« The Blessedness of Tears | Main | What Did Jesus Have Against Prosperity? »
August 17, 2003
The Consolation of Riches
The Consolation of Riches
Psalm 119: 1-16 / Proverbs 11: 1-6
Luke 6: 24
August 17th, 2003
In the two weeks we were away, Bonnie and I had a very wonderful time welcoming a new grandson, Owen Christopher Sages, into the family. One of the pleasures of our time with our children was being able to stock up their pantry a bit. Hillary’s hands will be full with two little ones.
But as we put meals that we had cooked and frozen into their freezer, and how good we felt doing this, I thought of Jesus’ words that are our theme this morning. “But woe to you who are rich now, for you have received your consolation.” By the world’s standards we are rich. I’m not rich by comparison with Bill Gates, but I’m rich by comparison with Mweenba Mwaamga. How many grandparents in Zambia could do what we were doing? I thought there was indeed comfort in being able to care for our children. Was Jesus saying to us, “Woe to you who can put good things into your children’s freezer, for you have received in this life all the consolation you’re ever going to get from me?” Maybe a rather severe question to ask?
Remember, when we read the Bible, we are to ask what God is saying to us, to me, and not just what is God saying to you, to others. I have no doubt that on the scale of distribution of things in this world, I am among the rich. So are you.
Let me say at the outset that I believe Jesus intends us to understand two principles that are a guide to us in our prosperity. First, our abundance may lure us into materialism that deadens the soul. If what we have is the principal source of our happiness, we’ve received all we’re going to get, when we know our needs are so much greater than money can satisfy. Second, that if we have abundance ,God has taken us into partnership with Him to do as He does with His abundance—use it to care for others. If we let our souls become dead by the abundance we have, we are to be pitied; we have received all the consolation we’re going to get. If we do not use our abundance in partnership with God, making His blessings flow to others through us, we are to be pitied, because we have forfeited the true blessing of our prosperity.
Having suggested the two big lessons I believe Jesus teaches us, let’s back up and see how I arrive at this. “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.” The word “but” is here because Jesus had just said, “Blessed are you” to four kinds of people we think are hardly blessed. Blessed are the poor? Blessed are the hungry? Blessed are those who weep now? Blessed are those who are hated for Jesus’ sake? We hardly think these are blessings. “But,” Jesus then says, “Woe to those who have it the way we’d much prefer to have it. First, “Woe to those who are rich.” What topsy-turvy thinking, Jesus! He calls the unfortunate blessed and says “poor you” to the fortunate.
When Jesus pronounced “woe” on those who are rich, He didn’t speak to those who are rich through devious means necessarily. I don’t think that He is addressing here the landlord who charges exorbitant rent. He isn’t talking to the drug dealer, or to the manufacturer who has a monopoly on an essential product for life, so he squeezes out every penny the market can bear. He isn’t talking about the banker who charges high interest to the needy. It’s just “woe to you who are rich for you have received your consolation.”
Jesus leaves us feeling uncertain how we are to think of God’s blessings. On the one hand we are to sing the “Doxology” cheerfully: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” “Count your many blessings,” we sing. “Name them one by one. And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.” On the other hand, “Woe to you who are rich now for you have received your consolation.” Those many blessings start to take on a grayer hue.
Why the woe? That sounds so ominous. What does “woe” imply? The Greek word translated “woe” sounds like a cry of anguish. Ow! Or Ou vay! Isaiah wrote to Israel, “Woe unto the wicked. It shall be ill with him, for what his hands have done shall be done to him.” When Isaiah writes this, we think of the violent Mafia lord who dies a violent death at the hands of his opposite. Evil deeds produce evil effects, but Jesus is not talking about evil deeds here.
A few chapters later on in Luke’s gospel we read that Jesus spoke to two towns north of the Sea of Galilee, “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.” Maybe we find a clue to what Jesus had in mind here. Apparently Jesus did wonderful works in these two Jewish cities. Tyre and Sidon were pagan cities. We’re not told in the Gospels what Jesus did in the two Jewish cities, but it seems He did so much that they should have been filled with people who trusted in Him.
But they responded to Jesus indifferently. They were sedated with the abundance of Jesus’ goodness to them. Apparently Jesus had healed the sick there plentifully. He had showered on these two towns abundant blessing. But they said, in effect, “so what?” They got used to Jesus. They saw Him coming and thought, “Here comes the one who can heal us, so let’s get our sick out where He can touch them.” But that was all. They did not trust in Jesus for anything more than His healing power. He meant nothing to them. They were thankless and presumptuous.
Jesus was warning His disciples about taking for granted God’s blessings. They little knew how the faith He ignited in them would have material effects many centuries later. The historian, Christopher Dawson, wrote an insightful book, Religion and the Rise of the West, in which he demonstrates how Christianity led to the prosperity of the Western world. The wisdom that led to developments in agriculture, law, medicine, and our terrific educational systems, was born in the Medieval Church. More recently, the Puritan work ethic has been lauded as the source of capitalism. Work hard, be thrifty, and wealth comes naturally.
