I’ve found this talk harder to prepare than most of the others in this series. This is partly because I have no training as an economist, but it may also say something about the difficulties Christians in the developed world have integrating their faith in God and this part of their lives. Jesus said, Wherever your treasure is, your heart will be there; I suspect that, whatever we say we believe, many of us treasure our money and our possessions as much as our faith in God.

Ironically, one of my favourite stories about Jesus adds to our difficulty. Near the end of Jesus’ life, some of his opponents in the religious establishment who kept God’s laws very strictly, called the Pharisees, challenged him about the tax that everyone in Palestine had to pay to the Romans, whose empire then ruled the land. Should we pay tax to the Romans, they asked, these people who have taken over our country and don’t worship our God, or should we refuse?

The Pharisees thought they had Jesus in a cleft stick. If he said people should pay tax to the Roman authorities, the crowds would hate him for it. If he said people should not pay their taxes, the Romans would arrest him for it. But as so often, Jesus didn’t do what they expected him to.

He asked one of them to bring him a coin – a Roman coin, with the emperor’s picture on it – and he did. This in itself was embarrassing for Jesus’ enemies. If they were really serious about keeping God’s laws for the Jewish people, they shouldn’t be touching Roman money with the image of the emperor on it, so the fact that they could lay their hands on the coinage showed they weren’t as pure as they claimed to be.

Then Jesus asked whose picture was on the coin. The Emperor’s, of course, they replied. Then my answer, he said, is to give the Emperor what belongs to the Emperor, and give God what belongs to God. A beautiful answer – it shut them up completely – but since then, Christians have never been able to agree on what exactly Jesus meant. What does belong to the civil authorities? What does belong to God? How do we decide?

There is no agreement on this question. The Ten Commandments given to Moses forbid both stealing and coveting others’ possessions. Though Christians agree that theft is wrong, the coveting of others’ possessions – wanting what we do not have – is necessary for our current economic system to succeed. So some Christian thinkers argue in favour of socialism, where (to put it crudely) possessions and money are given to those in need, rather than capitalism, where riches are given to those who are most economically successful. Others disagree, arguing that the riches of capitalism are a sign of God’s reward for hard work. Many churches in the West are too embarrassed to talk about money at all, so in the final analysis each of us depends on our own understanding of economics, and this leads to differences between Christians about how to handle money and possessions.

Of course, both in the time of the Hebrew Bible and in the time of Jesus, there were no such systems as capitalism or socialism. But there were always people who were richer than others. Abraham or Ibrahim, who left his home behind because God told him to do so, was a very wealthy man, with many sheep and cattle and slaves. King Solomon, who built God’s Temple, was very rich indeed. But there were always regulations in the Jewish law in favour of poor people. The sacrifices for people to offer to God were less expensive for poor people than for the rich. They were to be allowed to eat the corn growing at the edges of rich people’s fields without getting into trouble for it. If someone was so poor that he had to give his shirt as surety that a loan would be repaid, the law said that it had to be returned every evening, so he could sleep in it. There was a ban on anyone charging interest on loans to other Jews, and a regulation that once every seven years, all debts should be cancelled, and once every fifty years, all property that had been taken away from families should be restored. And the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, though they were not always heard, reminded rich people that it was their duty not to cheat those who were poor. When the Jewish people went into exile, it was said partly to have been a judgment on the rich among them, for not having given justice to the poor people among them.

When we come to Jesus, as you may know he told many stories, and a surprising number of those stories were about money. He told of a rich man who ignored the poor man begging at his gate. When both died, while the poor man was given a place of honour by Abraham, the rich man was sent to the flames of hell, because he had not helped the poor man when he was able to do so, though his duty had been clear from the Jewish Law.

He told of a man who owned a vineyard, who all through the day hired more and more people to work there. When the end of the day came, he paid the last workers as much as the first. When the first workers grumbled, he asked, Can I not be generous with my own money?

Some of these stories are troubling to those of us with money and possessions, for they seem to argue that we should be much more generous than we are.

Other stories, depending how we understand them, may be attacking our whole financial system. Jesus told of a wealthy man who went away and gave three servants money to keep for him until his return. Two of them traded with the money and made more, but one hid it in the ground and gave back exactly what he had been given. The first two servants were rewarded; and the last was punished. The meaning of this story is not clear. Is the wealthy man a hero, who rewards hard work, or a villain who makes money by exploiting workers? Is the poor man lazy and undependable, or a brave man who challenges the power of an economic system which rewards the rich? Again, Jesus spoke of a poor widow who could only afford to give a very little money to the Temple treasury, but who had been more generous than all the religious leaders; for while they gave from their excess, she gave all she had. Is this a story commending the faith of poor people, or one attacking the greed of the religious authorities, who demanded more money from the poor than they could give?

