The Elm and the Vine

"The two cities function symbiotically, and that is a reflection of how the two countries function symbiotically." - Bob Cook, President of the Nonprofit Economic Development Corporation, on El Paso and Ciudad Juarez

This past January I traveled with Episcopal Divinity School at Union students to El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico where we participated in the Annunciation House’s week-long Border Awareness Experience. A few days into the trip, the group headed up to a scenic mountain bluff in El Paso, Texas. From the mountain bluff, the border wall separating El Paso and Ciudad Juarez was nearly impossible to see. The two cities - one American, one Mexican - spread before me and my companions as a single teeming organism. This “Borderplex” is the largest bi-national community in the world, two regions connected by four international bridges that is the busiest crossing of people and cargo on earth.[1]

Despite their interconnectedness there are major differences between the two cities. Standing on the El Paso, TX side of the border wall, I was standing in one of the safest cities in the United States. Yet with my naked eye I could see the movement of cars and streets, the glint of tall office buildings, and the colonias of what remains one of the most violent cities on earth, a place where in 2008 a civilian had a greater likelihood of being kidnapped and murdered than in Baghdad.[2] 

On the El Paso side, on the same mountain I was standing on, stood a ring of mansions with spectacular views of Ciudad Juarez. We learned from our guide, a volunteer at the Roman Catholic refugee ministry Annunciation House, that many of these homes were owned by the top employees of the more than seventy Fortune 500 companies that do their manufacturing just across the border. Despite their proximity, the mansions are a world away from those three hundred factories, or maquiladoras, which are notoriously exploitative operations where in 2016 manufacturing wages was 40% cheaper than employee wages in China.[3]

Two cities, living and breathing as one organism. In 2008, Bob Cook, president of the economic development corporation for the region, noted that “the two cities function symbiotically” citing how the then-recent rise in manufacturing had brought more than 260,000 factory jobs to Juarez.[4] Referred to as a ‘low-cost geography’, Ciudad Juarez was named by fDi magazine in 2008 as “The City of the Future.” Yet my experience on both the mountain and in Ciudad Juarez has reminded me that parasitism is also a form of symbiosis, and this strikes me as a much more accurate way of describing the relationship between the two cities. In a 2016 Fronteras article on attempts by maquiladora employees to unionize for fairer wages, Dr. Kathy Staudt, professor of political science at the University of Texas, notes that the ‘global competitiveness’ of the region is exercised on the backs of workers. Further, when we descended the mountain and met with advocates on both sides of the border wall, they described a causal link between the low wages, desperate poverty, rise in corruption, and the extreme violence for which Juarez has become so known.  

The Pious Poor and Oppressive Rich Tradition in the Gospels

In order to grasp the Gospel’s perspective on wealth and poverty, one has to descend the mountain and head into places like the colonias of Juarez to see the relationship between the wealthy and the poor from the bottom up. Later on that trip, the EDS at Union group crossed into Juarez to visit the colonia of Anapra, a shanty town notable for its extreme poverty, vulnerability to violence, and its location right alongside the border wall. Many of the inhabitants of Anapra had traveled to Ciudad Juarez in the hopes of crossing into the United States, but after years of waiting and/or multiple failed attempts, they had settled in the poorest part of Juarez which looked through the border wall's slats toward the United States. A year prior, as part of another visit to Anapra, I stood at that wall as women and children emerged from their homes and mothers pressed their children forward to shyly beg from the wealthy Americans gathered there. Many of these women worked in the maquiladoras, a fact that I bore in mind as I peered between the slats into one of El Paso’s wealthier neighborhoods and up toward the mountains. 

Throughout the synoptic Gospels - and particularly in the Gospel of Luke - Jesus takes a distinctly negative view of the rich and sustains a ‘pious poor, oppressive rich’ tradition that longs for God’s apocalyptic reversal of society. And so we hear Mary in the Magnificat celebrating how God casts down the mighty from their thrones, lifts up the lowly, fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty.[5] In the Beatitudes, Jesus pointedly states that it is the poor who are blessed and in Luke’s version Jesus goes on to pronounce a series of woes to the rich and those whose stomachs are currently full.[6] Then there is also that uncomfortable exchange between Jesus and the rich young man/rich young ruler that is recorded in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, a story that has caused consternation among wealthy Christians and their apologists ever since.[7] After the rich young ruler refuses to sell all his possessions and give that money to the poor, Jesus stuns the disciples by telling them it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom of God. 

