Mark 10:23-26

THE CHURCH AND WEALTH

‘And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto His disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! And the disciples were amazed at His words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. And they were astonished exceedingly.’

Mark 10:23 (R.V. marg.)

These, and the like, words of our Lord have stood over against the Church in many ages and many lands, convicting it of a great unreality; but over against no Church and in no age have they sounded a more solemn protest than against our own to-day. Are we of the Church of England to-day faithful, as a great body of disciples should be, to our Master’s teaching about wealth? This teaching is not a matter of a few words here and there. It is embodied in His whole life and method.

I. The powerlessness of the Church.—‘Surely I have laboured in vain, and spent my strength for naught!’ Such a feeling is in the mind of very many of us as we take stock of the powerlessness of the Church, in spite of even splendid exceptions in this or that parish, to produce any broad, corporate effect, to make any effective spiritual appeal by its own proper influence, in England to-day. We are not in touch with the mass of the labouring people. Is not this because we are the Church of the rich rather than of the poor—of capital rather than of labour? By this I mean that in the strata of society the Church works from above rather than from below. The opinions and the prejudices that are associated with its administration as a whole are the opinions and the prejudices of the higher and higher-middle classes, rather than of the wage-earners. This becomes the more apparent if you contrast the Church of England in this respect with the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland or with the Presbyterian Churches of Scotland, at least as they have stood, up to the rise of the vast industrial cities like Glasgow or Dundee, where I suppose that ‘labour’ stands as much aloof from any existing religious organisation as in our English cities.

II. The test of vitality.—It is the chief test of the vitality of a Church of Christ in any country that it should represent the poor, the wage-earners, those who live by manual labour: that it should be a community in which the labourers hold the prerogative position. There is our great failure. Yet we have laboured very hard for the poor and amongst them. At the hand of Him Who said, ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me,’ there is laid up a rich store of benediction for men and women, priests and laymen innumerable, whose unselfish, unremitting, unrequited toil is really known only in the heart of our Lord. That is our real comfort. We are sure that all this labour will not be in vain.

III. Lines of recovery.—It, as it were, authorises us to claim illumination and guidance in reversing the great wrong and in averting the great judgment; or rather it authorises us to claim strength to make the right use of Divine chastisements. Let me indicate some lines of hopeful recovery.

(a) The Church must set itself deliberately and of set purpose, as far as possible, to get rid of the administration of relief from the ministry of the Word and Sacraments, and to associate it with the State, the municipality, and voluntary organisations of citizens on a purely secular basis.

(b) We want to make the most of what we have already. We have a really considerable body of communicants who are artisans; but we need to give them their true place and influence, and to mass them, so that their corporate effect shall tell. We must prevent the parishioners of poor parishes being ousted by those who come from outside.

(c) To do all this safely we must act on the basis of a true sacerdotalism. The ministerial priesthood is in charge of the Word and Sacraments, and the clergy should help every confirmed person to claim his or her place in the priestly body, and to learn to act on the apostolic pattern.

(d) We must dissociate the clergy from being identified with the wealthier classes.

‘These things are difficult. Such fundamental social changes are hard to bring about. We are an unimaginative and conservative people.’ True, quite true. But the beginnings are in prayer and penitence and right desire, and in giving the first place in our minds and counsels to the matters that are really of first importance.

Bishop Gore.

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‘Oh! how different would be the position of the Church if we clergy would sacrifice everything to concentrate ourselves upon really bringing out the social meaning of our Sacraments, upon really understanding and giving voice to the spirit of Christian brotherhood, upon really making ourselves the organs for expressing social justice and uttering effectively the Divine wrath upon all that degrades and crushes the weak and ignorant and poor. Oh! how different would be our moral appeal if Christ’s claim upon wealth—Christ’s claim for great sacrifices, great abandonments, as the normal exhibitions of a converted heart—were really once again the claim of the actual Church upon clergy and laity. But all this is only to ask that we should in penitence and prayer, give ourselves to teaching the faith and practice of Christendom as it is in the Bible. How, then, would many of the questions which now bulk biggest as Church questions take a very subordinate place! Truly we have protected the letter of Scripture, while its spirit of judgment and justice was being ignored; we have contended for ceremonial liberty, while the fundamental meaning of our sacraments of brotherhood was being parodied by a miserable religious selfishness.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

