Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. 2 Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. 3 Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days.4 Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. 5 You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you.
Just as the Old Testament prophets would regularly critique Israel’s surrounding nations not so much for their benefit but so that God’s people could hear what God thinks about them… James is doing something similar here. In this meditation he is censuring those wealth people who likely – we can’t say for sure – weren’t part of his congregation.
We’ve ran into these particular thugs before in James. Looking back to chapter 2:6ff, we perceive that these rich weren’t just not part of the church but we’re aggressively anti this-new-sect-claiming-Jesus-as-Messiah. Probably, these included some in the elite Jewish ruling class, many of them in the Sanhedrin, who were intent on keeping the status quo: especially in keeping Temple up and running. And because they viewed Jesus as a threat to the status quo, they arranged for him to be crucified… and then for years afterward harried his followers. Throughout their persecution, what chiefly motivated their desire to keep things as they were was so they could continue making the big bucks.
We discover in this meditation four specific critiques James has for some wealthy people he knows… which after saying that we need to clear up one more patch of potential misunderstanding. Though James has plenty of words to say against some wealthy folks he’s familiar with, we notice that one of his critiques is not that they’re wealthy! Riches are not bad. You can be a multimillionaire faithfully serving Jesus…theoretically serving Jesus more faithfully than someone scrimping by. There is no inherent vice in wealth; no inherent virtue in poverty. See Abraham. See Job. See David.
However, wealth is a dangerous good. Much harm can be done in attaining wealth. We could say the same thing about sex – dangerous good; power – dangerous good; bearing and rearing children – dangerous good etc etc etc.
So, given that there are good ways to be wealthy, let’s list some ways of handling wealth that here draw James’ stern and dire warning.
- The wealthy folks whom James has in mind are faulted for making ultimate investments in what wears out.
- The wealthy are faulted for not paying their workers.
- The wealthy are faulted for a decadent lifestyle.
- The wealthy are faulted for killing the righteous person.
Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded
Why should the rich howl? Because of what’s coming to them due to how stupid they’ve been. How have they been stupid? They’ve made a series of poor ultimate investments. By ultimate I mean they haven’t thought or done much beyond simply watching their material wealth increase, their piles grow higher, multiplying barns.
Wealth goes bad. Wealth is spoiled when it simply sits, stored up to grow bigger, higher, wider. James points out that wealth sitting in darkness literally goes bad. He names:
-rotted riches: presumably talking about storehouses of grain or other foods that have mildewed, molded etc. If you want a modern urban example: go home, open the fridge, and check out the dates of your salad dressings! Expiration dates aren’t printed on most stuff, but they’re always a thing.
-moth-eaten clothes: that’s an easy one to envision and something we in the northeast have some experience of. Moths could represent all kinds of tiny, hard to keep track of and thus hard to counter nibblers on wealth…like that Amazon video channel you were going to cancel after the trial week.
-corroded gold and silver: even the most durable of wealth is subject to some kind of breakdown: due to the weathering of elements, due to the corrosiveness of men who steal and governments who tax and tax, due to loss in the middle of a wintry forest, due to market forces like inflation, to …
Yeah, sure you can point to measurements that show your wealth isn’t diminishing but increasing…you have more stuff today than you did in your twenties… but things aren’t only what they seem. For instance, what kind of asset do you have in your Nantucket beach home even as it increases in value – but as MA property taxes are skyrocketing, and you suspect your property manager has weeknight keg parties over there and worry and the neighbors are getting annoyed, you’re having a harder and harder finding someone to renovate who doesn’t cut major corners.? Plus, erosion. Plus, you’re having a hard time getting away from work to enjoy the place and – when you invite your kids to join you – there’s always so much tension.
Someone argues: Hey, look, bottom line is I’ve invested so to have plenty to pass on to my kids when I’m outta here. And the response it: But then, how will they manage it? Have you seen how your kids are raising their kids…so those are to whom all your life labors were directed? Haven’t you noticed how uncertain everything is, how many holes for things to leak out?
The corrosion [of your investments] will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. The Spirit tells us: Your investments in many ways define you. Making it your business to accumulate wealth that has uncertainty and breakdown and loss as its central story will make breakdown and loss your central story. Put on Bill’s Gravestone: “Here lies Bill of Shortsighted Investments”
And if backing a loser being your life story wasn’t bad enough, James adds a word about context: you have laid up treasure in the last days. Don’t you realize you’re handling your wealth in the last days? Wait – when did the last days start? What does he mean by the last days?
Well, the last Adam has returned from the dead after having buried our sins deep in the land of forgetfulness. When God called Jesus back to life, the body that walks out of the tomb continues to have the usual digits, follicles, cells, organs, capillaries, bones etc – but now it simply won’t die. A body that cannot ever be eliminated. Early that one Sunday morning the a new quality of matter of an endless future stands up in the old age, and with the arrival of that glorious body God began to make all things new. With the resurrection, the new has arrived; yet the old is still fading away. The ages of the 1stAdam draw to a close; but the first day of the new creation has dawned. Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of the last days of all previous eons.