This generally negative view of the wealthy reflects the fact that the Gospels are a collection of stories from and for people whose lives looked more like those living in Anapra in Ciudad Juarez than those on the mountain bluff. In Greek literature, the Gospels are rare examples in which it is the poor who are at the center of the story, with the rich and powerful relegated to the margins and frequently serving as foils to the main action. In Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, historian Diarmaid McCullough notes, “Biographies were not rare in the ancient world and the Gospels do have many features in common with non-Christian examples. Yet these Christian books are an unusually ‘down-market’ variety of biography, in which ordinary people reflect on their experience of Jesus, where the powerful and the beautiful generally stay on the sidelines of the story, and where it is often the poor, the ill-educated and the disreputable whose encounters with God are most vividly described.”[8]

In the same way we must descend from the mountain bluff, so too we must reevaluate the pleasant scenes of richly-robed, pastoral poverty of the stained glass windows and illustrations in Sunday school curriculum. Christianity began and spread as an urban phenomenon, and Roman historians like Mary Beard note the “outskirts of many Roman towns may have been not far different from those of modern ‘Third World' cities, covered in squatter settlements or shanty towns populated by the nearly starving and those who begged as much as worked for their living.”[9] 

We know that the Roman Empire had an agrarian subsistence economy, one in which slave labor played a key role, and was characterized by profound inequality. In Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity, Helen Rhee notes the “Roman socio-economic hierarchy consisted of imperial and aristocratic elites (1–3 percent), a middle group with moderate surplus resources (7–15 percent), and the ‘poor,’ who were either stable near subsistence (22–27 percent), at subsistence (30–40 percent), or below subsistence (25–28 percent)." She concludes by saying that “while the term ‘poor’ is a relative term, 82–92 percent of the population still lived near or at subsistence level, struggling for survival and sustenance, particularly vulnerable to natural disasters and diseases.”[10] 

There is evidence from across the Roman Empire of extreme poverty in urban centers, including laws passed against homeless encampments in the tombs of the rich, references to the need to clear out the destitute’s lean-tos to prevent fires, as well as horrific references to parents intentionally blinding and maiming their children to increase their daily yield from begging.[11][12] Not all were destitute -- indeed, Rhee estimates 25-28% lived below subsistence level, a group comprised of farm families, unattached widows, orphans, beggars, the disabled, unskilled day laborers, prisoners -- but such destitution was never far from and would have represented a much-feared possibility for those smallholders, tenant farmers, and urban dwellers who were living right at subsistence level.[13] 

Of course, in the absence of clear economic data, there continues to be a great deal of debate among historians and biblical scholars about the extent of inequality and poverty in the Roman Empire. For this reason, I have found it helpful to think of poverty as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Scholar Neville Morley argues that whatever the exact percentage that the poor and destitute made up in Roman society, their lives were characterized by three factors: vulnerability to hunger, disease, crime and exploitation; exclusion from political processes, decision making, and the wider community; and shame in doing if not the actual work of slaves, then living and working in a way that was humiliatingly close to it.[14] Vulnerability, exclusion, and shame were self reinforcing factors since “shame contributed to social exclusion and social exclusion reinforced vulnerability, since the outcast could not rely on networks of reciprocity or patronage in times of crisis.” Bearing such factors in mind enriches our reading of the Gospel stories about healing from disease, of visions of feasts that would have been so compelling to people experiencing periods of hunger, of the story of the good Samaritan who helps a victim of robbery, as well as the repeated emphasis on restoring the excluded back into the wider community. 

