Among the four canonical Evangelists, Luke is the one most concerned with economic issues. Whether his reflections amount to a coherent, consistent money ethics, or whether they are a loose set of prophetic admonitions from which no systematic view can be distilled, is disputed. Perhaps the currently most satisfactory position is that of Hays (267): “Nobody can be Jesus’ disciple unless he or she renounces all possessions (14:33). This single coherent principle might be manifested in a variety of ways, contingent upon the disciples’ distinctive vocations and relative affluence.… Understanding renunciation to entail an internal separation with a necessary corresponding external expression, Luke describes a spectrum of behaviors which the modern interpreter can recognize as actualizing that renunciation.” The Christian should be detached from his or her possessions, and should think only of how best to dispose of them for the good of all. The detachment has three dimensions: care for one’s soul, for the divine will, and for the common good. People are in flight from themselves (from their vocations), from God (conscience), and from the care and respect for others that is implied in the idea of the common good. Unlike a later piety that would stress “God and the soul” at the expense of “society,” viewed so negatively as to inspire a fuga mundi rather than creative engagement, Luke makes being a good neighbour the hinge of salvation: “This do, and you shall live” (Lk 10:28), and he thinks out the social consequences of this far beyond the level of individual good will.
What ensures to Luke’s writing a gripping existential cogency is its Sitz im Leben, its concern with “propertied Christians who have been converted and cannot easily extricate themselves from their cultural mindsets” and who even “found theological justification for their self-centeredness” in opting out from care for the common good (Karris, 117, 122). The picture of the early community in Acts 2 is not a dreamy utopia of total sharing; in fact there was “no obligation for everyone to rid themselves of their goods,” and those who really did so, such as Barnabas (4:36-7) were admirable exceptions (like Peter and Levi in Lk 5:11, 28) (Dupont, 511). Luke does not draft a doctrinaire polity that would put the church community irremediably at odds with civil society. Yet the koinônia (2:42) of the Christians, based “on the fact that one enjoys the same heavenly goods,” which “assure the objective foundation of fraternal communion” (Dupont, 516), could not remain just a sentiment but demanded material expression, as the phrase hapanta koina (2:44; 4:32), “all things in common,” indicates. As early Christian sources insist, if one shares heavenly goods, a fortiori one must share material goods (Didache 4.8; Letter of Barnabas 19.8). This close conjunction of spiritual and material, individual and collective, gives a wholesome and creative character to Luke’s vision, again something rarely recovered in later piety.
The common good is not an “extra” in this vision, some sort of bothersome tax on believers striving toward heavenly salvation. Rather it defines the very milieu within which Christian commitment is exercised, much as in republican Rome, as remembered by Cicero, virtue was primarily defined as service of the res publica. Cicero deplored the choice of those who preferred a retired and tranquil life to the bother and danger of public affairs (De Republica I). Roman virtue was inherently social and political. The same may be said of Hebrew virtue: the Torah sets forth a social order, and the righteousness demanded by the Prophets never dwindles to a merely individual perspective.
Reference to Cicero is not a divagation here, since Luke creates a synthesis of Graeco-Roman values with those of the Torah. Paul had urged the Greek ideal of equality (isotês) for his communities (2 Cor 8:13-14) and Greek ideals pervade the Lukan picture: among those noted by Jacques Dupont are Pythagorean images of a golden age, taken up by Plato; the widely attested ideal of friendship as having all in common, koina ta philôn; the ideal of a community without want (Seneca, Ep. 90.38), where there is no needy person (endeês) (Acts 4:34, echoing Deut 15:4 LXX to which it gives an eschatological consummation). This openness to Graeco-Roman thought is another wholesome feature of the Lucan outlook, which suggests that his picture of ecclesial community has a bearing on the wider society, holding up to it the challenge of realizing its own best ideals. The Lukan Jesus is critical of disparities of wealth and power and his message of “a new social order based on service and humility” could have been subversive of the Roman State, in the long run, but in fact it did not come to this; the precise charges of revolutionary hostility to the State listed in Lk 23:2 were false ones (Cassidy, 65-6).
