Thought for the Week: The religious dimension of money

Robert Kyte consideres the religious dimension of money

Money must be important to us since we have so many words for it. There’s loot, buck, dime, quid, dough, bread, dosh, cash, readies, lolly, lucre, moolah, wonga, bob, tanner and many more. References to money also appear in many of the phrases we use, for example ‘to pay on the nail’, ‘to pay through the nose’, ‘to be as rich as Croesus’ and ‘to be as poor as a church mouse’.

The Bible contains many stories concerning money. These include the parable of the talents, the widow’s mite, the rich man and the camel passing through the eye of a needle, the love of money being the root of evil and the story of the Kingdom of Heaven being like a great treasure hidden in a field. They include the parable of the workers in the vineyard; the prodigal son who spends his inheritance but is still welcomed back by his father; the Good Samaritan who pays the innkeeper to look after the man who was set upon by thieves; and the story of Jesus overturning the tables of the money lenders in the temple and his response to the question whether it was right to pay taxes to Caesar. Jesus regularly used parables about money to illustrate a point he wanted to make. Finally, there are the thirty pieces of silver for which he was betrayed.

When I was a member of my previous Local Meeting, the Meeting had a monthly newsletter. The editor was always looking for contributions and invited people to write a short piece entitled ‘What I believe’. For several months there appeared a piece that was normally two or three paragraphs long and which briefly explained the writer’s beliefs and how they echoed what you might find in Quaker faith & practice. Then one month a friend of mine contributed a piece that consisted of just one sentence, which read ‘I believe there is nothing that is not God’.

As I read the sentence a thought occurred to me. If everything is God then money, too, is God. It then followed that what we do with money is one of the ways we express God in the world. Giving money to someone can be a way of blessing them. Looked at in this way money immediately attains a religious dimension, and economics becomes a moral science as well as a mathematical one. The Good Samaritan blessed the man by giving money to the innkeeper. Making a donation to a charity or investing in an ethical fund are ways of helping to make a change for good in the world.

Money is one way in which we show how we value people and things. What we do with our money, how much we spend on ourselves, how much we give to others, whether we pay taxes willingly – even when we may not benefit directly ourselves – and how much we think people should earn for doing a certain job all show the values we have.

Current arguments about austerity, and about the deficit and how to reduce it, often leave out this moral dimension. They only deal with the technicalities. The moral dimension must not be forgotten. It underlies everything we do with money.

This article was first published in the Charlbury Meeting newsletter.

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