In addition to helping us understand these recurring scenes, viewing wealth and poverty from the bottom up helps us begin to comprehend the apocalyptic hope for a reversal of how society is ordered which is a strong undercurrent throughout the Gospels. These apocalyptic hopes and visions were forged in the fires of increasing economic inequality during the post-exilic Second Temple period in Roman Palestine, as land became increasingly concentrated in the hands of the aristocratic classes. It is during this period that the ‘pious poor and oppressive rich’ tradition, a theme that runs throughout the Old Testament, becomes even more fully developed alongside the view that “profit making and the acquisition of wealth were automatically assumed to be the result of extortion or fraud."[15]  This ‘pious poor, oppressive rich’ tradition as well as the longing for a great, apocalyptic reversal was part of Jesus and his disciples’ mental furniture, an assumed worldview that is foundational to the Gospels and frames so many of his interactions with both the poor, destitute, and wealthy alike.

In sum, the Gospels were stories about the poor, shared in poor communities, whose recurring negative view of the rich speaks to a vastly unequal society. Helen Rhee describes Jesus and his disciples (Matt 8:20), the Jerusalem Church (Romans 15:26; Gal 2:10), Pauline communities (1 Cor: 26-27; 2 Cor 8:1) as belonging to the “lower socioeconomic stratum and ‘the poor’ in varying degrees; and they regularly described experiencing oppression and maltreatment by the rich and powerful in one way or another (cf. Luke 12:11–12; Acts 4:1–3; 8:1–3; 12:1–4; 2 Cor. 11:23–27; Heb. 10:32–34).”[16] 

As a non-scholar taking in all this information about wealth and poverty, I’ve found myself searching for images to encapsulate this view of how the wealthy are perceived by the poor in the Gospels. Recently, I’ve found ‘parasitic symbiosis’ to be a helpful framework because it synthesizes a cluster of disparate points made by biblical scholars and early church historians. First, it certainly carries forward the negative view of the wealthy found in the ‘pious poor, oppressive rich’ tradition that is a thematic undercurrent of the Gospels. Second, it captures what has been described as ‘the limited good’ view of wealth in an agrarian subsistence economy whereby the accumulation of wealth and profit-making was seen as an inherently unjust activity, the hoarding by the few of a relatively small amount of resources that was much-needed by the many. Finally, ‘parasitism’ is an immediately understandable term that bridges millennia. It is telling that even in this period of both economic growth and ever-rising inequality, the 2019 South Korean film Parasite won the academy award for best picture. This film tells the story of how two poor families in South Korea survive by tricking a wealthy family in order to survive, yet the story ultimately asks the haunting question of who is really exploiting the other? Who is the parasite of whom? 

As time has passed, the memories of these various trips to El Paso and Ciudad Juarez have begun to intermingle. I’m remembering standing on the mountain bluff looking down at Ciudad Juarez, then of standing in Anapra looking across El Paso toward the mountains. There are mansions and shanties and children approaching us shyly begging. There are factory owners as well as factory workers, as well as visions seen from the height of a mountain and then from between the slats of the border wall. As I’ll relate later, for several weeks after my last trip, I’d be awoken by images of the refugee women and children we’d meet there. These contrasting images and experiences have deeply informed my sense of who is the parasite of whom in this situation. 

Another Image of Symbiosis

By the second century, as more and more wealthy people were becoming part of the Christian assemblies, Christian thinkers began to deal with the awkwardness created by passages such as Jesus’ encounter with the rich young man. They asked whether the rich could, in fact, enter the Kingdom of God and, if so, how. The rest of this post will focus on how one second century text, The Shepherd of Hermas, addressed these questions. This text was popular among second and third century Christians and was considered canonical scripture by some early Church Fathers. It is also one of the earliest examples of Christian thinkers wrestling with the question of how the rich could fit into this growing movement which was still primarily comprised of and led by those living at, near, or below subsistence-level poverty, and it employs an image of mutualistic symbiosis to describe how the wealthy and the poor might eventually come to relate to one another within the church. 