CHRISTIANITY AND RICHES

If we are right in understanding by eternal life the highest life the soul is capable of living, we see that in the case of this youth it could only be obtained by absolute surrender of all that he could call his own. Earthly possessions were keeping him back from true blessedness. Can Christ’s teaching, ‘How hardly shall they that have riches,’ etc., be reconciled with the condition of our modern world? There is a twofold danger—(a) of explaining Christ’s words away, and (b) of interpreting them too literally.

I. The spirit of Christ’s words.—Clearly we should be explaining those words away were we to say that they have no reference to property, or that those words contain no special and solemn warning for the well-to-do in regard to that hindrance to which Christ has pointed as besetting their entrance into life. The disciples asked each other in dismay, ‘Who then can be saved?’ And that question shows that they took their Master to be referring not to men of great wealth alone, but to a much larger class. The youth whom they saw going away sorrowful had great possessions, it is said; but who shall say what degree of wealth that expression describes? It has a different meaning in every rank of society, in every country, in every condition. There is, in fact, no absolute criterion of wealth; the affluence of yesterday becomes the competence of to-day and the poverty of to-morrow. Every increase of means involves increase of claims, and increase in many cases so great that a nominal fortune affords but an uncertain measure of what is really at the disposal of its possessor. The truth is that no inventory of goods and chattels, no figure we can name, will suffice to define what our Lord meant by a rich man, and for this reason: that from the moral and spiritual point of view, which was His, it is not the actual amount that matters, but the space it occupies in the heart, the hold it has got upon the affections.

II. Moral peril.—No man who is keeping guard over his desires, and asking himself, as we are all bound to ask ourselves day by day, what it is that for him makes life worth living, will underrate the moral peril of riches; who, indeed, will dare to say that for him it does not exist who remembers what a host of haunting terrors drop off and vanish for the happy man who attains to this small competence, and what an enviable escape from corroding anxiety and care there is for the man that has reached the independence of the safest investment? Can one wonder that to most people money-seeking should be the highest pursuit, and accumulated property the first and almost only thing worthy of a sensible man’s ambition? It was a saying of Carlyle’s that an Englishman’s hell is want of money and failure to acquire property. The advice of Iago, ‘Put money in thy purse,’ is no longer the cynical counsel of a mammon-worshipper, but the practical wisdom of a man of the world, who has explored all the avenues to success, and finds one, and only one, to recommend.

III. Take heed.—Living under such conditions as we do, in a society deeply and increasingly tainted with mammon-worship, if we are to remain Christians in any sense we must take heed to our ways, and watch narrowly all our thoughts. We require, one and all, to be revising the estimate of life and objects by the light of that teaching which shall never pass away. Let us distinguish between those who present, roughly speaking, two types of character. Of the one you can say money belongs to him; he is its master; it is his instrument. Of the other you say he belongs to his money; he has given it the mastery, and he is its slave; he drudges for it, and he will drudge in an ever-deepening servitude, till the hour when he must leave it all behind. And this is the rich man in Christ’s sense; this is the man who trusts in his riches; whose deity, whatever he may profess, is the almighty dollar, governing the whole extent of his energies, dictating his whole estimate of men and things.

—Rev. Canon Duckworth.

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‘Not a few have made the sacrifice from which the young man flinched. In the life of St. Anthony, the father of the monastic system, we read that going into the church one day in early years, when the story we are studying happened to be the Gospel, he took our Lord’s demand upon the young ruler as a direct message to himself, and at once proceeded to distribute to the inhabitants of his native village the splendid estates he had inherited, reserving only a small portion of property for his sister. Not long after he was moved to give this away as well, and to place his sister in a society of religious recluses, while he himself embraced a life of the most rigid asceticism. In the course of the Christian centuries there have been many imitators of St. Anthony. That same voice which spoke so clearly to him persuaded St. Francis of Assisi to forsake his own people and father’s house for a company of barefooted friars bound to lifelong poverty; and many more have been disquieted by the doubt whether the command on which these men literally acted was not somehow binding upon them.’

