ese fundamental questions more
sternly in sight.

I

Plainly Jesus felt that the acquisitive instinct, like the sex instinct,
easily breaks bounds and becomes ravenous; there is even less natural
limit to it. It absorbs the energies of intellect and will. As with the
rich fool, the horizon of life is filled with chances to make the pile
grow bigger. Life seems to consist of money, and the problems of money.

People are valued according to that standard. Marriages are arranged for
it. Politics is run for it. Wars are begun for it. Creative artistic and
intellectual impulses are shouldered aside, fall asleep, or die of
inanition. Property is intended to secure freedom of action and
self-development; in fact, it often chains men and clips their wings. This
is what Jesus calls "the deceitfulness of riches" and "the darkening of
the inner eye."(2)

In addition to the blight of character, wealth exerts a desocializing and
divisive influence. It wedges apart groups that belong together. Dives and
Lazarus may live in the front and rear of the same block, but with no
sense of solidarity. Dives would have been deeply moved, perhaps, if one
of his own class had punctured a tire in the Philistian desert and gone
for two days without any food except crumbs. The separation of humanity
into classes on the lines of wealth is so universal and so orthodox that
few of us ever realize that it flouts all the principles of Christianity
and humanity.

In the case of the young ruler Jesus encountered the fact that wealth bars
men out of the world of their ideals. The question was not whether the
young man could get to heaven, but whether he could have a share in the
real life, in the kingdom of right relations. It is hard to acquire great
wealth without doing injustice to others; it is hard to possess it and yet
deal with others on the basis of equal humanity; it is hard to give it
away even without doing mischief.

We have seen that Jesus believed profoundly in the value and dignity of
human life; that he sought to create solidarity; that he was chiefly
concerned for the saving of the lowly; and that he demanded an heroic life
in the service of the Kingdom of God. But wealth, as he saw it, flouted
the value of life, dissolved the spiritual solidarity of whole classes,
and kept the lowly low; the wealthy had lost the capacity for an heroic
life.

This is radical teaching. What shall we say to it? Jesus is backed by the
Old Testame