One of the striking things Jesus did is also connected with money. In the Temple in Jerusalem, where God was worshipped, animals were sacrificed to God. Only perfect animals could be used, supplied by the Temple and bought with special Temple money, different from the Roman coinage in my first story. So if you went into the Temple to worship, you had to change money and you had to buy animals; this all happened in one of the outer courtyards, where people who worshipped God but were not Jews could pray.

When Jesus went into the Temple and saw this, he became very angry. He overturned the moneychangers’ tables. He freed the doves, sheep and cattle used in sacrifice, and whipped those who sold them out of the Temple. And he did this because, he said, God had wanted this place to be a house of prayer for all nations, but it had been turned into a robbers’ den.

Was Jesus protesting because this was not a dignified state of affairs in God’s house? Or because the religious authorities were cheating poor people, by changing money at unfair rates in a monopoly which they controlled? We do not know. Different Christians, whose politics are more conservative or more liberal, will have different interpretations of the story, and will act accordingly. But we all make our accommodations with it – for example, many famous churches include gift shops within their buildings, and many churches, including my own, sell fairly traded goods on Sundays, goods for which the producer has received a fair price.

After Jesus’ resurrection, when people started to worship together, to start with everyone shared the money or possessions they had, though a few held back and were punished for it. Some Christians were wealthy enough to own big houses that people could meet in, and there are stories about rich Christians eating and drinking too much while others were still hungry; so there was some tension between rich and poor. But the richer churches in Greece collected money to help the poorer church in Jerusalem, and looking after poor widows was part of every church’s duty.

For the first few centuries, it was against the law to be Christian in the Roman Empire. Then the Roman Emperor Constantine decided that Christianity would be a good faith to hold the Empire together, and being Christian started to be the way to become rich. Some people reacted against this, going into the desert to live simply as monks and nuns, but most Christians believed that God wanted people to have money and possessions.

By the time of the Middle Ages, the Church in Europe was very powerful and very rich, with church leaders behaving like kings. In reaction to this, a man called Francis from Assisi, the son of a rich merchant, believed he heard God’s call to live a life of chosen poverty; this was not popular with the authorities, but his personality was so attractive that many people flocked to join him, and today there are still Franciscan monks and nuns who have promised not to own money or possessions, but to share what they have with one another and with poor people.

In the Reformation, John Calvin, the founder of my church tradition, believed that God knew from before people were born exactly who would go to heaven and who would go to hell. As Calvin also believed riches were a sign of God’s favour, many Protestants worked very hard indeed to try to show they were going to heaven. As a result, those who became rich believed that God was favouring them, while they looked down on anyone who was poor, because their poverty must have been their own fault. A few centuries later, another Protestant called John Wesley urged poor people to give up drinking alcohol and take up habits of hard work; as they began to prosper, they became disinclined to go back to their old friends who were still poor and drunk. Thus a gap emerged between richer people in churches who looked down on those who were poor, and poor people outside churches who were not made welcome inside, in spite of Jesus’ own example.

What do Christians think about money and possessions today? I can only really speak for Christians in the developed world, where most of my own church life has been spent. In general, conservative Christians are more likely to think that prosperity is a sign of God’s favour, backing up their case from the Hebrew Bible. They are also more likely to give generously to their churches, following the tithe – a tenth of your income – that the regulations of the Hebrew Bible said should be given to the priests as they didn’t have land of their own. Their churches will have high-tech equipment, impressive buildings and large budgets, which they will spend on telling others about Jesus.

Liberal Christians, who probably have the same amount of money and possessions as the conservatives, may well feel more guilty about them. They are likely to investigate fair trade supporting poor people in the developing world, to invest their money ethically and to invest time and effort in helping people who are poor; however, they may also feel powerless to challenge our economic system and let that freeze them into inactivity.

Radical Christians, whether liberal or conservative, will try to live a simple life, following the examples of Jesus and Francis, and to opt out of our economic system wherever possible. In their attitude to money and possessions they may feel they have more in common with socialists with no faith in God than with Christians wedded to their possessions.

In the developing world, in my limited experience Christians are much more likely to be poor themselves, but also to show great generosity with money and possessions. We in the developing world need to re-examine our priorities; for where our treasure is, our hearts will be too.