Isaiah 43:16-21
Psalm 126
Philippians 3:4b-14
John 12:1-8
Each year on Ash Wednesday we hear
Jesus make reference to the three pillars of contemporary Jewish spiritual practice:
prayer, fasting and almsgiving.
Together they constitute, as one Jewish scholar called them, “the three
cardinal spiritual disciplines” that Judaism transmitted to both Christianity
and Islam. This Lent we have already looked
at prayer and fasting, considering their roots in ancient Judaism and their
development and expression in Christianity.
Today we come to the last Sunday in Lent before we begin Holy Week, and we
are reflecting on the third of these “cardinal spiritual disciplines”,
almsgiving.
It can be a difficult one to
consider, because while prayer is fundamentally an offering of time and fasting
an offering of ourselves, almsgiving is an offering of resources, most usually
in the form of money, and living in the modern age, under a capitalist economic
system, we have a very complicated relationship with money. It is something we earn, certainly, but it is
also something by which we often measure ourselves, our worth and our achievements. It has become not only the chief currency for
obtaining goods and services, but virtually the only conceivable one; so very
few people think of bartering, for example.
It has taken on an unhealthy symbolic quality, representing for us safety,
independence, industry, self-sufficiency; all those upright, forthright American/capitalist
values we have been raised on. Moreover,
there is no doubt the extent to which we have internalised the Puritan idea
that financial success is somehow a sign of divine approval, and hence of personal
virtue, even salvation. This latter may
not be conscious, it may not be overt, but it is there nonetheless, working its
influence as we form our reponses to both wealth and poverty. All this makes for a very powerful and
extremely complicated combination of circumstances, not least of which when we
come to reflect on giving money away, when considering issues surrounding
charity and almsgiving; and we all too
often get ourselves caught up in issues of percentages, “worthy” and “unworthy”
causes, “deserving” and “undeserving” poor.
It might be helpful to step out of
our contemporary context for a moment, and reflect on traditional Christian
attitudes surrounding almsgiving.
Judaism did not only transmit to us the importance of almsgiving, but
profoundly influenced the Church’s theological understanding of it. In Judaism almsgiving is better understood as
“righteous giving”; and Anna Diamant in her book, Living a Jewish Life, notes that the Hebrew word for it, tzedakah, “is related to several other
Hebrew words, including tzadik,
‘righteous person,’ and tzodek,
‘correct.’ ” She goes on to say that “in
the Bible, the word tzedekah
generally denotes righteousness” with suggestions of justice. Finally, she writes:
Giving
tzedakah is not viewed as an
expression of individual goodness or good will, but rather as a response to an
obligation based on biblical imperatives and on the belief that all needy
humans deserve help. Whereas it has
always been considered preferable to give tzedakah
cheerfully and willingly, the important thing is the gift, not the spirit in
which it is given.
Rabbi
Moses Maimonides, one of the greatest Jewish thinkers, wrote in the 12th
century that the most worthy tzedakah
is that given anonymously – recall Jesus’ words: “when you give alms, do not
let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3) – and
which enables the receiver to become self-sufficient. Equally, he was “greatly concerned with
sparing the poor as much embarrassment as possible.” He counseled 10% of one’s income as a proper tzedakah budget.
As Jews themselves, the earliest
Christians continued faithful to Judaism’s understanding of “righteous giving”,
and we read in the Acts of the Apostles how members of early Church in
Jerusalem would “sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds
to all, as any had need.” (Acts 2:45) At
the heart of the Christian understanding of almsgiving – as it is in Judaism –
is the need of the other. To varying
extents this practice existed in a disciplined way in the Church well into the
5th century, and soon became coupled with theologies of generosity
and gratitude, as well a developed understanding of God as Creator and ultimate
giver of all things. So we find St Basil,
St Gregory of Nyssa, St Augustine, and several others of the Church
Fathers teaching “that the wealthy are God's
stewards and dispensers, so much so that where they refuse to aid the needy
they are guilty of theft”.[1] St Augustine, specifically, reminds us of
God’s sovereignty over all things. He
writes: “Speaking through Haggai [the prophet], the Lord said ‘Mine is the
silver and mine the gold” (Haggai 2:8)…so that those who offer something to the
poor should not think that they are doing so from their own [resource].” This is the traditional Christian perspective
on almsgiving: All things are God’s and all of God’s creatures have a right to
share in God’s gifts. In a fallen and
broken world these gifts are inadequately distributed with some having a
surplus while others suffer a deficiency.
It is the duty of those with the surplus to be good stewards,
re-distributing goods and money in order that no one suffer from absolute want
and degradation. This may be far from
most people’s thinking today, and you may begin to glimpse how it might sit
counter to much of our modern, American understanding of charity and
almsgiving.
So
many of us tend to understand almsgiving as something we give out of the
goodness of our hearts, but which is fundamentally our own. It is our money, our resources, we earned
it. Because it is our own, we believe it
should be used in ways we want and moreover, we may feel it gives us the right
to judge those to whom we bestow it, decide who is deserving, who is not. Whenever, I catch my self in this sort of
thinking, I will myself to return to first principles. All things are God’s, all I have has been
given me by God. God has been
indiscriminately generous to me, and often when I have least deserved it. Why I cannot I be the same towards others? William Law the great 17th
Anglican divine expressed it like this:
“It may be…that I may often give to those that do not
deserve it, or who will make an ill use of my alms. But what then?....Do I beg God to deal with
me, not according to my merit, but according to God’s great goodness; and shall
I be so absurd as to withhold my charity from a poor brother or sister, because
they may perhaps not deserve it? Shall I
use a measure towards them, which I pray God never use towards me?”
As a
spiritual discipline, almsgiving is a profound response to God’s goodness and
generosity. It begins always in
thanksgiving, acknowledging God to be creator and Lord of all things, and the one
who shares his gifts with all indiscriminately as Jesus reminds us: “your
Father in heaven… makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends
rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (Matthew 5:45) The call on every Christian to give alms is
certainly a duty, but it can also be a very freeing and joyous act, celebrating
how loved and cared for we are by God, celebrating that our self-worth or sense
of success has nothing to do with how much we have amassed, indeed that the two
are only tendentiously, if at all, connected.
When we begin to think of alms in
this way, it shifts our perspective and we become acutely aware not only of who
much we have – often undeservedly – and how little some others have, equally
undeservedly. We begin to think in terms
of “enough”, and of gratitude. I begin
to see that goods of this world are not only here for my pleasure and
consumption, but chiefly for my good stewardship of them and for their
legitimate enjoyment by all of God’s creatures.
As we come near the end of Lent, we may want to think of the ways in
which we can respond to God’s gratitude, and take the time to ask ourselves
some hard questions regarding our attitude towards money, the poor, giving,
righteousness, gratitude. We may want to
spend some time discerning what is and ought to be our response to the God who has done and continues to do great things for us. (cf. Psalm 126:4)
[1] St. Basil, Homil. in illud Lucæ,
No. 7, P.G., XXXI, 278; St. Gregory of Nyssa, De Pauperibus Amandis, P.G.,
XLVI, 466; St. Chrysostom, in Ep. I ad Cor., Homil. 10, c. 3, P.G., LXI, 86;
St. Ambrose, De Nab. lib. unus, P.L., XIV, 747; St. Augustine, in Ps. cxvii,
P.L., XXXVII, 1922
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