The glowing portrait in Acts of a community of both spiritual communion and material sharing, born with the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit, is Luke’s vision of the common good, and it can also be seen as solving the aporias about money that recur throughout his Gospel (though this depends on how one sees the relation of the two books and on whether Luke already intended to write Acts when he wrote the Gospel: the inclusion of the Ascension in the Gospel suggests that he did not). The problem of money comes most vividly to the fore in a series of calculating soliloquies in the Gospel. These take us into the world of individuals who withdraw from community, a world marked by shiftiness like that of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11), heartlessness like that of the rich man who ignores the beggar at his gate (Lk 16:19-31), self-protection like that of the priest and Levite who “passed by” (10:31-2). Luke’s gallery of human weaknesses espouses all the messiness of our anxiety-ridden dealings with possessions and money, and with status and identity. He actually intensifies the aporetic character of the money problem.
Startingly, money is made the main theme of John the Baptist’s preaching. The question, “What shall we do?” put to him by the multitude (Lk 3:10), the tax collectors (3:12) and the soldiers (3:14), will recur later: “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” (10:25; 18:18); this comes from Mk 10:17 and Luke has projected it back into John’s dialogue with the multitude. Questions of praxis had become pressing for Luke’s community, and he shows that he means business in addressing them. The Baptist’s reply is a concrete instruction on how to handle money: to the multitude he says, “He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise” (3:10); to the tax collectors: “Collect no more than is appointed you” (3:13); to the soldiers: “Rob no one by violence or false accusation, and be content with your wages” (3:14). These prosaic injunctions, influenced by early Christian baptismal instruction (Schürmann, 179-81), sit ill with the apocalyptic tenor of the rhetoric that defines the Baptist’s character (as in 3:7-9, 16-17), and are a pointed addition on Luke’s part, perhaps deliberately dinting the standard image of the Baptist that had become rather remote. This revisionism confirms that in Luke’s understanding the key issue for Christian praxis is how to handle possessions and money.
Luke’s soliloquies are one of the distinctive marks of his literary art. They involve the reader by their Everyman quality, for we are all in the position of the rich and selfish Christians that Luke intends to reach. These inner monologues are introduced by phrases indicating a turning to oneself: “he said to himself” (7:39; 16:3; 18:4); “he thought to himself” (12:17), “he came to himself” (15:17); he “prayed thus with himself” (18:11).
The first of the soliloquies in the Gospel does not concern money directly. Simon the Pharisee reflects, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner” (7:39). Some find here a benevolent excusal of Jesus’s unawareness mixed with disappointment at his lack of prophetic perception. But most of the soliloquies are in the key of calculation, whether about money, or about nice social and moral distinctions as here, and they are motivated by self-interest and self-protection. They usually contain an error of judgement that rebounds on the soliloquist in a suprising reversal. The poor woman transgresses boundaries which the rich Pharisee carefully patrols. Simon’s hospitality has been stingy, reflecting his calculating mind, and the woman’s behaviour has been warm and generous (7:44-6). “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little” (7:47). Here an “economics” of love and forgiveness is adumbrated, which shapes the way people share or fail to share their goods in practical life. Generous love is the cement of a new social order, and Luke shows a sufficiently realistic grasp of social and economic realities to lend this prescription persuasive force, making it difficult to dismiss it as a flight into mere well-meaning sentiment.