But Jesus speaks to us who have enjoyed the fruits of Western development and the flowering of capitalism. There is the danger of living amid plenty and becoming so used to it that we no longer thank God. Then, when our total satisfaction is found in the things He has given us, our souls are cauterized. We sink into the lethargy of materialism. We are sedated with things. We then discover that no matter how much we have, we’re not happy. “Woe unto you that are rich, for you have received your consolation.” And it’s a bored and bitter consolation that the rich find who have forgotten the source of every blessing.
It is easy to think “life consists of the abundance of things we possess.” We gather catalogues. We shop till we drop. As Wordsworth put it, “Buying and selling we lay waste our powers.” Jesus told the parable of the camel trying to get through the eye of a needle as an illustration of how hard it is for a rich person to get into the Kingdom of Heaven because the one who has everything may want nothing more than stuff and more stuff. Woe to anyone who thinks that life consists of the abundance of things you can own.
The second reason why Jesus said “Woe to you who are rich for you have received your consolation,” seems to apply to those who only find personal consolation in their riches. They are like the rich fool who builds bigger barns when his harvests increase, never asking the question, Why did I get all this, and whose will all this stuff be when I die? Jesus is asking you for whom prosperity may come in bunches, “what are you doing with your abundance?” Woe to you if you just accumulate riches for your security. You’re getting all you’re going to get.
Jesus illustrated this point powerfully in a story we should take more to heart than we allow ourselves. Let me read it for you.
“There was a rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, full of sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table. Moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried; and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes, and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus in his bosom. And he called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy upon me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame.’ But Abraham said, ‘Son, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’ And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’ But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.’ And he said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if some one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead’.”
The problem of the rich man was not that he was rich, but that he did not respond to Lazarus whose need was evident to him every day. He got used to looking the other way. He could have fed him. He could have given him clothing. He could have had servants put ointment on his sores. But he did nothing for him.
Lazarus was a bum to ignore, to get off the street, rather than a person to care for. But look who found a place in Abraham’s bosom! The woe that came to the rich man came at the end of his life when it was too late to do anything to improve his situation. He had received his full consolation, his full comfort already.
A third-century Church Father, Clement, who lived in Alexandria, one of the great centers of civilization in his day, saw that Christians too were becoming well off. He looked at Jesus’ teaching about wealth and asked “Who is the rich man that shall be saved?” It was a sermon based on the story in the Gospel of Matthew (19: 16-22). A good man who had great possessions who came to Jesus and asked him what good deed he had to do to have eternal life. Jesus said, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come, follow me.” Matthew tells us, “When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions.” So Clement asked, “Who is the rich man that shall be saved?”
It’s a longish sermon, with many important observations—including the fact that Jesus said there was something the man could do to be perfect. Deeds matter! Faith without works is dead.
But one point in particular that Clement makes grabbed me. Clement observed that in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats, Jesus welcomed those who had cared for Him in His need. When they asked when they did this, He told them, “inasmuch as you did it to the least of these, my brethren, you did it to me.” Clement told the wealthy folk in his congregation that when God gives them abundance, He makes it possible for them to become His partners. We are God’s partners if we have an abundance of money. What God does with His riches, we can do. Jesus could not speak of giving to the poor if there were none that God blessed with the ability to give. Our blessings flow to us lavishly from our heavenly Father, but for a reason greater than to give us comfort in this life. In this life we have the chance to care for Jesus hidden in the opportunities to care for the needy.
The psalm we love so well begins, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits . . . who satisfies you with good as long as you live.” When God has given us plenty, far more than we need, it is to make us His hands in re-directing this bounty to where it is needed. And when we do this, enjoying the privilege of “playing God” for the supply of other peoples’ needs, we are happy. To the Corinthians Paul wrote, “The Lord loves a cheerful giver.” The Lord loves this person who has something to give before she gives it. But it is when the person gives cheerfully what God has entrusted to her, that the love of God splashes over her.
A few weeks ago we had in our pulpit Joe Simfukwe, the principal of the Theological College of Central Africa. When I learned of the dire need of several students I had taught when I was there two summers ago, I approached our Deacons to see if they would object to us giving Principal Simfukwe a sizeable check to help meet some of this student need. I was given permission to write a good-sized check, and I felt such joy in drawing this congregation into the Lord’s supply of a great need. When these students have their needs met from an unknown source, they will thank God. Joe is sending me an account of what he gives to needy students, but they won’t know it comes from you at Faith Church. They’ll only think, “God has provided for our need.” Our plenty has become God’s supply.
The rich to whom Jesus said, “Woe to those who are rich for they have received their consolation,” are those whose riches are their consolation alone. Those who have, and who, not trusting God for the future, accumulate more and more, sharing moderately of their excess, will be receiving all the consolation they’re going to get.
My dear people, whom God has blessed so richly with material well-being, let us rejoice in playing God for others. There are many ways we can’t play God. But there is one way we can, by using the bounty He has given into our control, where He shows us need. I would be so pleased to see our giving beyond Faith Church needs be the same as what we give to maintain our congregation’s life. Because then it would be evidence for us that we had accepted the mantel God has offered us, to play God, whose benefits come to us daily.
Let us pray: O Lord, thank You for meeting all our needs and more. Give us grace to receive your benefits and channel them where there is need. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at August 17, 2003 09:30 AM