Part of what makes The Shepherd of Hermas such a unique text - and to my mind, such a helpful framework for thinking about wealth and poverty in Christianity today - is that it manages to do three things at once. First, it sustains the Gospels’ generally negative view on the accumulation of wealth and is unequivocal about the dangers that wealth poses to salvation. “The rich have much wealth, but are poor in the things of the Lord, being distracted by their wealth, and they have very little confession and prayer with the Lord, and what they do have is small and weak and has no power above.”[17] Unlike later writers like Clement of Alexandria, there is no attempt to argue for the moral neutrality of wealth in general. Second, because it sustains the Gospel’s prophetic critique of wealth, it focuses narrowly on how the wealthy and poor can come to relate to one another within the church. The Shepherd of Hermas sees the church as offering a corrective to the parasitic relationship between the wealthy and the poor so apparent in wider society. Third, in order to illustrate this new relationship, the writer offers two remarkable images to describe how the wealthy and powerful can indeed become incorporated into the life of the Church.

In the first of these two images, the writer envisions a church tower being constructed out of square stones. Laying all about the tower, however, are round stones which do not fit in and which, therefore, are not able to be used in the building up of the church tower. We are told that these stones represent those who are faithful but rich and who must first cut away their unjustly gained wealth in order to find their place in this new movement. “When their riches, which lead their souls astray, are cut away, then they will be useful to God. For just as the round stone cannot become square unless it is trimmed and loses some part of itself, so also those who are rich in this world cannot become useful to the Lord unless their riches are cut away. Learn first from yourself: when you were rich, you were useless, but now you are useful and beneficial to life.”[18]

What is fascinating about this image, and what makes it so striking today, is in the way in which the wealthy and powerful are de-centered in this image of the building up of the church tower. The round stones are far from being the “pillars of the community” around which the church is built. Rather, The Shepherd of Hermas insists that it is the wealthy and powerful who have to do significant work in order to fit into an emerging movement that is still primarily led by the poor and marginalized members of society. 

The second image is that of the fruitless elm and the unsupported vine. It is important here to reiterate the fact that this image is not a pollyanna image of how the wealthy and poor might relate to one another in wider society, but rather a hopeful vision for how the wealthy and the poor might relate to one another within the church. This image of mutualistic symbiosis is intended as a corrective to the parasitic relationship so evident in wider society, both then and now. 

In this image of mutualistic symbiosis, the writer compares the recently incorporated wealthy members of the church to the then-common agrarian practice of using elm trees as supports for fruiting grapevines. The wealthy are represented by the elm tree, a type of tree that, while not able to bear fruit, can nevertheless serve as a source of support and much-needed shade in times of drought. The poor are represented by the grapevine whose fruits are so easily consumed by predators and destroyed by the heat when it does not have the support and shade of elm trees. “As far as people are concerned, the elm does not seem to bear fruit, and they neither know nor realize that if a drought comes the elm, which has water, nourishes the vine, and the vine, having a constant supply of water, bears double the fruit, both for itself and for the elm. So also the poor, by appealing to the Lord on behalf of the rich, complement their wealth, and again, the rich, by providing for the needs of the poor, complement their souls.”[19] 

Notably, The Shepherd of Hermas continues the ‘pious poor, oppressive rich’ tradition of seeing the poor as having a much closer relationship to God than the wealthy and the theme that God hears the prayers of the poor more closely than those of the rich. Together, however, the fruitless elm and the unsupported vine can become one teeming organism, bearing much fruit for the Kingdom of God. 

The image of the elm and the vine would become a part of a larger theological discussion around redemptive almsgiving as a means by which members of the early Church could atone for post-baptismal sins, and also as a pathway for the wealthy to gain their salvation. In both the Shepherd of Hermas and in the theology of redemptive almsgiving generally, there remains a troubling transactional nature to this relationship between the wealthy and the poor. The wealthy’s support of the poor is in exchange for the poor’s prayers to God on behalf of the wealthy. Because God hears and attends to the prayers of the poor more closely, alms were thought to give the rich a chance at salvation. Early church historians have pointed out that this helped to align the church with the broader Roman patronage system in which the wealthy’s gifts to the wider public were given in exchange for loyalty, fame, and a certain amount of protection. In later centuries, the transactional nature of redemptive almsgiving would become so pronounced that Clement of Alexandria, writing in the third century to his fellow elite, proclaimed “O divine exchange!” and urged the rich to set sail immediately for this market in which with worldly wealth one can purchase divine salvation. 

