“Quit being so materialistic”. That command seems, on its surface, to be a good command to be spiritual, not material in life. It is fascinating that we separate the two and yet, in the New Testament times, it was assumed that it was all one thing. Then the belief was that if you were holy, the sign of that was your wealth that represented God’s favor.
The church, in Western society still believes it. Enter the misuse of Calvinism and the result is a clear separation of material from spiritual. Out of this idea rose the Protestant work ethic that says we know who is blessed by their good works and their prosperity. This could never have been written by a poor person. Only someone writing from a privileged place could conceive that God’s love is clear in the things you have.
This ability to separate the material from the spiritual is how you can have a free market system that represents the need to produce more and more and to have more and more. Remember the young rich man who asked Jesus how to get eternal life. He asked what he could “do”, not how he should be. Jesus shut it all down in a sentence, “go sell all that you have and give it to the poor”. The issue was not wealth but ego, of believing what his faith had taught him, that wealth represented God’s favor.
Is it wrong to have much? No! In truth having great wealth does demonstrate God’s favor. This is not to say one person with money is better than another, only that all that we have is given by God. The point of the story is that unless your entire life is in balance, you are not on the “narrow” path. We need to quit separating material from spiritual and make life whole again. All that we have, all that we are, is because of God’s grace. It is only a problem when our ego tells us differently.
I believe this was the problem for the young rich man, his ego would not let him see himself without his wealth, without his material blessings. It was about him, not about how blessed he was. In our society, we are always keeping score by our stuff. Maybe it is time to keep score by who we are and how we love.
TMM