 |
| By Meister des Codex Aureus Epternacensis - The Yorck Project (2002) |
One of the themes that I immediately picked up on, particularly within the Gospel of Luke, was that of the reversal of fortunes between the rich and poor, the powerful and the weak. I was particularly struck by Mary’s hope expressed in the Magnificat that God would pull the powerful down from their thrones, lift up the lowly, fill the hungry with good things, and send the rich away empty (Luke 1:46-55) as well as the Lucan Beatitudes' inclusion of woes on the rich, the full, and those who were laughing now (Luke 6:24-26).
At that particular moment in my life, a period in which I felt scared, powerless, and regularly humiliated, reading about what biblical scholars have termed ‘the great reversal’ gave me hope and clarity about God’s place on the side of the most vulnerable.
These images and stories of God’s impending reversal are one of Christianity’s great gifts, a balm and source of hope to all who are living their lives with a boot on their neck. Too often, however, this dream of God's reversal is missed or dismissed. I cannot tell you the number of times I have heard a priest preach that God simply wants us to "follow our joy", or the frequency with which the rules for polite conversation at a cocktail party are confused with the Gospel.
Jesus’ mission to proclaim Good News to the poor includes woes to the rich and powerful, and these are an important, second half of his hopeful message. On the Magnificat, theologian M. Douglas Meeks describes this bluntly: “The rich can avoid the eschatological reversal only by repenting whatever in their lives makes them hoard themselves and their possessions,” and later of the woes in Jesus’ Beatitudes, that “though the rich prosper now, the coming rule of God’s righteousness will bring an end to their present status of privilege and prosperity.”[1]
To appreciate the centrality of this message, we have to look at where these dreams of reversal come from. In this post, I will explore early church historian Helen Rhee’s research examining the origins of the “pious poor and oppressive rich” tradition in the Gospels as well as some of what led to the dreams of the great reversal that I found - and continue to find - so profoundly compelling.
What follows will be a summary of work Rhee presents in two books, Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation and Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity. Although she presents an abundance of material, including how the Septuagint made extreme poverty more visible through its usage of the Greek word for the category of 'destitute', I will be focusing almost exclusively on her description of the underlying socioeconomics of the Second Temple Period and the intense pressures of first century Palestine. I will then look at the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31) as the quintessential stories of how God’s judgment reverses the fate of the rich and the poor.
----
In Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich, Rhee offers important details on the intense socioeconomic pressures of the Second Temple Period, the period in Jewish history between 516 BCE and 70 AD when the Second Temple in Jerusalem existed. She notes that this time in Jewish history was one of “continuous foreign domination from the Persians, Greeks, and Romans, with a brief hiatus of the Hasmonean rule” as well as “a time of harsh social reality and living conditions for the masses.”[2]
“In first-century Palestine, the social scene betrayed the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small elite group (the landed aristocracy) and the general impoverishment of the majority of the population (the landless peasants). The tension between the wealthy landed minority and the peasant landless majority goes back to the late monarchical period, but throughout the Second Temple period and especially during Herod’s rule, the situation grew increasingly worse through the continuing economic oppression and confiscation of the land by the rich and powerful. Creation of huge estates through the exploitation of the land and through mortgage interest produced a growing number of landless tenants or hired laborers in the very land they had once owned. And the coalition between the great landowners and the mercantile groups over the monopoly of the agricultural goods made the peasant workers’ lot more difficult to endure.”
Rhee goes on to describe this period as having “the firm imprint of feudalism” wherein the pressures on the lives of the poor were immense. In addition, other compounding factors such overpopulation and over-cultivation of the land, natural disasters, as well as increasing tributes and tithes all combined to force “the already poor majority into the arduous struggle for unfortunate survival in a highly stratified society.”[3]
Just how stratified stratified first century Palestine was has been a source of debate among biblical scholars and early church historians for some time. In Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity, published in 2017, Rhee includes more recent estimates that moderate the stark picture first offered by Bruce Longnecker in his 2010 book Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World. Even these figures, however, are a stark reminder of the prevalence and severity of poverty and the extent to which this shaped the Gospels.
