What is a rich man?

Starting again from scratch

I never intended to, but a number of issues attracted my attention this week and I thought you’d like to hear from me about them. But someone unsubscribed and, when you live alone and your writing is your only outlet to the wider world, that can cause a depression. So, if you’ve had enough, just ignore what follows.

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I follow a chap here on Substack called Walter Rhein and you can check out his stuff here. In one of his more recent articles, he calls Jesus into question, citing the incident when Jesus came across a group of people about to stone a prostitute to death. Walter asks, justifiably, I think: isn’t it so that people without sin wouldn’t have wanted to cast the first stone anyway?

I think that that’s right, but over and beyond that, I think that what Jesus did in that moment was instil in the minds of the stoners the logical conclusion that, even if they were without sin before casting the stone, they would certainly have been sinners after casting it: the act of stoning someone is a sin. But he phrased it differently: instead of saying Only sinners stone people, he said, If you are not a sinner, go ahead: the implication being because you soon will be.

What Walter rightly points out is that nobody who was about to stone the prostitute defied Jesus. No one said Sod you, I don’t care if it’s sinning or not, I’m going to stone this tart. It was a tricky situation: under the law at that time, it was perfectly legal to publicly stone someone who engaged in prostitution. The problem here was in a way that this prostitute was not convicted by a court of law, but was only rumoured to be a prostitute. For all I know, the rumours could have amounted to common knowledge, but our modern sense of right and wrong would demand that that accusation be put to proof before a neutral court. Once it had handed down its sentence of guilty, then would have been the appropriate time to take up stones to stone her to death. You may be aware that stoning to death is still a valid means of execution in some countries, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Except Jesus wasn’t having any of that, either. He could have cited God’s law: love as you would be loved. In other words, if you yourself want to be stoned, then you may stone the woman. He could even have cited the Old Testament: thou shalt not kill. He could have cited the unlawfulness of the act they were about to engage in under Man’s law, let alone God’s. He could have railed against the law of Judaea for even allowing execution for prostitution. But he didn’t.

What (in my humble view) many fail to appreciate in Jesus, and indeed in God (although to a lesser extent in the Old Testament), is that God doesn’t tell you what to do—you do. It is a fundamental precept of belief that, because you believe in God, you believe in you: it is not God who ordains, it is you yourself who commands yourself. The final judgment that some believers fear will not be handed down by God wearing a horsehair wig and brandishing a gavel: it will be handed down by us ourselves. Belief is not about being subjugated to God, it’s about being subjugated to what you know in your conscience is right. All God does is give you hints.

This image amuses me: it may be simulated. The actual product may vary. Well, there we have the inherent problem with translation.

Take the Ten Commandments (which are in the Old Testament). The story of how they got written is so improbable in my view, I actually wrote a skit about it once, which I will publish here one day. Nonetheless, we have these ten laws, but the first four of them are all about God. Only numbers five to ten are about us. Of them, really only one made its way pretty universally onto the statute books of every country in the world: thou shalt not kill (whereby, it has to be said, each of those countries reserves an exception for its own government and for the rules of war. And for espionage. And for police brutality. And for jaywalkers.)

Do not steal is open to interpretation, since we steal from each other all the time, under structures that our unequal laws set up like a forest around us. Price-gouging is theft. Tax is theft. The Oklahoma land grab was theft.

Adultery is okay these days, and lying (or bearing false witness) is endemic, as long as we don’t do it in a court of law. We adhere to God’s law only when it affects how we apply our law, and then we get non-believers to swear an oath on a soul they don’t believe in on a book in which they have no credence, in order to apply laws that run counter to those set forth in the book itself. What a joke.

The final one is do not covet. Before your rush to the dictionary, covet means want, or desire, and the implication is what you can’t have. What many confuse in God’s law is that they expect it to be the same as Man’s law, and it isn’t: Man’s law punishes what you do, as long as you intend it; God’s law punishes what you intend, whether or not you do it. Until you say sorry (and mean it). We execute people for murders they didn’t commit and invent proverbs like no point crying over spilt milk. God is palpably more logical in His approach.

As I have indicated, God’s law is in so many ways the exact opposite of Man’s. Man’s law sets standards, lines in the sand, if you will, which it defies men and women to cross or not to cross. If you fulfil the standard, then you’re guilty (or not guilty). God doesn’t set any standards. You don’t have to love each other. You just have to love each other the way you want to be loved. If you don’t like being loved, then don’t love anyone else, there is no penalty (and even if there were, the only penalty would be applied by you yourself, so there’s no point having any penalty: the penalty is if your conscience troubles you. That’s all.) I honestly think there are more thugs in heaven than bank managers, because thugs want no love. So they generally give no love. They love as they would be loved. (It is not stupid, you, there at the back.)

And nobody in the Old Testament told anyone to love their parents. We were told to honour them, and that’s something different. Anyway, Jesus swept that all away and told us to love everyone as much as you want to be loved, so you no longer need to honour your parents, but if you want them to love you so much, you have to love them at least as much as that.

Walter’s piece is challenging, and I like that. I like that very much. Because it shows an enquiring mind and I will not answer a heartfelt enquiry with a panacea or a platitude. So, I answered it as follows.

But before I do so, I want to make a plea: for the life of Robert Roberson III who is incarcerated on death row in a Texas prison and will be executed in six days’ time, on 17 October 2024. He did not kill anyone, least of all his two-year-old daughter. The science that has convicted him is junk science. The great Christian traditions of Texas are blind to the great commandment of their God: thou shalt not kill.

Hello, Walter. You’re right, there are a lot of strange things in the scriptures. I discuss some of them in my own blog (https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/the-christmas-story), like the Three Wise Men: they travelled six months on camelback [two, actually] from either Yerevan or Tehran on a speculative journey about a star, without guards or accompaniment (as far as we know) but laden with valuable oils, incense and gold. And what was gold doing there, if a rich man cannot enter the kingdom of God? And we talk about being born in a stable as if Joseph didn’t have to cough up money for the accommodations (in a town where every last bed was taken). And, by the way, “There will be poor always”. So splash the balm on my feet, Mary. Oh, dear, contradictions, contradictions, contradictions.

If you feel you’re having to make undue excuses for Jesus’s contradictions, then there is one of two ways out of the quandary: dismiss Him as contradictory; or start thinking about the whole thing again from scratch.

The challenge to those without sin is, to my mind, a catch 22: no one who really has a conscience knows they’re without sin. So it was a fair bet that they would all drop their stones. Of course, they wouldn’t have dropped their stones for you, nor for me. So, what was it about this extraordinary man that made them (a) listen to His clever invitation and (b) actually drop the damn stones? It’s not permissive to invite the sinless to sin if (a) you know the sinless don’t exist and (b), as you rightly point out, those who are sinless wouldn't be in a crowd stoning a prostitute, anyway. If you really want to read it as Roll up, roll up, all non-sinners can now pelt this woman with stones, then I think that is actually a little bit contrary of you.

Jesus was not perfect, this we know. He was tempted in the wilderness, and He lost His temper in the temple, and He said strange things about the poor. If you think He came out with untruths like a politician, then I can’t disabuse you of that except to say that we have no evidence (you asked for evidence) that He harboured any political ambition whatsoever, and yet He had a following of thousands. Don’t you think He should have pushed for office, with over 5,000 people behind him? Maybe He was popular but inept. Maybe He was popular but principled.

What does it mean to say it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God? Never mind whether camels can actually pass through eyes of needles, or whether there was a gate in Jerusalem known as The Eye of the Needle: just start with what is a rich man?

That should get us thinking hard enough without measuring the height of a dromedary.