And yet, even knowing this, I continue to find The Shepherd of Hermas’ two images to be among the most compelling visions for how the wealthy and the poor can relate to one another within the Church. I appreciate that he, unlike later writers like Clement of Alexandria, Ambrosiaster, and to a certain extent Augustine, sustains the ‘pious poor, oppressive rich’ perspective that is such an undercurrent of the Gospels even as he genuinely wrestles with how the rich can fit into the church tower. It is the wealthy, he insists, who must do the work, cutting away at wealth and privilege to enter into assemblies in which one is not centered. As fruitless elm trees, the wealthy can atone for the exploitative means by which they have gained their wealth by becoming a quietly solid elm tree, offering support and shade in times of drought and famine. Here I must add that for me, these images are also beautifully accurate descriptions of what it is like to become a member of a church community that is “owned” and led by marginalized members of society. It is a transformative experience of decentering, of entering into the lifelong journey of cutting away one’s wealth and privilege, and of learning how to be a source of quiet strength and support. 

Mujeres de esperanza y fe

Not long after our group stood on the mountain bluff, we piled into a van and headed toward one of the four international bridges from El Paso into Ciudad Juarez. We traveled five miles into the city toward a garbage dump where women and children can be found foraging for food, clothing, and other basic necessities. This dumpsite is where more than two decades ago, Roman Catholic nun Sister Donna Kustusch founded Centro Catalina, a center for women and children whose protective walls still abuts the dump.[20] In 2009, the New York Times made a six-minute film about how Centro Catalina had become a haven amidst the rise in violence that captures this remarkable story. 

We had traveled to Centro Catalina to visit Las mujeres de esperanza y fe - Women of Hope and Faith - a women's cooperative comprised of sixteen members who sew and sell scarves, handbags, coin purses, and tortilla warmers, among many other items. Many of the women were former maquiladora workers who spoke about how grateful they were that this women’s collective had enabled them to escape that grueling life. At one point, they mentioned that the annual income goal for the entire collective was $7,000, a total that even split among the sixteen members, still represented a significant improvement in their overall quality of life over their time as factory workers. 

It is important to pause here and do a little math. An annual total of $7,000, when split among sixteen members, means that each member can receive up to $437.00 per year. This figure, however, does not take into account what might be spent on supplies and materials for making their products, and so the amount that members take home could be considerably less. 

Upon hearing this amount, I also found myself immediately comparing this number to other amounts I’m much more familiar with. I thought about how many times the $7000 total could go into my annual income, not to mention my household’s annual income. I thought about those $7,000 in relation to the income made off of investments -- monies I made in the past year by quite literally doing nothing at all. I thought about how much I’d spent on my wedding and on how much I had spent on a recent vacation, and I was struck, once again, by the way that some of us -- including a great many who may not necessarily perceive ourselves as rich -- have a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, and power, while over half the globe lives on less than $5.50 a day.[21]

For several weeks after returning from El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, I would awaken from dreams in which I’d see the faces of the women and children I met both at Centro Catalina and at Annunciation House’s shelter for refugees. But even as these images have faded from memory, what I have remained particularly haunted by is this exceptionally cruel math. How can a family survive on the amounts described? And what are we, the consumers of what is manufactured in Juarez, to make of the fact that this still represents a significant improvement over their prior lives as maquiladora employees? 

Conclusion

Unfortunately, of the three main messages that The Shepherd of Hermas offers regarding wealth and poverty, it oftentimes seems that it is only the pastoral image of the elm and vine that has remained with us. In my experience of the Episcopal Church, it is relatively rare to hear a full-throated, prophetic critique of the accumulation of wealth, and in this we are the inheritors of later thinkers like Clement of Alexandria and Augustine who made the case for wealth’s moral neutrality. In arguments that feel surprisingly familiar to our current conversation around guns, Clement laid the groundwork for thinking of wealth as a tool. Wealth itself is not to be critiqued but rather the person who wields that wealth and determines its use. 