(THIRD OUTLINE)

THE LOVE OF MONEY

‘Sell that thou hast, and give to the poor,’ was the direct command of Jesus to the rich young ruler, noble in character, desiring perfection, but mastered, owned by his possessions, forced to make the Great Refusal. Ninety-nine rich Christians to-day out of every hundred are making just the same refusal, serenely confident that the order has naught to do with them.

I. It is the teaching of Jesus, it seems to me, that the best environment for our souls is neither poverty nor riches, but simple competence—that condition of life which He Himself consecrated by adopting it.

II. The most popular of English professions, money-making for personal enjoyment, is prohibited to the Christian. Obviously, no man following and believing Jesus, and desiring heaven, would deliberately adopt a mode of life which would make it hard to enter there.

III. We disguise the issue.—We disguise it by our orthodox confession that wealth is a trust, not an absolute ownership. It is true: it is Christ’s doctrine, and in theory we gladly acknowledge it. Money is a stewardship. The Christian possessing riches is merely a trustee. Consider, then. What sort of a name do you apply to a trustee who appropriates to his own personal use and indulgence nine-tenths of the property assigned to him in trust for the benefit of others? Is he fraudulent?

IV. If these are the Christian doctrines, if wealth is either to be no longer sought for, or if inherited to be distributed in benefactions, what will become of civilisation? Civilisation! We are not civilised. There is no such thing known yet on the earth. What we have is an industrial chaos, based upon egoism and strife and greed. Competition, not brotherhood is the note of it. It is for the few, not the many. It means, in this land, a million over-rich people at the top, a million paupers at the bottom, three millions wretchedly, cruelly poor, ten millions oppressed by care and terror. It means millionaires and sweated industries. It means palaces and slums side by side. It means the massacre of the innocents in all our large cities, a population physically deteriorating year by year. It means epicurean banquets and insane luxury, coexistent with starving school-children. It means huge fortunes for Stock Exchange gamblers and Napoleons of finance; half a crown a week and a loaf of bread for noble, honest labourers who have toiled hard for half a century. It means labour divorced from joy, men transformed into machines, life for the majority dull, grey-tinted, monotonous.

V. And because of all these cruelties and injustices, because Christians have discarded the social teaching of Jesus, because Christian teachers will not, or dare not, proclaim what He proclaimed, we have lost the hearts of the working-classes. ‘The common people heard Jesus gladly.’ They stand aloof from the Christianity of to-day. It is no use hiding the fact. The rich and the comfortable fill our churches; the masses are outside. The main cause of their alienation is the monstrous contradiction between Christian ethics and the state of society which Christians tolerate.

VI. There is only one remedy: ‘Back to Christ.’ Some day there will arise a Christian commonwealth which will loyally accept His teaching, and believe the words of the Son of God. In that Kingdom of Heaven on earth there will be neither rich nor poor. It will contain no ‘leisured class,’ no idle drones. ‘He that will not work, neither should he eat.’ It will be a league of brothers, not a hateful, warring, discordant chaos of anarchic commercialism. Captains of industry will displace the fortune-hunters. Work shall be a joy, not a curse. Luxury—whatever forms of it are pure and of good report—music, art, knowledge—will be enjoyed in common. And every man faithful to duty and righteousness shall live with hope in his heart. Already there are signs of the dawn of a brighter day.

—Rev. W. Hudson Shaw.

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‘I had a parishioner once, a most pious Christian who knew all the Church collects by heart, possessor of a fortune of £60,000. Suddenly he lost it all, and was reduced to a modest income of £3 a week. It broke his heart: he turned his face to the wall and died; life was no longer worth living. What the Emperor Hadrian said in the second century is, alas! largely true of the English to-day. “They have,” he declared, “but one God—money: it is he alone that Christians, Jews, and all the rest adore.” ’