Reflection:
Imagine being in a dynamic movement where people demonstrated genuine love for one another. Especially if you were a first century Jew, and hoped for the Lord to transform Israel, you knew from the complaints of the historic heroes and leaders of Israel, the prophets, that your people always lapsed into idolatry that always led to injustice and corruption. As a result, your expectations grew that God would do something to change humanity itself. Those hopes flowed from the language of those very same prophets: the Lord would give people a new heart (Jer.31:31 - 34) and give people a new Spirit (Ezk.36:36 - 36) to obey Him and love one another as He commanded. Now, through Jesus, God has forged that people. And that movement is spreading.
When we glance at Luke’s portrayal of the early church, we find that many early Christians demonstrated a very surprising attitude towards each other, land, possessions, and wealth.
The first converts sold their property and possessions (Acts 2:45), the apostles and surely other Christians had nothing of their own, even to give away (3:1-10), more converts sold their lands and houses (4:34), Barnabas sold his plot of land in order to give the money to the apostles to use as they saw fit (4:36-37), and Ananias and Sapphira sold a portion of their property for the proceeds (5:1). Presumably many other Christians did as well. A new attitude towards wealth and stability had emerged.[1] If the Didache also reflects in any way the practices of the early church, then we have in early Christianity a very fluid, mobile community.[2] What explains this type of behavior? It is true that Jesus commanded an ethic of sacrifice on behalf of others in the church community; the reasons he gave were often pragmatic, for instance, that there were people in need. But even this does not totally explain the phenomenon. Jesus’ commands also seem to go beyond these situational instances because needs could have been met in other ways that developed a more stable church community. Certainly the early Christians took Jesus as meaning more than that. One scholar notes that in ancient Greece, sharing, not selling, of property did happen on those occasions when the rich were afraid of revolt or social unrest by the poor.[3] These actions served to stabilize Greek communities. What we find in Acts, however, goes beyond this and in a real sense threatens it.
Here is the crux of the issue: Israel had a blessed land unique among the nations, but the church does not. Aside from caring for people’s basic needs, there is therefore no comprehensively normative arrangement of economic resources to reference, and correspondingly, no fixed system by which to arbitrate all financial disputes. This is the probable reason why Jesus refused to arbitrate between the brothers fighting over their family land inheritance.
In Luke’s writings, which are oriented primarily to Hellenistic apologetics and Gentile Christian communities, we find a model for assisting the poor that would have surely come under a sharp critique: This selling of property to give away the proceeds tends to de-stabilize communities! If Jews in Israel, who were known as rarely voluntarily parting with their ancestral lands, sell their property and give away the proceeds, what would this mean for Greeks and Romans? It means that since Jesus effectively severed the unique relation between Israel and her land, by extension, and precisely from this moment of historical-theological transition, Jesus challenges everyone else’s desire for material security and stability, Greek, Roman, or otherwise. Because Israel was the chosen people, uniquely selected to partially live the life intended for humanity from the creation, they were given a taste of the abundance and the shalom all other nations tried to acquire by cities and planning, warfare and bloodshed, oppression and labor. When Jesus stripped Israel of this privilege and declared its end, he did not just overturn Israel’s claim to its land, although he did at least that. He also reiterated and reinforced God’s judgment on every other people’s attempt to secure their place in creation, for Gentiles attempt it by tooth and nail, walls and laws, whip and assembly line; they resist God’s curse on creation by building their great civilizations, which is what Genesis 1 – 11 tells us if we perceive its polemical nature. Jesus challenges Gentiles because he first challenged the Jews, for both salvation and judgment occurred with the Jew first. Jesus was a homeless pilgrim, a sojourner without any place to lay his head, an alien in a foreign land that should have been his homeland, and he calls his people to be the same, wherever they are. That is the starting point for all Christians to think about their relation to money, financial security, patron-client relations, the equality of believers, ‘kingdom economics,’
[1] We must be careful of the popular view that overstates the impact of these practices in order to neutralize their relevance. The popular view suggests that the Christian ‘community of goods’ described in Acts created an economic crisis for the Jewish Christians later. Justo Gonzales (Faith and Wealth) ably refutes this view.
[2] For those scholars in favor of an early date for the Didache, i.e. 120 A.D., see G. H. Box,
[3] Alexander Fuks, Social Conflict in Ancient Greece (E. J. Brill: Leiden, Holland, 1984), p.52-189.