The framework of judgement presupposed in Simon’s soliloquy sets him up for a characteristic Lukan reversal, according to a basic programme of the Gospel, expressed in the Magnificat (Lk 1:52-3) and the Beatitudes and Woes (6:20-6). Simon judges the woman by the Law, implicitly confident that he himself is justified by his observance of it. “The insufficiency of observing the Law consists in the tendency to self-justification. For redemption and the attainment of eternal life what is needed is the opening and surpassal of the Law. This happens in the turn to the neighbour through almsgiving or concrete deeds of love” (Klein, 145). The place held in Paul by justification through faith is held in Luke by this turn away from self-concern to concern for the common good. There is ample basis for such a view in sapiential literature: “Water puts out a blazing fire; and almsgiving atones for sin” (Sirach 3:30); “Almsgiving saves from death and cleanses away every sin” (Tobit 12:8). More should have been made of this in Christian tradition, for it would have spared us much fruitless brooding on grace, justification, sanctification, and predestination abstractly conceived. Note that Simon receives a friendly instruction from Jesus, for “the rich for Luke are not enemies but people in danger; and in this they stand very close to the pious” (Klein, 157). The reader of the Gospel is both both rich and righteous, simul iustus et peccator, and hears the words of Jesus as simultaneously Good News and call to repentance.
The next soliloquy is that of the rich fool, which is particularly pungent: “What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?… I will do this: I will pull down my barns, and build larger ones; and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry” (12:17-19). This is a calculation about the most incalculable thing of all—the amount of days remaining in one’s mortal span. The uncertainty permits us to postulate a reassuring “many years” and to relax into enjoyment of present pleasures as if this were the height of wisdom; whereas it should generate urgency and throw us back on the present as the sole locus of service.
Here again the soliloquy is followed by a dramatic reversal: the calculated imaginary world of the soliloquist is interrupted by the emergence of the incalculable real. Note that the speaker uses the same question that elsewhere expresses ethical awakening in face of eschatological urgency: “What shall I do?” But the summit of his folly is to answer that question without referring to God. Using possessions as “a source of security apart from God” (Green, 491), and scorning the responsibility they entail to meet the needs of others, “he did not consider that his life was on loan from God,” a loan that suddenly falls due. Not only is gospel salvation enacted in material activities such as sharing, hospitality and almsgiving, but the basic realities of life and death are profiled in economic terms, as if God’s dealing with humans were an immense economic transaction. Ultimately a principle of mercy and generosity overrides strict application of an economic tit for tat, both on God’s side (15:20-24) and on ours (the good Samaritan, 10:25-37), but at a first level the latter is grimly insisted on, as in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (16:19-31).
The reversal of the rich fool’s expectations is not simply a matter of unexpected demise. It is a divine judgement, for he has consistently rejected wisdom and indulged in godlessness (Seccombe, 142). Luke is not telling us to worry about death and its timing—we already do—but about righteousness and judgement. The correct disposition of one’s possessions is a theme of sapiential literature, as in Job 31:17-32. The one who disposes of them badly, through narrowness of perspective, indifference to the neighbour, or sheer greed, is a fool not in some banal everyday sense but as one who lacks the wisdom enjoined by the Lord and linked with the divine life itself (Prov 8:22-31). His complacent soliloquies are already mocked in the wisdom literature: “When he says: ‘I have found rest, now I will feast on my possessions,’ he does not know how long it will be till he dies and leaves them to others” (Sirach 11:19). And this unwisdom translates into social injustice: “Given the high level of interconnectedness characteristic of the village economy, it is worth asking why this farmer lays out a course of action in isolation from others whose well-being is affected by his decision” (Green, 490).
A short soliloquy occurs at 12:45: “But if that servant says to himself [en tê kardia autou, in his heart]: ‘My master is delayed in coming,’ and begins to beat the menservants and the maidservants, and to eat and drink and get drunk…” Like so many of these soliloquies, this one insinuates itself into the secret thought of its hearers, echoing, as at 12:19, the Epicurean catchwords that are always so tempting. The “delay of the parousia” had dulled the zeal of many in Luke’s generation. The inner thought of unconcern for the Lord’s will is instantly translated into indulgence of self and abuse of others, three dimensions of a single disorder that we may imagine to have become manifest in Luke’s Church, in contrast to the ideal situation of the pentecostal beginnings.
