Scripture quite often surprises me. In fact, the more I take understanding it for granted, the more surprised I get.
Take this week’s epistle for example. I thought I knew what was wrong with stealing. It is taking something that belongs to someone else, something that by right belongs to someone else. I would have told you that the wrong in stealing was against the person from whom something was taken.
That, however, is not how the Bible understands it, at least not Ephesians. Chapter 4, verse 28, begins predictably. “Thieves must give up stealing.” So far, so good. Ephesians goes on: “let them labor and work honestly with their own hands.” OK, that makes sense. Then the surprise—“so as to have something to share with the needy.” In Ephesians, the problem with stealing is not the issue of property rights. It is the sharing issue. Stealing, rather than earning with one’s own labor, limits sharing. And in Ephesians it’s not a matter of quantity, how much there is to share. It is a matter of quality. After all, Robin Hood shared a great deal. It is only in sharing what one earns by one’s own labor that one can share of himself or herself. Sharing one’s own property means sharing one’s own substance. And that, morally speaking, is what matters.
It is the giving of oneself that yields the spiritual benefit, not just the giving of resources to the needy alone. In the Ephesians model, what is being shared is not simply the material resource. It is the human one because sharing is, by definition, relational. It is the relationship that matters, not helping those in need by itself. Otherwise, Ephesians might as well be about Sherwood Forest and attributed to Friar Tuck rather than St. Paul. The key to the New Testament point of view is in the first verse of this week’s lesson, “for we are members of one another.” We do not, biblically speaking, exist in isolation from each other. The moral point is not who owns something, but who gives of oneself. The model, of course, is Christ, who “loved us and gave himself up for us.” It’s not the thing we give. It’s ourselves.
There is one more Scriptural surprise for me in this passage. It’s not just about property rights. It’s about rights in general. Indeed, it seems to me to suggest something about our current situation.
Isn’t the biblical point of having something, according to Ephesians, to give it away? And if that’s true of our property rights, wouldn’t it be true of our other rights? After all, according to Ephesians, we are members of one another. The truth is we are bound to each other in God, members one of another, precisely because Christ gave himself for us.
It may very well be correct that we have certain rights about not wearing masks, including to school, but don’t we want to teach our children that their rights might have something to do with the needs of others. Are we teaching our children that their rights are more important than the well-being of others, that a minor sacrifice of a right is to be protected even when giving it up might help someone else? That’s what really worries me. It seems to me that we can’t both proclaim that we want God in public schools and not teach our children at home what Ephesians does: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
Which is more important to us? Our rights or the truth that we are members of one another in Christ? It seems to me the latter is not about what we have but about what we give away.
Agape,
+Stacy
Bishop Stacy Sauls
Founder and President