It’s a familiar TV scenario, Casualty or East Enders or a gritty social drama. A man knocks on a door, which is opened by a frightened looking older person, and he snarls: 'Pay me what you owe', and generally intimidates or beats up the person who owes a few pounds. Being in debt isn’t nice or easy to cope with. Many of us pay our bills as soon as possible because we don’t want to owe anyone anything. I met a man a few years ago who was both a clergyman and a businessman, who helped clergy who couldn’t cope with letters & bills, some of whom got their phone cut off because they never opened their bills at all. They couldn’t face being in debt, and were paralysed by it.
Jesus used people’s feelings about debt a lot in his teaching. Often referred to sin as a debt, a weight around your neck. We don’t really get the force of it, unless we’re in involuntary debt up to our ears. The Lord's Prayer in the Church of Scotland says, 'Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors', which is Luke’s version. If we realised how like debts our sins are, and were afraid of a God who might come round and beat us up and threaten us, then the good news Jesus told, that God loves to forgive us our debts, would be good news indeed. We do need of course to admit that we’re in debt to God before we can be forgiven – to act like the clergy who won’t open their post and pretend that our debt isn’t there means that we can’t get the debt itself sorted out.
Our reading from Deuteronomy is in the context of the ancient world where debt came out of disaster, as it still does in much of the world. As a peasant farmer, if your harvest fails or the breadwinner dies, you have to borrow to survive, and your creditor then owns you. If you can’t pay, you'll lose your land, your livelihood, your house, everything, and your only hope is to become a prostitute or a slave.
The book of Deuteronomy set out the ideal whereby debts are let off every seven years. It was meant to be a way of ensuring that no one in the community became really & permanently poor. ‘Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts.’ Whoever owed money was let off. It sounds a wonderful system! But remember, it was a society where there were no banks lending money, no social security, and a lot of people living below the poverty line. God is therefore addressing rich people, who were told to help the poor, and not use bad harvests as a way of getting control over poor people.
What does it mean today? We're not talking about people getting into debt because they’re impatient to have a car or a widescreen TV, but are talking about people who go into debt to buy shoes or food for their children – and there are many families like that in Bradford. And we're talking about third world farmers whose children die because their money goes on paying debt charges run up by their corrupt rulers, or who suffer from natural disasters – I wonder what happened to the owner of the ship which was wrecked off Malta with St Paul on board in our NT reading.
There are a few things though to note about what this passage in Deuteronomy has to say and how it says it. One is that there’s a difference between the ideal and the real. Deuteronomy has a touch of what’s called nowadays prosperity theology: if you do what’s right, God will bless you, therefore good people will be rich & poor people are bad people. It’s a theology that rich people love to hear. Deut says that there won’t be any poor Israelites, because God will bless his people – as long as they do what is right. That’s the ideal. But a few verses later the author shows the realism which Jesus knew – the poor will always be with you. Because we aren’t caring for one another, because we’re greedy and selfish and don’t help others in trouble, therefore there will always be the poor and disadvantaged. That may be how it is – but it doesn’t have to be like that. Deuteronomy is neither naïve idealism nor cynical realism, but an acceptance of reality in order to move it towards the ideal which God wants for the world, where there aren’t poor people any more.
The second thing is that poverty is the responsibility of all of us. Deuteronomy has a clear sense of how society is interrelated. Poverty can happen through foolishness or disaster, but the persistence of poverty is because the better off refuse to help the worse off. We can see this in our own world society, where the incredibly rich nations are grudging about helping the poor nations, not least because their poverty keeps us rich. We can see it in our own country, where we vote for governments which’ll cut taxes for the rich and where as a consequence a third of our children are growing up in relative poverty. Poverty isn’t 'just there', says the writer of Deuteronomy – it’s there because you let it be there, because you're selfish and mean.
What do we think of bankers? I got a voting paper for the Nationwide this week, asking me to vote for the same board to be re-elected, and to approve their salaries. I had a look: the Chair of the Board gets ¼ of a million pounds a year for a day or two a week; the Chief Executive got £1.8 million last year. Remember that the Prime Minister gets about £180,000 a year. But this is fine according to the report of the remuneration committee of Nationwide – which is made up of yet more paid directors – because it's about in the middle of what bankers get paid. So I voted No.
I'm not having a go at the Nationwide here, but at a banking industry that thinks that it's acceptable for a few people to get lots of money simply because they can, far more money than anyone can reasonably need – what do you do with £2 million a year? How many loaves of bread does that buy? The reason why it matters is because it destroys society and community. Studies have shown that more equal societies are happier societies; but if people accumulate wealth for themselves and keep it for themselves, then many others will lose out in the process: one person's win is another person's loss. That's why choice and competition aren't the answer to everything: if two families each choose for their children to have a place at a popular school and they compete for it, one of them will lose out. If bankers pay themselves fat salaries and bonuses, their shareholders and customers will lose out – and that's us.
That's why Deuteronomy says so strongly to the rich that if someone in the community is in real need, we mustn’t be hard-hearted or grudging or tight-fisted or hostile – instead we’re commanded by God to open our hand to the poor. Indeed, says Deuteronomy, you’ll be blessed, not by keeping your goods and congratulating yourself on your prosperity, but rather you’ll be blessed by God if you give liberally and ungrudgingly. To hang on to your riches means condemnation – to share them means blessing and life for all.
So many people in the world fear the visit of the debt collector and the violence that goes along with poverty. So many more of us hide from the reality of our sinfulness, greed and acquisition of things, and our indebtedness to God. By working for a just society, by relieving the debts of the poor, we can open our hands to give and receive the remission and the blessing which God offers to all of us, together, as one community in the world. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
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