Readers can identify totally with the soliloquy of the prodigal son, especially if one is cynical enough to read it not as an undiluted expression of heartfelt conversion, but rather as a calculation about survival. If read as a straight narrative of religious conversion it can appear clumsy or wooden, and the indignation of the elder brother merely churlish. But thanks to the penetration of biblical studies by the subtleties of modern literary criticism we are learning to read Luke as a great master of narrative art, insinuation a wider spectrum of intricate motives than conventional piety normally takes account of. The phrase “coming to himself” (15:17) “does not on its own signify repentance. ‘Coming to one’s senses’ is more the idea,” although “shades of repentance are clearly evident” (Green, 581). At best they are shades, and even then they are far from evident. The “conversion” is prompted by destitution and impossible to dissociate from economic considerations. The speech the prodigal rehearses for his father is skillfully calculated to win back his favour, and in what he says to himself there is no reference to any injury done to his father: “How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants’” (15:17-19). A more honest speech would begin, “Father, I’ve come back because I am dying of hunger,” so “the lie by omission is flagrant” (Aletti, 235). (Aletti adds that the soliloquies “allow the reader to get beyond appearances, to enter into the real motivation of the actors, and to assess the sometimes enormous distance that separates the words and the feelings locked in the depth of the heart.”) This soliloquy also meets reversal, for the father forgives the son when he sees him at a distance and interrupts his rehearsed speech before he can say “treat me as one of your hired servants,” a phrase that is not the deepest level of self-abasement, since the servants were paid; “the finesse of a narrator without any illusion about certain discourses of repentance” is to be admired (Aletti, 236). The paternal response is not in the same key of calculation as the soliloquy, and its generosity undercuts the son’s cautious and mistrustful performance. The son’s judgement thus fell short of the mark, just as his brother’s calculations of merit and reward (15:29-30) are tangential to the father’s uncalculating love for the sons.
The dishonest steward, a squanderer like the prodigal son (16:1), also finds himself in pressing straits; his soliloquy is again “a significant turning point in the parable” (Culpepper, 307): “What shall I do, since my master is taking the stewardship away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do, so that people may receive me into their houses when I am put out of the stewardship” (16:3-4). Again we have the question, “What shall I do?,” and again, as at 12:17, the framework within which it is posed falls far short of the perspective of the kingdom of God. This soliloquy, unlike the prodigal son’s, offers no pretext for reading sublime meanings into it. But whereas the rich fool was planning material aggrandizement, the steward is battling for survival, so his question and its answer are not fatuous. His calculation turns upon some tricky business, but in a surprise twist he is praised by his master for his prudence (16:8) and Jesus comments: “Make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon” (16:9). The reversal effect here lies in the unexpected confirmation of the steward’s calculation by the master and by Jesus. The soliloquist’s judgement might seem base and cynical, but unlike the delusions of the rich fool it shows sterling common sense.
While the Gospel sometimes urges selfless and self-forgetful giving—“Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Mt 6:3; no equivalent in Luke)—it also uses do ut des reasoning quite unembarrassedly in the same Matthean passage (6:4, 5-6, 16-18) and in the saying, “the measure you give will be the measure you get, anda still more will be given you” (Mk 4:24; Lk 6:38), as well as in similar calculations about forgiveness and not judging (Mt 7:1-2; Lk 6:37), which in Luke immediately precede an eloquent expansion of the “give, and it will be given to you” topos (Lk 6:38). Love itself is calculated, in that selfless love will win a great reward (Mt 5:46-7; Lk 32-5). As in the case of the prodigal son, the unjust steward’s calculations about his own welfare become a model for wise disciples. But the closed world of the soliloquy opens up to unexpected horizons of divine generosity: “Your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind (chrêstos) to the ungrateful (acharistous) and the selfish (ponêrous)” (Lk 6:35). Reconciliation with the community is close at hand, a mere matter of “making friends” through almsgiving, and it is at one and the same stroke an easy path to rediscovering God as kind and merciful. The badness and shabbiness of money does not prevent it from being an instrument of grace, a key to “eternal habitations” (16:9). In fact its badness is not ontological but a matter of general misuse, “in theft and exploitation, hoarding, conspicuous consumption, and the more general disregard for outsiders and persons of low status and need” (Green, 596-7). Luke never preaches distance and disdain toward the actual economic and social order, but seeks to transform and redeem it. “Wealth is either used faithfully—that is, in the service of God and thus in solidarity with and on behalf of those in need—or, as in v. 13, it takes on a personified, cosmological status in which case its claims for service are as unyielding as they are perverse” (Green 596). The shared wealth of the ideal Christian community of Acts is a blessing for the recipients but even more for the donors: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).