There Rhee notes that first century Rome was comprised of an imperial & aristocratic elite (1-3%), a middle group with moderate surplus resources (7-15%), and “the poor” who were either stable near subsistence (22-27%), at subsistence (30-40%), or below subsistence and therefore lacking necessary food, shelter, and clothing (25-28%).[4] In the agrarian subsistence economy that was the Roman empire, this meant that 75-90% of the Roman world lived close to subsistence level -- near, at, or below -- and were struggling for survival and sustenance on a daily basis.[5] As such, a vast majority of the population was particularly vulnerable to natural disasters, including droughts resulting in periodic food shortages and diseases.
Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome helps to fill in the picture of what these percentages mean. The fact that ancient Rome was an agrarian subsistence economy, for instance, means that 50 million people across the Roman Empire were peasant farmers -- both smallholders and tenants alike -- “struggling to grow enough food to feed themselves in some years, with a small surplus to sell in others.”[5A] There were periods of extreme hardship such as the late 60s BCE when evidence from Roman coins suggest that peasant farmers experienced “if not starvation then persistent hunger.”[5B]
As early Christianity’s spread was largely an urban phenomenon, it is especially important to take in her descriptions of the extreme urban poverty that plagued Roman cities. She notes the existence of Roman laws prohibiting people camping in the tombs of the aristocracy, the descriptions of the poor creating lean-tos against walls and how those were cleared periodically. In describing why so few indications remain that tell us anything about the lives of the poor, Beard writes about how literally fragile their existence was. “The outskirts of many Roman towns may have not been 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.”[5C] Shanty towns do not leave behind permanent structures to study millennia later, and extreme hunger, she notes, typically resolved itself by the starving dying without leaving a trace behind.
The increasing pressures of poverty on that 75-90% of the population meant that the stage was set for social upheaval and rebellion in Roman Palestine. Jesus' ministry and the emergence of the Jesus movement takes place alongside the revolt of Judas the Galilean (6 CE), the Jewish War (66–70 CE), and the Bar Kochba rebellion (132–35 CE). While all of these events are very different from one another, they can be understood as multifaceted responses to the intense socioeconomic pressures of that period.
In addition to setting the stage for social upheaval and rebellion, the volatility and pressures of the Second Temple Period also led to an imaginative vision, tone, and framework about what God's justice would look like. Literature from this period - including 1 Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon, and the Gospels, Revelations, and the Book of James - hinge on imagery of the hoped-for, final struggle between the righteous and the wicked wherein “the righteous were presented as the victimized poor and the wicked were identified as the powerful rich.”
Rhee concludes that “this eschatological conflict between the righteous poor and the wicked rich involved the ‘great reversal’ of their earthly fortunes on the last day,” and that “in this political and socioeconomic climate, the early followers of Jesus believed that, with the coming of Jesus, the eschatological new age had indeed dawned.”
----
While these themes of the ‘pious poor and oppressive rich’ and ‘great reversal’ are interwoven throughout all four Gospels, they are especially present within the Gospel of Luke. In addition to the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), Jesus announces his mission as proclaiming good news to the poor (Luke 4:18-19), and tells followers to invite ‘the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind’ to banquets (Luke 14:13, 21). Luke’s version of the beatitudes includes a series of woes to the rich (Luke 6:20-26) and focuses on the ridiculousness of the rich fool who stores up his wealth in barns (Luke 12:16-21). There is also, of course, the story of the rich young ruler - a version of which is told in all three synoptic Gospels - which concludes with Jesus saying that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Indeed, the rich who are to be praised are people like Zaccheus who gives his wealth away (Luke 19:1-10) and the ‘unjust steward’ who halves the debts of his master’s servants, a small sign of God’s Jubilee and, perhaps, the closest thing Luke has in terms of a constructive pathway forward for making friends for one’s self using ‘dishonest wealth’ (Luke 16:9).
