Insights: Money. William Barclay
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of all, real giving must be sacrificial: it must hurt. ‘It may well be a sign of the decadence of the Church and the failure of our Christianity that gifts have to be coaxed out of church people, and that often they will not give at all unless they get something back in the way of entertainment or of goods.’ The second lesson to be learned is that real giving has a certain recklessness about it. The widow could have kept her last coin. ‘Somehow,’ writes Barclay, ‘there is nearly always something we hold back. We rarely make the final sacrifice.’ And the third lesson from the story is that the person praised by Jesus as the epitome of generosity was a person who gave a gift of so little monetary value: ‘if we put all that we have and are at his disposal, he can do things with it and with us that are beyond our imagination.’
Readers may find the lessons in this book – on money, wealth and possessions – unsettling and shocking. They are hard-hitting lessons as they apply to our lives today. But William Barclay gives us the courage to be had from understanding the truth. Money cannot buy your character, or your relationships, or your values. Insights: Money certainly reveals some uncomfortable truths, but it also helps you to see life from a different perspective.
If you are inspired by Barclay’s insights on money, wealth and possessions, you may wish to explore how the passages in this book are related to the rest of the New Testament. You can read more in the New Daily Study Bible series, in the following volumes: Matthew; Mark; Luke; Acts; Corinthians; Timothy, Titus and Philemon; and James and Peter. These volumes, and the rest of the series, are available from Saint Andrew Press.
The peril of the love of money
1 Timothy 6:9–10
Those who wish to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many senseless and harmful desires for the forbidden things, desires which swamp men in a sea of ruin and total loss in time and in eternity. For the love of money is a root from which all evils spring; and some, in their reaching out after it, have been sadly led astray, and have transfixed themselves with many pains.
HERE is one of the most misquoted sayings in the Bible. Scripture does not say that money is the root of all evil; it says that the love of money is the root of all evil. This is a truth of which the great classical thinkers were as conscious as the Christian teachers. ‘Love of money’, said the Greek philosopher Democritus, ‘is the metropolis of all evils.’ Seneca speaks of ‘the desire for that which does not belong to us, from which every evil of the mind springs’. ‘The love of money’, said the Cynic teacher Diogenes of Sinope, ‘is the mother of all evils.’ Philo, the Jewish writer, spoke of ‘love of money which is the starting-place of the greatest transgressions of the law’. The Greek writer Athenaeus, who lived in the second century, quotes a saying: ‘The belly’s pleasure is the beginning and root of all evil.’
Money in itself is neither good nor bad, but the love of it may lead to evil. With it, people may selfishly serve their own desires; with it, they may answer the cry of their neighbour’s need. With it, they may advance the path of wrongdoing; with it, they may make it easier for other people to live as God meant them to do. Money is not itself an evil, but it is a great responsibility. It has power for good and power for evil. What then are the special dangers involved in the love of money?
(1) The desire for money tends to be a thirst which cannot be satisfied. There was a Roman proverbial saying that wealth is like sea water; far from quenching thirst, it intensifies it. The more we get, the more we want.
(2) The desire for wealth is founded on an illusion. It is founded on the desire for security; but wealth cannot buy security. It cannot buy health, nor real love, and it cannot preserve from sorrow and from death. The security which is founded on material things is doomed to failure.
(3) The desire for money tends to make people selfish. If they are driven by the desire for wealth, it is nothing to them that someone has to lose in order that they may gain. The desire for wealth fixes people’s thoughts upon self, and others become merely means or obstacles in the path to their own enrichment. True, that need not happen; but in fact it often does.
(4) Although the desire for wealth is based on the desire for security, it ends in nothing but anxiety. The more people have to keep, the more they have to lose, and the tendency is for them to be obsessed by the risk of loss. There is an old story about a peasant who performed a great service to a king, who rewarded him with a gift of much money. For a time, the man was thrilled; but the day came when he begged the king to take back his gift, for into his life had entered the hitherto unknown worry that he might lose what he had. John Bunyan was right:
He that is down needs fear no fall.
He that is low, no pride;
He that is humble ever shall
Have God to be his guide.
I am content with what I have,
Little be it or much;
And, Lord, contentment still I crave,
Because Thou savest such.
Fullness to such a burden is
That go on pilgrimage;
Here little, and hereafter bliss,
Is best from age to age.
(5) The love of money may easily lead people into wrong ways of getting it, and therefore, in the end, into pain and remorse. That is true even physically. They may so drive their bodies in their passion to get that they ruin their health. They may discover too late what damage their desire has done to others and be saddled with remorse.
To seek to be independent and prudently to provide for the future is a Christian duty, but to make the love of money the driving force of life cannot ever be anything other than the most perilous of sins.
The end of the world’s values
Luke 6:20–6
Jesus lifted up his eyes upon his disciples and said, ‘Happy are you poor, because yours is the kingdom of God. Happy are you who are hungry now because you will be filled. Happy are you who weep now because you will laugh. Happy are you when men will hate you and shut you off from their company and insult you and cast out your name as an evil name, for the sake of the Son of Man; for – look you – your reward in heaven will be great. Their fathers used to treat the prophets in the same way. But woe to you who are rich because you have all the comfort you are going to get. Woe to you who are filled because you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now because you will grieve and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is what your fathers used to do to the false prophets.’
LUKE’s Sermon on the Plain and Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, chapters 5–7) closely correspond. Both start with a series of beatitudes. There are differences between the versions of Matthew and Luke, but this one thing is clear – they are a series of bombshells. It may well be that we have read them so often that we have forgotten how revolutionary they are. They are quite unlike the laws which a philosopher or a typical wise man might lay down. Each one is a challenge.
As the scholar Adolf Deissmann said, ‘They are spoken in an electric atmosphere. They are not quiet stars but flashes of lightning followed by a thunder of surprise and amazement.’ They take the accepted standards and turn them upside down. The people whom Jesus called happy the world would call wretched; and the people Jesus called wretched the world would call happy. Just imagine anyone saying, ‘Happy are the poor, and, Woe to the rich!’ To talk like that is to put an end to the world’s values altogether.
Where then is the key to this? It comes in verse 24. There Jesus says, ‘Woe to you who are rich because you have all the comfort you