YET YOU’RE STILL COLLECTING SHOES, EVEN IF THEY DO HAVE THOSE GREAT VIBRAM SOLES THAT LAST SO LONG! But why aren’t you thinking long-term? No, I mean llllooooonnnnnggggg term, into the full light of the new age? Why are you collecting wealth that holds relevance only in an age that is on its way out?
Piling up wealth that is on its way out is loser. Investing in wealth that lasts into the endless future is where it’s at. We don’t have time to say hardly anything about that now, except to give the rule that our investments should always have embodied-people-as-eternal-souls in view. One specific application would be: couples, don’t go chiefly after wealth/ lifestyle…but have babies!
Invest in embodied people as eternal souls. Even as material wealth goes, think of how to ultimately invest it into image bearers of eternal souls. Anything else just isn’t smart.
The second charge James lays against wealthy folks he knew, and here it seems he has land-owners/ farmers/ ranchers in mind, is they are unjust. They were unjust in this way: they didn’t pay their day-laborers.
Why weren’t they paying their workers? Well, maybe they were only delaying paying them so in the meantime they could keep receiving as much interest as possible. I’ve heard insurance companies doing that…contesting payouts as long as possible for the sake of gathering interest.
Delayed payment…or perhaps these landowners never got around to paying them at all, ever. Well, how could that be right? It couldn’t. How could that be possible? Well, if because of your wealth you or your business partners have access to all the levers of power, the unpaid laborers would have no recourse in a court of law.
Not right, but possible. Doing what is possible, not what is right. That’s a good description of injustice. And wealth makes a lot of things possible, though, of course, it can’t change what is right.
But even though those being defrauded couldn’t get their day in court, James says something interesting: the wages that the wealthy farmers didn’t pay sat in their cash boxes, and those 20- and 50-dollar bills were calling up to heaven: ‘we shouldn’t be here…we should be in that poor man’s pocket.’ Everything from the Benjamins to the Washingtons crying: Rise up, O God of vengeance.
The Lord of Armies prepares to crusade against all injustice. He will destroy.
Understand, O dullest of people! Fools, when will you be wise? He who planted the ear, does he not hear? He who formed the eye, does he not see? Psalm 94:8,9.
Wealth is dangerous because it opens up possibilities, including the possibility of injustice. And in our iniquitous mind what’s possible easily becomes what’s rational. Somehow it starts to make sense to withhold what is due. But what’s really dangerous is that when we withhold payment, we’ve aligned ourselves against the Captain of the heavenly armies.
Brothers and sisters, wealth is dangerous… various kinds of wealth. A wealth of free time. A wealth of freedom. A wealth of un-supervision. A wealth of reputational cred inherited from your parents. A wealth of control within your household. A wealth of opportunity to learn. A wealth of access to low interest rates, cheap borrowing. A wealth of aura of command or intellectualism or charm that you were simply given…
All of these forms of wealth imply duties. Yet all of these forms of wealth open the possibility to injustice.
Do you use such wealth for selfish indulgence or enacting justice? Bosses, calling up to heaven for vengeance is your mismanaged time…time that should have been invested in your employees leading to their promotion. Time instead spent on your surfing the web during work hours, thereby defrauding your junior colleagues! Well, guess what: you have the attention of the Lord of Armies!
So many ways of abusing power. Lazy, entitled husbands and fathers who think they can get away with self-centeredness. You have the attention of the Lord of Armies!
What are we stealing from the next generation by racking up national debt? He who formed the eye, does he not see? Boomers, Generation X, Millennials: you have the attention of the Lord of Armies!
Do you do what is possible, what you can get away with, or are you directed by justice?
Next charge against the wealthy is that you have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. Now, sentences like these have traps all over the place, ditches on both sides.
One reason this is a tricky topic is that, by almost every measure, relative to all of history and much of the globe now, almost every American today is living large and uncommonly easy. Tell Solomon the Great that after your hot shower you left in your car with the heated, leather seats to drive to the movie theater and watch a cinematic masterpiece projected with 4k Laser onto a giant screen… and he’ll be as dumbstruck as the Queen of Sheba was visiting him. As Christ has ruled and the Spirit has striven these past 2000 years there’s been a lot of comfort and color and efficiency rising up under their watch. Thank God for refrigerated meats, front loaders, etc.
But there is a difference between experiencing comfort, ease, softness – even a lot of it – and your whole life on the earth slouching toward experiencing more thrills, comfort, softness. If you spend your career in an office working hard using state of the art computers, sitting on a magnificent leather chair with great lumber support – that luxury is perfectly ok. But when you think of your work career as being for the purpose of getting you to the place where you can retire, then luxuriate, be self-indulgent, take all me time you didn’t have access to before, play golf full time and sail and travel… I think that’s the sort of thing that James is critiquing.
When you are guided in significant ways by the prospect of ease and pleasant experiences, that’s the problem. Working hard now so someday you can play hard – that’s a problem. Putting in the time during your career so you can enjoy a splendid retirement – I believe that’s a problem.
