Progressive reflections on the lectionary #76

Monday 4th August 2025

Luke 12: 32-40 Learning to live counter culturally

This week’s reading is a passage from Luke’s gospel where Jesus tells his people not to worry about having enough. It includes the line: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” There’s a lot of upside down thinking in this passage, and I’m going to say it reflects an ‘alternative narrative’, or a different way of looking at the world to the conventional narrative of economic scarcity.

I've been watching the series ‘Inside the Jesus Army’ on the BBC, I’ve got friends who were in the Jesus Army, and I spent a bit of time in one of their community houses when researching my book on New Monastic communities back at the end of the noughties. The documentary is pretty scathing, and it takes aim at the serious safeguarding failures which, ultimately, brought the movement down. One of the documentary critiques I have some mixed feelings about, though, is the criticism of the ‘shared possessions’ model of community living.

Some members literally gave up everything they had to be part of the movement, surrendering savings, property and etc. I know, from friends who left the movement, how difficult this made adjusting to life outside of the Jesus Army, so I am not uncritical of this. However my bigger concern is that the church has serially failed to propose any viable alternative to the way of life proposed by mainstream capitalist economics. Had the Jesus Army not collapsed amid stories of abuse and safeguarding failures, would we still be criticising their economic models?

Because actually, selling all your stuff and living communally is pretty authentically Christian. There are difficulties with it, of course, and it doesn’t fit with a conventional approach to things, I accept that, however it fits well with early church and Jesus community teachings.

Take this passage as an example:

Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (12:32-34)

What was Jesus doing, as he roamed around Galilee in those early years? He was teaching people to live an alternative way, he was teaching upside down economics. He was showing people that if they shared their resources there would be enough for all. He was creating what I like to call ‘communities of resistance’.

The Jesus way is profoundly practical, in that it proposes an alternative way of being in a world which defaults to relying on exploitation and governmentally sanctioned gangsterism. That way of thinking relies on the idea of ‘scarcity’ - the basic idea is: “there’s not enough to go around, so we need to make sure we’ve got enough and protect it from other people.” In other words, “be afraid…”

In stark contrast, “do not be afraid,” Jesus tells his disciples. In fact the phrase is so important that it, or variations of it, appear more than 300 times across the Old and New testaments, it is one of the most repeated phrases in the Bible. Here the context is ‘scarcity.’ ‘Do not be afraid! There is enough to go around, the world has plentiful resources. Let go of the need to control, learn to trust and to share...’ This new economic model, which he calls ‘the kingdom of God’ is set up in defiance of the empire that sought to control, tax and administer.

The passage goes on to describe a further reversal, a tipping over of the social hierarchies that dominated the world of the time.

Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. (12:37)

‘Slaves’ here is perhaps not a reference to actual enslaved people, rather it’s a metaphor for those who have given themselves over to God’s service - however it remains a powerful depiction of a society in which those on the lowest rung of society’s ladder are served by their ‘superiors’. A complete reversal of expectation.

Luke, who given his profession may have been enslaved himself, continues to present a model of Jesus who liberates and encourages redistribution. A Jesus who levels out social distinctions and who encourages a radical new way of living in the very belly of the empire beast.

As time went on, of course, this was transformed into a very different message, one of other-worldliness. But what comes through here is the very real ‘here and now’ teaching of early Christianity. Surprise surprise - a lot of people don’t like it.

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Image: Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash