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THE RICHES OF POVERTY AND THE POVERTY OF RICHES

James 2:5–7

Listen, my dear brothers. Did God not choose those who are poor by the world’s valuation to be rich because of their faith and to be heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him? But you dishonour the poor man. Do not the rich oppress you, and is it not they who drag you to the law courts? And is it not they who abuse the fair name by which you have been called?

‘GOD’, said the American president Abraham Lincoln, ‘must love the common people because he made so many of them.’ Christianity has always had a special message for the poor. In Jesus’ first sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth, his claim was: ‘He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor’ (Luke 4:18). His answer to John’s puzzled inquiries as to whether or not he was God’s chosen one culminated in the claim: ‘The poor have good news brought to them’ (Matthew 11:5). The first of the beatitudes was: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 5:3). And Luke is even more definite: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God’ (Luke 6:20). During the ministry of Jesus, when he was banished from the synagogues and took to the open road and the hillside and the seaside, it was the crowds of ordinary men and women to whom his message came. In the days of the early Church, it was to the crowds that the street preachers preached. In fact, the message of Christianity was that those who mattered to no one else mattered intensely to God. ‘Consider your own call, brothers and sisters,’ wrote Paul to the Corinthians, ‘not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth’ (1 Corinthians 1:26).

It is not that Christ and the Church do not want the great and the rich and the wise and the mighty; we must beware of an inverted snobbery, as we have already seen. But it was the simple fact that the gospel offered so much to the poor, and demanded so much from the rich, that it was the poor who were swept into the Church. It was, in fact, the ordinary people who heard Jesus gladly and the rich young ruler who went sorrowfully away because he had great possessions. James is not shutting the door on the rich – far from it. He is saying that the gospel of Christ is especially dear to the poor and that in it there is a welcome for those who have no one to welcome them, and that through it there is a value set on those whom the world regards as valueless.

In the society that James inhabited, the rich oppressed the poor. They dragged them to the law courts. No doubt this was for debt. At the bottom end of the social scale, people were so poor that they could hardly live, and money-lenders were plentiful and well practised in extortion. In the ancient world, there was a custom of instant arrest. If a creditor met a debtor on the street, he could seize him by the neck of his robe, nearly throttling him, and literally drag him to the law courts. That is what the rich did to the poor. They had no sympathy; all they wanted was every last penny, every last cent. It is not riches that James is condemning; it is the management of riches without sympathy.

It is the rich who abuse the name by which the Christians are called. It may be the name Christian by which the followers of Christ were called first of all at Antioch and which was given initially as a jest. It may be the name of Christ, which was pronounced over a Christian at baptism. The word James uses for called (epikaleisthai) is the word used for a wife taking her husband’s name in marriage or for children being called after their father. Christians take the name of Christ; they are called after Christ. It is as if they were married to Christ, or born and christened into the family of Christ.

The rich and the masters would have many reasons for insulting the name Christian. Slaves who became Christians would have a new independence; they would no longer cringe at their master’s power, punishment would cease to terrorize them and they would meet their master with a new strength and confidence. They would have a new honesty. That would make them better slaves, but it would also mean they could no longer be their master’s instruments in sharp practice and petty dishonesty as once they might have been. They would have a new sense of worship, and on the Lord’s Day they would insist on putting work aside in order that they might worship with the people of God. There would be ample opportunity for a master to find reasons for insulting the name of Christian and cursing the name of Christ.