"The least of these my brethren" remains misunderstood divorced from the meaning of discipleship in its apocalyptic milieu

The misunderstanding was recently on vivid display here, where conservative and liberal interpreters feud over the meaning of Matthew 25:40 for the contemporary social situation of wealth and poverty.

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Unfortunately the text has little meaning for the contemporary social situation, except perhaps to teach those who think that they are Jesus' followers that they are not, and those who are self-satisfied humanitarians that they are dull.

The significance of "my brethren" is much more than what its conservative interpreters say it is. The phrase locates it in apocalyptic time, to the activity of The Twelve before the end of the world. It cannot refer to future generations, as if it were some timeless instruction for right living which liberalism for example can pride itself on by making it the law of the land. Jesus does not at all imagine such a future. He does not even imagine our existence. Instead Jesus imagines a future cut short by judgment and the arrival of the kingdom of God. It is the narrowest of time horizons constrained by the expectation of an imminent end of the world.

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. ... Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels (Matthew 25:34, 41).

The activity of The Twelve is what is expected of disciples who have paid the cost to escape the apocalyptic sentence of death: Leaving all and following their Master, selling what they have and giving to the poor, embarking on an itinerant life preaching a similar repentance, traveling without visible means of support and relying on God to provide, and so on. This is all of a piece with the teaching on discipleship and the instructions to missionaries elsewhere, summarizing and presupposing it.

"Salvation" comes to a house that provides these itinerants their food, drink, clothing, shelter, palliative care for illness in the event, and companionship if and when imprisoned for posing a threat to the powers about to be overthrown by the inbreaking of God's reign. Such acts constitute their own repentance and solidarity with the "Christian" message.

Needless to say, this is a vision which has almost nothing to do with the Pauline Gospel per se, but amazingly survived in the written record anyway despite its failure to materialize.

It does live on in Paul, however, in another form, in "the collection for the saints". Paul's pledge "to remember the poor" is specifically defined by that, and not by a dull humanitarianism. Paul's collection for the saints in Jerusalem, in fact, is the second great animating feature of his missionary journeys but is still little remarked let alone appreciated in your average church today. As for the dull humanitarianism, we have to wait until the 19th Century and Liberal Christianity before we really get the groundwork laid for that contemporary misreading of the ancient sources referred to above. It was against this that Schweitzer's critique based on apocalyptic was launched at the beginning of the 20th Century.

We talk about that critique a lot here.

Against the Tithers

The preacher man on TV last night kept saying how false teaching is destructive to one's immortal soul. I couldn't help but reflect on the irony of that statement because nine years ago a good blast of false doctrine had worked wonders on me. It functioned like smelling salts, waking me to a clearer-headed assessment of where I had been. Not because the false teaching was in any way true, but because it was so blissfully, wonderfully, ignorant and out of place. That a Lutheran pastor actually fell for it showed me that his Lutheranism had been no match for it. It was a "peace that passes understanding" kind of moment.

I had been teaching my students at my church Paul's "authentic" letters, in chronological order, when the incident occurred. A fund raising campaign was getting underway for a building expansion and all classes were being asked to interrupt their curricula and incorporate some stewardship components to support the effort. The materials we were asked to use openly advocated tithing, arguing for it on the basis of mostly Old Testament precedents. The pastor himself one Sunday announced his intent to tithe, and actually blurted out the amount in dollars and cents from the pulpit. Proud of his title, the Rev. Dr. apparently took degree exams which hadn't covered such trivial matters as the command of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount "to give in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you," let alone Paul's argumentation in the Letter to the Galatians against becoming debtors "to do the whole law." At the very least one would think that a real Lutheran would have some affection for the ideas of Paul, and that it would therefore occur to such a person that tithing speaks the very language of what Paul calls "necessity" or "compulsion," not the language of Christian freedom in the spirit, which we find so forcefully expressed in Paul's early letters. It turned out that the pastor's M.Div. was Lutheran, but his D.Min. was not.

Under such circumstances, about the only avenue open was to point out how tithing hardly even represented an intellectual category in early Christianity. One can see this in volume two of Luke's history of Christianity, The Acts of the Apostles, and despite the skepticism which sometimes attaches to this source, the broad picture it paints on the subject of money is clear enough and coheres with Paul's own testimony.

Paul's conversion to the Way occurred at a time when the followers of Jesus in Jerusalem were experimenting with a form of communism in which "no one said that anything he had was his own." Pooling of resources made it possible to supply the wants of a growing number of poor, dependent on the generosity of the Christians, both Jew and Greek. This distribution for the poor no doubt contributed greatly to the early success of the Christian sect, but the weakness of this arrangement was exposed by the famine in the land in the mid 40's, and the dispensers of aid themselves soon became in need of help.

It is at this juncture that Paul's role as a kind of entrepreneur comes into focus. Although entitled to compensation from the churches he had founded, Paul instead chose to self-fund his various missionary travels throughout the eastern Mediterranean from the proceeds of his own leather business, which he combined with his role as apostle to the Gentiles. This decision was taken in part to prove to the leadership of the church at Jerusalem that his conversion from violent persecutor to follower of the Way was genuine, but also to remove suspicions about the nature of and motivations behind his law-free gospel to the Gentiles and, indeed, to remove suspicions about the authenticity of his appointment as apostle by the risen Jesus. Paul's own testimony from his letters shows that he was not entirely successful in quelling these suspicions, and he operated under a cloud which seemed to follow him everywhere.

So instead of taking compensation from his various churches, Paul frequently had urged them to collect and set aside monies for the relief of the community at Jerusalem, "every man according as he purposeth in his heart." It is a pledge of support such as this, made freely and voluntarily by the church at Corinth, which for some reason had subsequently gone unfulfilled and which prompted Paul's comments about money in the correspondence which comes down to us in the two Corinthian epistles. Far from addressing such issues as how or even whether the local churches were to fund themselves, Paul's comments about money are instead focused on this "collection for the saints" at Jerusalem. It was the peculiar problem of the Corinthians that they had lost their sense of urgency about the suffering of their fellow believers and had become self-absorbed, which gives Paul's epistles to the Corinthians some of their special edge.

Paul's ultimate success with this collection must have been considerable, a tribute to his powers of persuasion. But the trouble which subsequently fell upon him in Jerusalem, when after many years of missionary activity he at length delivered the monies there, cannot have been due solely to such things as his reputed relaxation of circumcision rules for the children of Jewish converts to Christianity. Somehow the magnitude of the alms and offerings he had presented had become known outside Jewish circles, since after his arrest the Roman governor Felix kept Paul under confinement for two years hoping "that money should have been given him of Paul, that he might loose him." It would seem likely that Paul had bypassed the Temple administration in bringing his "alms and offerings" and had delivered the funds directly into the hands of James and the elders. Knowledge of this must therefore have leaked out of Christian, perhaps Greek, circles within the church. We can well imagine how anger and jealousy over this must have stirred up the hubbub against Paul in the city, and it helps explain one line of Paul's subsequent defense of himself, that "against the temple he had not offended at all."

A scrupulous person like a tither doesn't get into this kind of trouble.