It is difficult to overstate the extent to which such a view undermined the “pious poor, oppressive rich” perspective found within the Gospels, and how out-of-step such a viewpoint was with contemporary and even later thinkers such as John Chrysostom who speak of profit, the accumulation of riches, and the passing of this wealth through inheritance as inherently exploitative and unjust acts. Tragically, the prophetic witness of the Gospels on these matters and the voices of these later thinkers are rarely referenced. Further, at times it seems we have reversed the relationship described in the image of the church tower and round stones. Far from asking the wealthy to cut away their wealth and power, some -- perhaps even many -- churches have made the experience of the wealthy and powerful central, cutting away instead at the prophetic voice of the Gospel to ensure continued institutional support. These losses have laid the groundwork for a remarkable turn in mainline Christianity whose fruit is an unhinged overvaluing of wealth and the wealthy in the life of the Church.

What has remained, however, is the spirit behind the Shepherd of Hermas’ image of the elm and the vine. In the most positive reading of this image, the wealthy can be a source of support and shade in times of drought and famine to the poor and destitute. One contemporary example of this relationship can be found at Centro Catalina itself in that many of the services provided to the women and children there are funded through donations made by the wealthy of both Juarez and El Paso. Checks are written in homes like yours and mine as well as, perhaps, some of the homes I saw atop the mountain bluff. And yet I’m struck by the way even this hopeful image can veer into the realm of questionable transaction -- a patronage model that centers the wealthy and powerful -- when it becomes disconnected from the Gospel’s prophetic critique of the rich and from the expectation that the wealthy must first confront and cut away at their power and privilege to enter the poor people’s movement that is the life of the Church. It is only in holding all three strands that we, the wealthy, can enter into a journey of being transformed by Jesus’ Good News for the poor. 

________________

[1] “The Ciudad-Juarez Borderplex: The U.S. Mexico Border Done Right” and “2 Cities and 4 Bridges Where Commerce Flows” 

[2] October 2009 New York Times video “Return to Juarez”

[3] Fronteras, 2016 - “Factory Workers in Juarez Unionize for Higher Pay, Better Working Conditions” - https://fronterasdesk.org/content/10219/factory-workers-ju%C3%A1rez-unionize-higher-pay-better-working-conditions

[4] “2 Cities and 4 Bridges Where Commerce Flows” 

[5] Luke 1:46-55

[6] Luke 6:20-26

[7] Matthew 19:16-30; Mark 10:17-31; Luke 18:18-30

[8] MacCullough, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Page 77. 

[9] Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. Page 443. 

[10] Rhee, Helen. Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. Location 80. 

[11] Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. Pages 442-444. 

[12] Parkin, Annaleise. “You Do Him No Service: An Exploration of Pagan Almsgiving” in Poverty in the Roman World. Page 71

[13] Rhee, Helen. Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich. Page 10. 

[14] Morley, Nelville. “The Poor in the City of Rome” in Poverty in the Roman World. 33-36. 

[15] Malina and Rohrbaugh, “Rich, Poor, and Limited Good”, Social Science Commentary on Gospels, 400-401

[16] Rhee, Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation. 35 

[17]  Rhee, Helen. Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity (Ad Fontes: Early Christian Sources) Kindle Edition. Shepherd of Hermas, Loc 674. 

[18] Rhee, Helen. Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity (Ad Fontes: Early Christian Sources) (p. 2). Augsburg Fortress. Kindle Edition. / Shepherd of Hermas. Loc 625

[19] Rhee, Helen. Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity (Ad Fontes: Early Christian Sources) (p. 2). Augsburg Fortress. Kindle Edition. / Shepherd of Hermas. Location 682. 

[20] “Juarez: Amid Violence, a Haven.” 2009 New York Times video - https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/1194839591561/jurez-amid-violence-a-haven.html?searchResultPosition=1

[21] “Nearly Half the World Lives on Less Than $5.50 a Day” World Bank, Oct 2018 - https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/10/17/nearly-half-the-world-lives-on-less-than-550-a-day