Ryan Harker is a Ph.D. student in New Testament at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. His home congregation is Pulaski (Iowa) Mennonite Church.

Ignacio Silva recently wrote an interesting piece for The Mennonite online titled, “Wealth and Christianity: One Business Teacher’s Perspective.” As someone from a poor background who has now become a pastor and a Bible-scholar-in-training, the title certainly caught my eye.

I am incredibly thankful for my upbringing, because it gave me the eyes to recognize the Bible’s teachings on wealth once I did become a Christian on the cusp of my adult life. And I’m thankful to Mr. Silva for giving me the opportunity to think through this topic once more.

That said, I’d like to share a few thoughts in response to Mr. Silva’s opinion article.

First off, something about the reading of the Bible: that is, how we interpret the divinely inspired text that God has given us. Here’s the thing about interpretation: if we’re not careful, we will find in a text, work of art, or movie whatever it is that we bring to it. The Bible is no exception. To submit ourselves to the Bible, because that’s what Christians do, is to commit to understanding it on its own terms first and ours second.

As for “wealth and Christianity,” the fact of the matter is that the New Testament, especially the Gospels, has quite a negative view of the concept of “wealth.” Still, while the overwhelming majority of the statements regarding riches, wealth, or money are negative, there is also some evidence that there existed more wealthy believers early on. Phoebe, Chloe, and Ananias and Sapphira are just a few examples, though the text helps us know how being wealthy turned out for Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5). These folks are the exception, however.

Jesus’ statements about riches and wealth are also much more negative than they are positive, despite what Mr. Silva claims. To be frank, to be a disciple of Jesus and to be rich is to have a problem on your hands, as Stanley Hauerwas says in his Brazos Theological Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. Twice in the Gospels, Jesus says “Blessed are the poor,” though he says it a bit differently in Matthew than he does in Luke, where he also adds “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry” (6:24-5a).

In addition to the Beatitudes, we could also talk about the Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:16-21), the Parable of the Unjust Steward (Luke 16:1-13), and the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31), all parables that, if read well, issue stern warnings against the pursuit of wealth. While Mr. Silva cites the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), and the Parable of the Talents (Matt. 25:14-30), none of these parables have anything directly to do with riches or wealth. They certainly don’t reveal how Jesus felt about it. But Jesus is quite direct in other places, including but not only in his Beatitudes.

For instance, I will just mention Matthew 6:24, right in the middle of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which we Mennonites love so much. In verse 24, Jesus issues this warning: “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and wealth (Mammon).” To quote Hauerwas again, in commenting on this verse and referring back to the Lord’s Prayer (“Give us this day our daily bread”), to live according to this teaching is “to ask for no more than our daily bread. That does not mean that we are encouraged to idleness (2 Thess. 3). But it means that we must learn what it means to live in a community of trust. Such a community offers the hope that habits can be developed that draw us from the forms of greed given legitimacy by capitalist practices and ideologies (81).”

On that same page, Hauerwas says simply, and I agree with him, “Jesus is very clear. Wealth is a problem.” While the accidents of life may leave us relatively wealthy on some level, the pursuit of wealth is surely to stray from the path laid out by Jesus and further taught by his disciples and the Apostle Paul. Mammon will form our hearts in its likeness, and that’s not a place we want to be, if Jesus’ words are any indication.

In terms of the economic status of Jesus’ family and later of his economic status as an adult, much more could be said than I can fit in a short article. But a few things are important to notice, especially about the word tekton, which Mr. Silva rightly points out means “carpenter,” both Jesus’ and Joseph’s vocation.

Luke 2:22-4 actually reveals that Jesus’ family, though his father was a tekton, a skilled craftsperson (usually a carpenter), was in fact poor. In this passage, Luke reports the event of Jesus’ parents taking him to the Temple “when the time came for purification according to the Law of Moses (v. 22).” In v. 23, Luke alludes to Leviticus 12:8 when he writes that Mary and Joseph took baby Jesus to the temple to offer a sacrifice of “two turtledoves or two young pigeons.” Now, the context of Lev 12:8 is the directions for the purification of women after childbirth. This is interesting because it says in v. 8 that “if she [the women having given birth] cannot afford a sheep, she shall take two turtledoves or two pigeons, one for a burnt offering and the other for a sin offering.” We thus have clear evidence that Jesus hails from a poor family, one unable to afford a sheep for a temple sacrifice, though his was a family provided for by a tekton. One’s status as a tekton does not guarantee that one is “a complete artisan: highly skilled, highly paid, and highly in-demand,” as Mr. Silva claims. The same is true today. There are wealthy carpenters, and there are poor carpenters. Their wealth (or lack thereof) may reflect their skill level, or it may not. The same was true then. Jesus’ father was a tekton, but he was a poor one.

On the question of tekton, a few more words are in order. Mr. Silva is right to point out that tekton can refer to crafsmanship with respect to many trades, though almost always carpentry of some sort. But there is no evidence that the use of the word tekton to describe a person “designates carpentry, stonemason, cartwright, and joiner all rolled into one.” Actually, in a very quick look, I only found one reference in ancient Greek literature of a tekton being one who deals with stone. Every other time, it designates a woodworker, and sometimes such people are slaves, though not always. Besides, in the unusual circumstance that a craftsperson was able to reach expert level in all of these highly-skilled crafts, a writer probably would have taken pains to describe such an impressive feat, just as we would today. The use of one word like tekton would not have been adequate to describe such a person.

Lastly, Mr. Silva interestingly claims that Jesus must have been wealthy in order to finance his ministry, right after he declares that Jesus, being from a “backwater town,” must have made his riches in the big city of Sepphoris, a wealthy city in Galilee heavily influenced by Greek culture (and not very Jewish, actually). Interestingly, though, Sepphoris is never even mentioned in the Gospels, and I think that’s intentional. But of course, since Jesus was just a country-bumpkin, he obviously needed the big city to earn money, which he saved “instead of spending it partying in Sepphoris, and it was this money that he then used to finance his three-year ministry. See? He became wealthy, and gave it back, as was his heavenly Father’s will.” Besides the fact that this sounds an awful lot like a modern capitalistic narrative of a poor rural person “making it rich” in the city for the Kingdom of God, there is one more important thing to note. Mr. Silva unfortunately leaves out the clear statement in Luke’s Gospel that Jesus did not support his own ministry. In fact, Luke says (8:1-3) that as Jesus went about the cities and villages proclaiming the Kingdom of God, his disciples were with him. But also with him were several women: Mary Magdelene, Joanna, Susanna, and many others, “who provided for him out of their resources.”

So, Jesus was a poor, rural (“backwood”), low-paid craftsman who needed the support of generous women in order to do God’s work. These women pulled their resources together to provide for what little needs Jesus had (after all, he could make bread from stones, so I doubt he needed much capital to do his work).

In my response, I have tried to be fair to Mr. Silva’s sentiments and viewpoints, but I have also tried to be clear about where I disagree. I’ve also tried to make plain that the biblical view of riches and wealth is much more negative (or at least complicated) than Mr. Silva makes it out to be. As for me, I’d rather be like our poor, rural, backwoods, low-paid God Incarnate than a rich man who builds bigger storage units to put up all the stuff I can buy with my hard-earned money. There are two ways.

This “Opinions” section of our website provides a forum for the voices within Mennonite Church USA and related Anabaptist-Mennonite voices. The views expressed do not necessarily represent the official positions of The Mennonite, the board for The Mennonite, Inc., or Mennonite Church USA.