by Kester Brewin

It’s one of those stories that jumps from the page at you. A man – a good guy by all accounts – comes to Jesus with the blunt question that others had probably been too scared to ask: how do I get eternal life? You can imagine the wry smile breaking across Jesus’ face. ‘It’s simple, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘Just obey the commandments.’ The man is perhaps more relaxed, more confident now, and comes back at him: which ones? To which he gets the obvious reply: don’t kill people, don’t be unfaithful, don’t steal stuff, don’t lie… Yeah, yeah, yeah the man says, cutting Jesus off before he recites the entire list. ‘I’ve done all that…’
 
And then comes the hit. Jesus turns, fixes him with his gaze and speaks right to the heart of the matter: go and sell all you have, and give the money to the poor. The man turns away sadly and walks away, the camera holding a long shot as he walks off into the distance, slowly and thoughtfully. He is a rich man, gutted.
 
As we’re thinking about ‘Kingdom Economy’ I think this story is very pertinent because the economy of the Kingdom is so different to the economy that we are so deeply enmeshed in. Capitalism is not simply an economic system, some way we have chose to order our lives, it is the very iris of our society – almost nothing enters our consciousness without being filtered by it.
 
So if we are to think about how to order our lives around a Kingdom Economy, the first question that must go is ‘how much should I give?’ We’re used to thinking about tithes, about percentages and figures – the amount we can hand over to be ‘good enough.’ Jesus makes it clear: if you’re thinking about how much, you’ve still got your Capitalist glasses on, not your Kingdom ones, your ‘what can I do’ work ethic, not your ‘what can God do’ spirit.
 
Slajov Zizek (a Marxist Atheist philosopher who remains completely fascinated with Christianity) gave a brilliant talk at the Royal Society of Arts recently (see video embed) in which he critiqued the Altruist-Capitalist agenda of ‘the new philanthropists’ like Bill Gates. The issue is complex, but I want to be provocative and suggest that Zizek is right: in Kingdom economics, the Gates foundation is ultimately part of the problem, not the solution.
 
When you are buying a coffee from Starbucks, you are simultaneously ‘buying into’ an act of altruism by doing something for the poor coffee farmers etc. etc. As their strapline goes, "It's Not Just What You Are Buying, It's What You Are Buying Into." Through this sort of company – and through schemes like Brand (Red) we are encouraged to see that we are purchasing our redemption from being only a consumer: we are buying in order to fulfil our ethical duties. We are attempting to buy, in other words, something that cannot be bought – a gift, an act of generosity.
 
It’s this sense of capitalism being the mode by which we will help the poor which I think Jesus is critiquing in this story too. When he tells the rich man to go and sell all he has he is asking him to totally change the economic mode by which he sees the world. He is saying that the Kingdom works not as a by-product of capitalism, but as a radically different economics – ‘ordering of the house’ – altogether. As Zizek concludes with a quote from Oscar Wilde: ‘the worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves.’ Why? Because this superficial pleasantry prolonged a destructive system.

In a world which has been ravaged by the pursuit of profit, grand gestures of altruism by those who have harvested huge profits through companies with less than altruistic market strategies are, in Jesus’ eyes, like the money thrown into the collection box by the rich. Showy, but not part of the solution. In a world where huge bonuses are paid to bankers for making money, while governments step in and protect their jobs when they lose on a huge scale - while letting low-paid manual labourers go to the wall - the new economics of the Kingdom is desperately needed.
 
So in a sense then, Starbucks are right. It’s not what you are buying, it’s what you are buying into. And we need to be very aware of what we think we are buying into whether that be paying for a coffee, playing the stock market or paying for a conference - as James Shelley points out below.

You can view the Zizek video here.