The parable of the unjust judge, which is close to the earlier images of the importunate friend (11:5-8) and the father who will not give his child a snake when he asks for a fish or a scorpion for an egg (11:11-12), has a soliloquy: “Though I neither fear God nor regard man, yet because this widow bothers [or more strongly, ‘badgers’] me, I will vindicate her, or she will wear me out by her continual coming” (18:4-5). “The language Luke uses is startling, perhaps even humorous, borrowed as it is from the boxing ring,, for it invokes images of the almighty, fearless, macho judge cornered and slugged by the least powerful in society” (Green, 641). Here the calculation goes against the soliloquist’s habitual behaviour, a reversal effected by the widow’s pleading. The point made earlier—“If you, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (11:13)—is now dramatized by entry into the mind of a bad man swayed by impetration. As in the case of the dishonest steward, all-too-human calculations become a vehicle for reflecting on divine attitudes. Luke’s Gospel is not a pabulum for beautiful souls; it constantly engages us amid the pressures of our money calculations, skilfully pulling on that thread to lead us to the social realities that are the hallmark of the Kingdom.
There is a kind of prayer that is not addressed to God at all but is a self-centred soliloquy. a prayer to oneself. “The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself [statheis pros heauton tauta prosêucheto], ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get’” (18:11-12). The phrase “pros heauton” may refer to his position: “The Pharisees separated themselves from others to maintain their purity before God, so this Pharisee takes a position that reflects his identity—standing by himself” (Culpepper, 341). Or it may refer to his prayer: “Concerning himself he prayed these things” (ib.). But the irony is even more piquant if we read, “to himself he prayed these things.” (This suggestion is “too sophisticated,” says Marshall [679], who sees pros heauton as “representing an Aramaic ethic dative which emphasizes the verb.” But the topic of “self” looms large in the other soliloquies and Luke is certainly “sophisticated” enough to be able to develop it as a thematic element.) The Pharisee's prayer of thanksgiving goes astray: “For God’s acts, the Pharisee has substituted his own” (Green, 648). A society in which people are more preoccupied with their own achievements and success than with the common good these are supposed to subserve will also be blind to the divine graciousness that is enacted and tasted in work for the common good. Virtuous scorn for degenerate society, in the spirit of Molière’s Alceste, which places itself “in one camp and all others in the category of thieves, rogues, and adulterers” (ib.), misses out on the basic solidarity of all citizens in reponsibility for the social fabric. Social corruption is not a licence for resignation and disengagement but a challenge to assume anew the social task. This is a moral socialism that will be given material expression in the lifestyle of the pentecostal church. The turn away from this into the petty world of self is a plunge into fatuous delusion. Luke underlines that the Pharisee may be any one of us, or rather is every one of us: “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled” (18:14). The text tracks a common human delusion and how it is set up for reversal.
