Rich People – Poor People
Jesus has a lot to say about people who are “rich” and people who are “poor.” In fact understanding what Jesus teaches about the rich and the poor is a vital part of the framework for understanding and living out the Christian life.
Unfortunately for those of us in modern America, there are aspects to our cultural assumptions about what “rich” and “poor” means that keep us from understanding Jesus.
One of those is our idolatry of materialism. This leads us to view any references to “rich” and “poor” in purely materialistic ways and assume that any other way of understanding these words outside of a materialistic lens are inaccurate. We also tend to assume that the definition of “rich people” is “anyone who has more money than I do.”
Here is an important thing to know. If you live in modern America you are not materialistically poor – not by global standards and not by historic standards. As someone who has spent almost all of his adult life caring for the “poor” in America, I can tell you that the poor in America are materialistically the envy of the poor and working class of almost any other place on the planet and any other time in history.
But there certainly are other ways that Americans are poor.
Another cultural assumption that leads us to misunderstand Jesus is when we view his words through the lens of Marxism. When Marxists view the world they see two kinds of people – the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the oppressed and the oppressor. Everyone they meet or think about belongs in one of those groups. The great aspiration of a Marxist is to use the power of government and institutions tear down one group – the rich oppressor group – in order to build up the other group – the poor oppressed group.
To many people – especially Christians sometimes – Marxism can sound like it is a morally upright ideology of justice and liberation, but in reality and in practice it is so incredibly and tragically none of these things.
No other ideology ever conceived has enslaved, impoverished, and murdered more people than Marxism.
I’ll try to write more about Marxism some other time, but for now, just know that Marxism, like materialism, flattens the understanding of what in reality it means to be “rich” or “poor.” In reality, there are financially poor oppressors and financially rich liberators, wicked have-nots and noble-hearted haves. I hope this will become more clear later on but in short, a Marxist’s view of “rich” and “poor” is far too narrow to fit the lived human experience – and all too often, far too violent and oppressive.
So what is it that we are missing when Jesus talks about the “rich” and the “poor?” Let me tell a brief story.
There was a successful businessman and talent scout who at the top of his career got incredibly burned out and was forced to take a leave of absence. He was rich and successful but his life was a wreck. He decided he needed to go someplace far removed from anything he knew so he spun a globe and picked out an island in the middle of nowhere.
It was perfect – just local food, local people, and little huts next to beautiful beaches.
Every day when he went out to this nearly deserted beach he saw a man and his kids playing and surfing. Every. Day. It amazed the business man, but what amazed him even more was how incredible this man was as a surfer. He was simply amazing.
Every day the businessman would watch this father play with his kids and do things on his surf board that he had never seen before. He wondered, “What a waste that someone who can do what he can is stuck in a nowhere place like this.”
Finally the businessman could stand it no longer and he went down the beach to talk to this young father.
After introducing himself the businessman said, “You know, I couldn’t help but noticing that you’re really good at surfing.”
The father smiled and with delight in his eyes said, “Thanks! It’s a lot of fun!”
The Businessman said, “I don’t know how much sense this will make to you, but I happen to be a talent scout and if you’d be willing to come back to America with me, I could get you some major sponsorships. You’d be the biggest thing to hit the surfing world in years!”
“Wow! Really?” The other man said, “And then what?”
“Well, and then you’d be rich of course!”
“And then what?” the man asked again.
Dumbfounded that this island yokel didn’t know the importance of being rich, the businessman replied, “And then you can do whatever you want of course.”
The other man paused for a minute. With the surfboard under his arm he looked out at the ocean and listened to his kids laughing as they played in the waves, and then said, “You mean like surf and play with my kids all day? I think I’ll just stay here. Thanks though.” and walked back out to the ocean.
Being rich isn’t about how much money you have it’s about having what you want. Financially, materialistically, the businessman was rich and the surfer was destitute. In reality, the businessman was bankrupt and the surfer was wealthy.
I know homeless people who are rich because what they want is not money but freedom from responsibility – and they have all they could ever want and almost never want to trade it for something else.
I know a man who has an incredible amount of money but breaks down and cries on a regular basis over what his children have made of their lives. He would give every dollar he has for the wealth of seeing his children made whole.
I know tons of people who choose to make less money because “rich” to them is doing work they love and believe in or having time to spend with their kids.
I once knew a lady who was about as successful in corporate America as you can get, but she was so poor in relationships that she physically hurt sometimes from the loneliness.
Almost every week I spend time with people who are rich in many ways but are in bondage to drugs or alcohol.
I have seen families at the hospital who were materialistically rich by a global and historical standard, but what they were losing in that hospital bed left them in utter poverty.
As we shed our materialistic and Marxist lenses of the world and begin to understand the fuller meaning of what it means to be rich and what it means to be poor, both life and the teachings of Jesus take on whole new depths, color, and richness.
As we do this it allows us to see the richer meaning of teachings like Luke 6:20 where Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor for yours is the kingdom of God.” That can mean, “Blessed are those who can’t afford the necessities of life…” but its fuller meaning is better understood as “Blessed are those for whom life isn’t working out, who experience their life as tragedy and defeat, who can’t get what they really long for – because it is people like these, in situations like these, that have the chance to really get what the Kingdom of God is really all about.”
May this deeper understanding of “rich” and “poor” open your eyes to the profound teachings of Jesus and the vibrancy of the human experience.
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