Reflection:
What does it mean to ‘repent’? The first time the word ‘repentance’ is found in Luke, it is on the lips of John the Baptist preparing people for Jesus’ public ministry. Three different audiences approach him: the Jewish crowds (3:7), the tax collectors (3:12), and Roman soldiers (3:14). All ask what they must do to prepare for the dawning of the kingdom. To each of these groups, John discusses material wealth and its use. Thus, the word ‘repentance’ appears in proximity to a dense teaching on the appropriate use of wealth. To the Jewish crowds he says, ‘The man who has two tunics is to share with him who has none; and he who has food is to do likewise.’ To tax collectors, he says, ‘Collect no more than what you have been ordered to.’ And to soldiers: ‘Do not take money from anyone by force, or accuse anyone falsely, and be content with your wages.’ God cares where we spend our money, and He also cares where we get it.
In fact, God cares about it so much that He calls people to repent of the way they use and get their money even before Jesus comes. Jesus will only deepen and intensify that teaching. So we can legitimately say that it's important to tell people before they come to Jesus that following Jesus involves generosity and sacrifice and therefore a transformation when it comes to money. Martin Luther once said, 'There are three conversions a person needs to experience: a conversion of the head; the conversion of the heart; and the conversion of the pocketbook. Of the three, the third might be the most difficult.' Perhaps that's because concretely caring for other people requires resources.
Of particular interest to us is what John the Baptist said to tax collectors. Jewish tax collectors made their income by collecting more than what the Roman Empire required, so the tax collector collecting nothing beyond what was assigned would have no personal income at all; he would simply be dependent henceforth on the covenant community, perhaps until he could find a new profession. The kingdom of God calls for this kind of action. Can both individual and faith community take such stands together against the pain of communities and structural injustice? For we, too, must confront deep structural problems in the relations between peoples, resulting for instance in prostitution, child indenture, etc. but stemming from oppression, despair and hostility. John the Baptist addresses people in various professions, just as we must. He does this publicly. Although the precise form of obedience does not look the same for all, I believe we are on firm ground in saying on the one hand that the underlying principles of the kingdom – repenting from materialism, being generous with others, even addressing structural injustice – must be present, and on the other, there must be context-specific forms of obedience, usually involving self-restraint, sacrifice, and community.
A word must be said about ‘systemic’ or ‘structural’ forms of injustice. Often in our contemporary context, we address people as part of but distinct from a ‘system’ of injustice. This has some accuracy, and Scripture demonstrates sensitivity to such issues, not least with the tax collectors in Luke’s Gospel. However, as totalizing and rigid we may feel a system is, ultimately Scripture does not allow people to blame a ‘system.’ In their preaching, John the Baptist and Jesus personalize injustice. Tax collectors perpetrate injustice, not because the Roman government sets up these conditions which make it inevitable that some Jews become tax collectors and skim off the top of their own people. No: tax collectors perpetrate injustice because they choose to do so. Some people are oppressed because other people choose to oppress them.
This approach, while not blind to the complexities of systemic incentives, tendencies and abuses, personalizes the injustice so that the person addressed by the word of God must choose to obey or disobey, but s/he cannot fundamentally place the responsibility elsewhere. S/he must acknowledge her culpability and repent. And she is called, not to find another profession and thereby to simply open the door for another tax collector to take her place, reinforcing the power of the ‘system,’ but to absorb the injustice within her own person. The tax collector is called to stay and make nothing. Among North American evangelicals, this is a generally underappreciated point. The example of the tax collectors shows us that while injustice can indeed be mitigated by systemic policy change, injustice must be personalized. A person’s professional life is still a part of his or her person and the preaching of the gospel treats people not as dichotomous entities with private versus public personas but as one integrated whole. Christian leadership must bring theological and sociological analysis together to disciple not only people – implicitly pulling them out of certain jobs and roles when the tension becomes too great – but people within structures.
This theme continues and deepens as Jesus amplifies this teaching on wealth. Jesus does not draw distinctions between Jews, tax collectors, and Roman soldiers in terms of their respective bottom-line responsibilities; instead, Jesus does away with those distinctions and invites all to be subject to the same teaching in his community. Similarly, Luke’s Gospel will climax with Jesus commissioning his disciples to proclaim ‘repentance’ to the nations (Lk.24:47). Christian mission is of permanent value, and permanently carries this message. Luke defines ‘repentance’ very clearly throughout his Gospel. Alongside ethnocentric exclusiveness, the only other major sin Jesus targets for repentance is materialism. Not even pride, which is more commonly made the target of repentance in the individualistic Christianity of the West, gets mentioned with any comparable frequency. Luke means something much more social, tangible and concrete by this expression, so this misreading of Luke, shaped by the long accommodation of materialism and ethnocentric exclusiveness by Christians, is unfortunate. While ‘repentance’ in Luke 24 may very well mean more than repenting of materialism in its many dimensions, it certainly does not mean less.
At age 30, Millard Fuller was what many of us would like to be: a self-made millionaire. He was living in a mansion on a big block of land in the southern state of Alabama. He drove a luxury car and was deeply involved with his business – a company which he had started up with a friend from law school. Then one day, Millard’s life was turned upside down. His wife Linda told him she was leaving him. She said, ‘I no longer feel like I have a husband.’ Millard admitted, ‘I was so consumed by my business enterprise that I ended up severely neglecting my family.’ Though he had tried to rationalize it away, he had been an opportunist living only for himself. But out of that crisis came a miracle. The two of them rethought their lives. After receiving counseling about their marriage, they responded to Jesus and gave him their lives. They said: ‘We felt that God was calling us to divest ourselves of our wealth, which is what we did, and we asked God to guide us into a life of Christian service, and that’s what brought us to the work of building homes for low-income families and eventually became what we know today as Habitat for Humanity.’ The two of them gave their possessions to charity and moved their family to the Congo to help build houses for three years. That’s where they got the vision for Habitat for Humanity, which builds houses for disadvantaged and marginalized families around the world. Materials and labor are donated. The recipients of the houses take out a loan for the house, and they help to build their new dwellings; that adds to their dignity and ownership. The family pays back the loan interest-free. The repaid money is put back into the program and used to build more houses. Currently they build a house every 26 minutes. The Fullers now live in a low-income neighborhood of Americus, Georgia. Their home has no air conditioning. While they were employed through Habitat, they drew nominal salaries. Both feel that they have everything they want by living a life with Jesus. They say they are rich in other ways.