You have a Master in heaven who knows exactly what he has given you. Do you think something shifted in heaven when Ronald Reagan shifted social security payouts from 65 y.o. to 65 y.o.? NO. The time your Master has assigned you is not until age 65, or 67, or 70 – – – after which he’ll no longer demand productivity, fruitfulness. No, you are to be laboring into your 70s, 80s, 90s. You are never given license for general ease until the Lord closes his hand and takes your spirit away from your body.
We cannot unblinkingly accept society’s template for life on this earth. There is no scriptural “weekend.” There are six days you shall labor and one day you shall rest. There is no retirement as the world defines it…although there are faint echoes of such. Our work might put us out to pasture at some time…or we might step away from our long-term career, but that’s not to idle, or to idol or to “I’ll do….whatever it is I feel like.” In Scripture, there is no mandated vacation, though there are mandated holidays…holy days… weeks to set aside work so that you can seek for and celebrate the Lord and be refreshed in the Lord…in body and soul…so as to return to the work.
You have fattened yourselves in a day of slaughter – these wealthy dabblers, creatures of ease, lovers of experiences, standers outside pressures – – – felt like they were collecting all kinds of sensations and experiences and resources to do more and more of that, their Instagram stuffed with all their beach and mountain vista photos… James says that all that it means for them is that there’ll be more to lose on the day of judgment. More to remember and regret. More evidence that they’ve lived unproductively, selfishly. Their wealth and status only places a bigger target on their backs come reckoning day. And a reckoning day is coming…in this age the Spirit speaking through James might have in mind the fall of Jerusalem in a couple decades.
And speaking ultimately, their swollenness from grasping for ease and pleasure will condemn these souls come Judgment Day.
Finally, James says that these wealthy people have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you. That the righteous person does not resist you implies that because the righteous person seemingly has been easily overcome by the wealthy man eager to get him out of the way because he stands in the way of his acquisitions… the wealthy murderers have been deceived into thinking that they’re winning.
The fact that James calls him the righteous person – singular – sets us to thinking. Could this be THE righteous person – Jesus himself? I think we could start there. The murderers of Jerusalem eliminated the One who didn’t resist them…who opened not his mouth/ like a lamb that is led to the slaughter/ and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent/ so he opened not his mouth.
Wealth is dangerous in that it makes you want to get more wealth – that’s ok, as far as it goes – yet could make you willing to all eliminate obstacles to increasing wealth. Even if in eliminating said obstacles you are aligning yourself against the righteous person and so with the most ancient of evils, the source of all evil.
There is this ancient antagonism between the seed of the Serpent and the seed of the woman, Jesus Christ. The serpent is a liar and a murderer, and he and his seed have ever been willing or on the way to being willing to simply eliminating the Righteous One and those whom he’s made righteous by their union with him.
And as we said, pursuing wealth can make those alignments make sense.
And, here’s the thing… all the while you can think that you’re on the side of the future, on the winning team, even on the side of virtue. Throughout the last 2000 years until today, in several corners of the world Christians are being shoved to the side, eliminated from public influence, caricatured as zany primitives, sometimes restricted, seldom but occasionally martyred. And those who have the resources to carry out this nefariousness assume that their success means that the universe – perhaps even God – is on their side. They didn’t even put up a fight!
Wealth…actually any kind of power…is dangerous because it could turn you away from disciplined, principled thinking into all kinds of greedy rationalization and self-justification.
But the Redeemer lives. His sword is sharp and will be employed to good use. Though he has saved the world by his death at the hands of wealthy murderers, and for goodness’ sake still allows his Body on earth to suffer public defeat, for its blood to be shed… it will not ever be so. When the Redeemer returns into this space-time dimension he’ll be flying into human history on a white horse and with a sharp sword in his hand. Then woe to the one who has not aligned with him…and in not aligning with him has aligned with the old serpent … and so is ultimately aligned against him. There’s no neutrality. The eyes of flaming fire will search out and discover the truth of things, and the winners will be losers, and the first will be last, and the last first and the dead in Christ will be raised up, and the martyrs will be vindicated.
Woe unto you Bill Gates, investing in embodied persons but not considering their eternal souls. Woe unto you, Elon Musk not officially aligned with the Serpent crushing Christ. Woe unto all who – unbeknownst even to yourself – by your action, or rather your inaction, have aligned yourself with the ancient evil, the murderous serpent…who by your loyalties and preoccupations and investments are attempting to thwart and unbind yourself from the King over every age. Woe unto you, tribal chieftains who use your people to feed your egos. Woe unto you, Wall Street, who measures with facts and not wisdom, not looking to the Lord. Woe unto you, Corrupt Realtors. Woe unto you, bullying husbands. Woe unto you, selfish parents. Woe unto you ambitious, hustling grandson who never calls his grandpa. Woe unto you, tenured teachers who long ago stopped caring about the minds of your students. Woe unto you contractors who overcharged the naïve widow and kept pushing her project further down the road…because you could. Woe unto you prayer-less pastors. Woe unto you advertisers of shoddy and shady products. Woe unto you investors of the short term who never figured out the instructions to ‘lay hold on eternal life.’ Woe unto those with well-tended gardens, stainless steel appliances, community approval but who have never read through the Bible. Woe unto you who are rich before men but are poor before God.
Leave a Reply