There is one more soliloquy at 20:13, though it is introduced by the simple “the owner of the vineyard said”: “What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; it may be they will respect him.” This is developed from Mk 12:6, which is not so clearly a soliloquy: “They will respect my son.” The reversal of the soliloquist’s expectations by the wicked behaviour of the tenants portrays goodness (and by extension divine goodness) as naive and trusting over against the brutal and summary calculations of the wicked: “This is the heir; let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours” (Lk 20:14). The last phrase here is slightedly more consciously calculating than Mark’s “and the inheritance will be ours” (Mk 12:7), as is the phrase dielogizonto pros allêlous, in place of Mark’s pros heautous eipan, since it suggests a deliberative casting about in mutual give and take. “The act of ‘discussing among themselves’ is typical of those who oppose the redemptive purpose of God at work in Jesus,” as at 5:21 (“Who can forgive sins but God alone?”) and 9:46 (“A discussion arose among them as to which of them was the greatest”) (Green, 708)—both cases in which Jesus “knew their thoughts” just as he divines those of Simon at 7:40. Secret discussions based on suspicion, opportunism, resistance, plotting, have the same calculative character as soliloquies. In Acts the disciples invest the same mental energy more wholesomely in open debate, thus preserving the principles of “the Way” (Acts 9:2), foremost among them care for the common good, over against those whose calculations insidiously undermine them.
Our survey of the soliloquies lights up only a small corner of the immense world of Lukan thought. Luke does not lock us into the private world of the soliloquists, wrestling with dilemmas of conscience in a hole-in-corner way. Their calculations serve to highlight what overthrows them, Luke’s vision of a decent human society. While in Luke-Acts it is the church that exists as a community of sharing or of the common good, the whole tenor of Luke’s writings supports civic virtues and values as well. That is, the Kingdom of God is not only an ecclesial enclave, an eschatological community that is not of this world, but involves care for the earthly city as well. That at least is how it is seen in the church’s social teaching, greatly influenced by Luke since the time of St Ambroses’s commentary on his Gospel.
Luke cherishes the civic virtues of this time. The “solutions” to the problems of the earthly city that church teachers propose and a committed laity enacts are not solutions coming from the outside; they are inherent in the social order itself. That is why one might say that the church’s teaching falls flat if there is no context in the social order ready to receive it. Leo XIII did not preach in a vacuum—his teachings resonate with the entire issue of labour and capital as developed in the 19th century. Pius XII’s positive words on democracy would make no sense without the entire debate about democracy since the 18th century. Neo-Augustinians who take an anarchist approach to the State and regard all the rhetoric of democracy as empty and illusory place an undue burden on the Church (idealized and glorified in a medieval way) and lame the Church’s capacity to be in dialogue with the earthly city and to offer a beacon in support of its deepest values. It would be an immense task to track Luke’s attitudes to the secular authorities in Acts, but in general he seems devoid of the negative apocalyptic mentality that sees the Church as exiled in an evil age. He could be seen as undertaking in this regard a daring course correction for the growing Church, as when he boldly thrusts the apocalyptic John the Baptist into the thick of social concerns. His rich reflections will continue to intersect with the ethical questions of current economic debate and with Christian efforts to think of the common good in the broadest perspective of an integral human ecology (see Zamagni), which both gives “glory to God in the highest” and brings “peace on earth to people of good will” (Lk 2:14).
References
Jean-Noël Aletti, Quand Luc raconte (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1998).
Richard J. Cassidy, Jesus, Politics, and Society: A Study of Luke’s Gospel (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1978).
R. Alan Culpepper, in The New Interpreter’s Bible, IX (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995).
Jacques Dupont, Études sur les Actes des Apôtres (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1967).
Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997).
Christopher M. Hays, Luke’s Wealth Ethics: A Study in Their Coherence and Character (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2010).
R. J. Karris, “Poor and Rich: The Lukan Sitz im Leben,” in C. K. Talbert, ed. Perspectives on Luke-Acts (Edinburgh: Clark, 1978), 112-25.
Hans Klein, Lukasstudien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005).
I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978).
Heinz Schürmann, Das Lukasevangelium, I, 4th ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1990).
David Peter Seccombe, Possessions and the Poor in Luke-Acts (Linz: Studien zum Neuen Testament und seiner Umwelt, 1982).
Stefano Zamagni, “For an Integral Ecology,” The Japan Mission Journal 70 (2016):7-15.