In addition to these examples, perhaps the most vivid and straightforward depiction of God’s reversal in the Gospel of Luke is the one that takes place between Lazarus and the rich man. Theologian Douglas Meeks describes this parable as a vivid illustration of the coming reversal and the need for repentance among the rich and powerful for their treatment of the poor.[6]
Luke 16:19-31 relates in vivid detail the contrasting lives and fates of the beggar Lazarus and a rich man. Characteristic of the way that the Gospels are view of society from the bottom up, it is the beggar Lazarus who is named while the rich man remains a generalized figure. The differences are told in striking detail. Whereas the rich man was “was dressed in purple and fine linen” and “feasted sumptuously every day”, Lazarus lay at the rich man’s gate “covered in sores” hoping to “satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table.” Even the dogs would come to lick Lazarus’ sores, Jesus tells his listeners.
Death comes for both Lazarus and the rich man but even here there are differences. Whereas the rich man is properly buried, Lazarus dies at the gates of the rich man. Hearers of this story would have known that beggars like Lazarus ended up being buried in mass graves. It is only in the eternal life that God’s reversal of fortunes finally takes place. M. Douglas Meeks states, “But, though not even decently buried, Lazarus (“God helps”) now sits at the table with Abraham in God’s eschatological household. In contrast, the rich man, properly interred, experiences that hell that the poor Lazarus had known in his lifetime.“ [6A]
In a passage that is as frightening to the rich as it would have been soothing to the first listeners of this parable, Jesus continues by telling how the rich man called out to Abraham, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.” But Abraham responds, “Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.”
God’s justice has fixed a great chasm between the rich man and Lazarus and everything has been turned upside down.
----
The pious poor and oppressive rich tradition, as well as the images of God’s reversal particularly within the Gospel of Luke, are, of course, not the only themes to be found within the Gospels as relates to wealth and poverty. Even so, one can't deny these texts existence and they need to be reconsidered as a source of inspiration for those who live with a boot on their neck.
When I was fourteen and feeling particularly powerless and frightened about my future, I was frankly inspired by these texts. Reading those words, my teenage soul joined up with generations of oppressed peoples who have found strength and courage in both halves of this message, both the positive affirmations of ‘the least of these’ as well as the less frequently cited pronouncement of woes on the powerful who make the lives of the poor miserable. There’s a lot of historical evidence showing that my fourteen year old state was a lot closer to that of the first listeners whose lives were on the edge, were experiencing incredible societal and psychological pressures, and who actively dreamed of God’s coming to reverse the stifling order of things, a situation in which people were struggling everyday to survive and breathe.
Of course, it has been twenty four years since I began reading the Gospel of Luke. In the time since, I’ve been surprisingly successful when one considers my decision to focus on Religious Studies and Spanish in college, and I now encounter these texts in a very different way. Suffice to say, in the story of Lazarus and the rich man, I am definitively not Lazarus. In fact, this story bears a chilling resemblance to the social reality I witness everyday, albeit this time from the rich man’s perspective.
As a result of the economic fallout of COVID-19, there are now people leaning against and resting alongside the apartment building I live in, a building which immediately changed its policies and locked its entrance doors the instant that the population of homeless people began growing in my neighborhood. As someone who is able to work from home, I spend most of my days inside, thirty one floors above the human tragedy unfolding on the streets below.
The experience of these stories -- whether they are a source of hope or terror -- depends greatly on whether you are reading the Gospels from the top down or the bottom up, from the insulation that wealth brings or, as my friend and colleague Dean Kelly Brown Douglas often says, “from the underside of history.” At 38, I’d like to believe that where one chooses to align one’s work and witness also matters, that compassionate solidarity with ‘the least of these’ is also a factor in God’s judgment, yet I’d note that the Gospels are remarkably silent on the interior sympathies of the rich.
It is ultimately in the external acts of giving away one’s wealth, acting on the reversal demanded by God’s justice, that we the rich can live into God’s Kingdom.
________________
[1] Meeks, M. Douglas. Economics in Christian Scriptures, Oxford Book. Page 9
[2] Rhee, Helen. Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich . Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Loc 1001
[3] Rhee, Helen. Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich . Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Loc 1001
[4] Rhee, Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity, Loc 80
[5] Rhee, Helen. Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation, pages 5 and 11
[5A] Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. 442-448
[5B] Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. 46
[5C] Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. 443
[6] Meeks, Douglas. Economics in Church Scriptures. Oxford. Page 9
[6A] Meeks, Douglas. Economics in Church Scriptures. Oxford. Page 9
Comments
Post a Comment