Hear this, you that trample on the needy,
and bring to ruin the poor of the land,
saying, “When will the new moon be over
so that we may sell grain;
and the sabbath,
so that we may offer wheat for sale?
We will make the ephah small and the shekel great,
and practice deceit with false balances,
buying the poor for silver
and the needy for a pair of sandals,
and selling the sweepings of the wheat.”
The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob:
Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.
Amos 8:4-7
Yeah, baby! That’ll put the fear of God into any rich fat cat who attends a church that uses the Revised Common Lectionary and chose track 2. (Loses some of the punch there at the end, doesn’t it?) You’ve got to love that concrete, back and white thinking. Thinking of cheating the poor? Think again, because the LORD [caps in the original] has sworn (sworn!) by the pride of Jacob. Now the Pride of Jacob sounds either like a group of captive lions or a West Texas football team, but in either case, not something the kind of white collar criminal who makes the ephah small and the shekel great would want to go up against. There seems to be a reckoning coming, and we all love a good reckoning.
That’s the great thing about pirates and Robin Hood. They are instruments of the pride of Jacob. They make the rich pay for their evil ways. Americans may often live in the hope of making it big, but every now and then we like to side with the guy who gives the big shots exactly what we think they are due for making their money at the expense of the poor. Even when we get into conversations about making money while we are making change (social enterprise, businesses that have a social as well as a profit motive) many of us who come at it from a faith perspective love to point at passages like this one and say, “See! Don’t be messing around with the poor like that. You’re going to have to answer to the starting inside linebacker from Jacob’s Lions.”
It’s unfortunate for people like me who enjoy a tidy dogma like this to have to actually deal with the picture we get of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel. Luke, it seems, must have sold travel insurance on the Jerusalem / Damascus road. He loves to talk business, especially when business gets messy. For instance, in chapter 16:
Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, `What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ Then the manager said to himself, `What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’ So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, `How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, `A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, `Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ Then he asked another, `And how much do you owe?’ He replied, `A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, `Take your bill and make it eighty.’ And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.
So let’s break this down just a little bit. This is the story of a middle-man, and nobody likes a middle manager. That’s especially true when one of your own moves up a notch. (Think of Django in “Django Unchained” playing the most despicable role there is: black slave-trader.) So here’s a middle manager – maybe Jew who oversees the lands of a Roman Centurion in Isreal – who has been caught with his hand in the till. Presumably. The charges aren’t adjudicated and maybe the rich man just assumes that all people like the manager and the people he comes from are like that. Whatever the case, the manager has a choice to make. He has to decide whether to fight the case or pave the way for his future.
I’ll tell you that in West Nashville, we’d fight tooth and nail to protect a sense of honor that won’t buy day-old bread at Kroger’s. Every middle class will do it. We’d rather deny our redneck cousins and pass ourselves off as old money when the old money will always snicker at our tassel loafers. The sons of a newly emerging Israeli middle class who are listening to this nut from Nazareth were probably as interested in holding on to the privilege they had so recently gained as any banker’s son in Belle Meade.
And I don’t think that Jesus is really running them down for having a little something. He likes a good party and a soft bed and a vacation on the Golan Heights as much as any Second Temple Period dude. He’s just reminding the disciples that there is more to be done by sharing privilege than by protecting it. In fact, if privilege has any real value, it as a tool for manifesting the reign of justice and peace on the Earth.
So knowledge is a privilege. Education is a privilege. Access to technology is a privilege. If we are shrewd in this generation, we can use ideas like social enterprise to leverage tools like capital markets in order to bring the privileges of technology, education, health care, and so on to people who have not been able to reach them before. We can do this because markets work. Economic incentives work, but they work as a tool, not as an end. The end must remain the expansion of privilege to more people like us — which is to say all people. For as today’s passage from the Gospel ends, “No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”