a
spiritless “practical atheist,” a term employed by Jacques Maritain to
designate inoffensive theists who “believe that they believe in God [and...
perhaps believe in Him in their brains] but... in reality deny His existence by
each one of their deeds” – in other words, salt-less Christians.
Christians are to be in the world but not “of” it, in order
to -- and this is the part that will get you fed to a modern lion in a modern coliseum -- change the world.
So then, you want to be a Christian this Christmas, do you?
Not much has changed over the past 2,000 years. Rome is still feeding
Christians to lions. The more the world changes, the more it remains the same.
But be not afraid, and this Christmas take joy in John, 16:33:
“I have said these things to you,
that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take
heart; I have overcome the world.”
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