615. The Mortal Danger of Wealth

Hang on. We are now about to be counter-cultural.

1) Who is wealthy?

Answer: Probably we are. The average annual personal income in America is about $65,000, and the average annual household income is about $85,000.

The average annual income (adjusted to American dollars) in Haiti is $2010, in Nigeria $1360, in Afghanistan $390.

2) Jesus’ teachings

Matthew 6:24: “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth *.”

• Literally “mammon”, the demonic god of money.

Matthew 13.22: “And the one on whom seed was sown among the thorns, this is the man who hears the Word, and the worry of the world and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the Word, and it becomes unfruitful.”

Mark 10.23: “Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!”

Luke 12.15: “Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”

Or try His brother James 5:1-6: “Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.”

3) The Orthodox Fathers.

We could quote from many. Today’s let’s hear only from two men we know well, the authors of our Divine Liturgies:

Quotes taken from Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Bookstore’s “Popular Patristics” series: 

Saint John Chrysostom, “On Wealth and Poverty”

“Our Lord’s things they are, from whencesoever we may obtain them. And if we distribute to the needy we shall obtain for ourselves great abundance. And for this it is that God has permitted you to possess much,—not that you should spend it in fornication, in drunkenness, in gluttony, in rich clothing, or any other mode of luxury, but that you should distribute it to the needy. And just as if a receiver of taxes, having in charge the king’s property, should not distribute it to those for whom it is ordered, but should spend it for his own enjoyment, he would pay the penalty and come to ruin; thus also the rich man is, as it were, a receiver of goods which are destined to be dispensed to the poor—to those of his fellow-servants who are in want. If he then should spend upon himself more than he really needs, he will pay hereafter a heavy penalty. For the things he has are not his own, but are the things of his fellow-servants.” 

Saint Basil the Great, “On Social Justice”

I’m sure you know that Saint Basil was born to great wealth. He gave his inheritance away to build a “city for the poor” with food kitchens, a hospital, a hostel, a leprosarium and more. When he became bishop he lived there.

“You showed no mercy; it will not be shown to you. You opened not your house; you will be expelled from the Kingdom. You gave not your bread; you will not receive eternal life.” 

“The bread you are holding back is for the hungry, the clothes you keep put away are for the naked, the shoes that are rotting away with disuse are for those who have none, the silver you keep buried in the earth is for the needy. You are thus guilty of injustice toward as many as you might have aided, and did not.” 

4) Contemporary “Orthodox” Commentary

Probably I haven’t searched enough – there are so many Orthodox commentaries these day – but those I have found seem to quote the Fathers and go not much farther. If I’ve missed any who say it plainly like Basil and Chrysostom, or like those below, please let me know.

[P.S. Only a half hour after publication, I found a pretty good one! https://stmichaeltx.org/orthodox-101/living-orthodoxy-daily/what-is-the-orthodox-view-of-money-and-wealth/

These two Anglicans are “orthodox” in the broader sense, Scriptural, Creedal, Sacramental.

C.S. Lewis from Mere Christianity:

“One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of happiness money can give and so fail to realise your need for God. If everything seems to come simply by signing checks, you may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.”

N.T. Wright, prominent Church of England theologian and author, former Bishop of Durham.  This is taken from an interview with him in “The New York Times” by Peter Wengell, December 28, 2025.

“I want to say this most clearly, when I read the whole of the Bible, and not least Israel’s Scriptures, there are one or two of the Psalms, like Psalm 72, which is a great paean of praise to the true king. And the reason that the true king gets praised is because he looks after the poor and the widow and the orphan and the stranger. The king’s care for the needy is repeated again and again. And this sense throughout Scripture is that actually, God cares about the people who are at the bottom of the pile, and that if there is true political authority, the primary task of that authority would be to instantiate that love of God for the poor and the widow and the orphan and the marginalized and the outcast.

“I know perfectly well that that could be heard as simply: Oh, well, that’s the woke agenda, isn’t it? But believe me, it isn’t. It’s the strong agenda of a vision of God who is not the big bully in the sky. He’s the God who comes to be with us and whose personal presence with us is that of this cheerful but suffering young man who walks with us and goes to die for us, the man we call Jesus.”

 

5) Contemporary Official Orthodox Statements 

Again, unless I’ve missed some (and I hope I have), these also seem hard to find.

from “Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church” Section VI. Labour and Its Fruits. August 15, 2000

“Continuing on earth the service of Christ Who identified Himself with the destitute, the Church always comes out in defence of the voiceless and powerless. Therefore, she calls upon society to ensure the equitable distribution of the fruits of labour, in which the rich support the poor, the healthy the sick, the able-bodied, the elderly. The spiritual welfare and survival of society are possible only if the effort to ensure life, health and minimal welfare for all citizens becomes an indisputable priority in distributing the material resources.”

“In participating in government and political processes, the Orthodox laity are called to base their work on the norms of the gospel’s morality, the unity of justice and mercy (Ps. 85:10), the concern for the spiritual and material welfare of people, the love of the fatherland and the desire to transform the surrounding world according to the word of Christ.”

“Christians are called to exercise discernment about how, when, and to what extent to use the government to fulfill moral objectives: “most decisions adopted and political actions taken tend to benefit only a part of society, while restricting or infringing upon the interests and wishes of others. Many such decisions and actions are stained with sin or connivance with sin. Precisely for this reason the Orthodox politician or statesman is required to be very sensitive spiritually and morally.”

 

”For the Life of the World” is an extensive and significant work of The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, published in 2025.

For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church.

This is a very small portion:

In any nation, the poor are almost always the first to suffer as any general adverse conditions, natural or social, economic or political. And, in many places, poverty is as much the result of racial or class discrimination as of mere personal misfortune…

Almost invariably, however, the greatest immediate burden falls upon the less economically developed quarters of the earth, where governments can do—or elect to do—very little to protect the destitute against the consequences of industrial waste and general ecological devastation. It is the poor, moreover, who are most regularly displaced and further impoverished by the destruction of the environment around them.

And, even in nations of the developed world, it tends to be the poorest citizens who are most routinely exposed to the dire results of environmental degradation and who lack the resources to remedy their situations. So long as immense discrepancies in wealth exist between nations and between individuals, social and political power will be the possession primarily of the rich, as will whatever degree of relative immunity from the consequences of human folly and corruption or natural calamity can be achieved by material means.

So too will the best avenues of education or professional advancement, the best healthcare, the best legal protections, the best financial opportunities, the best access to institutions of political power, and so on. Great economic inequality is, inevitably, social injustice; it is, moreover, according to the teachings of Christ, a thing abominable in the eyes of God.

Whole schools of economics arose in the twentieth century at the service of such inequality, arguing that it is a necessary concomitant of any functioning economy. Without fail, however, the arguments employed by these schools are tautologous at best, and proof of how impoverished the human moral imagination can make itself in servitude to ideology. The Church must trust instead in the assurances of Christ that, for those who seek God’s Kingdom and its justice, God will provide all things. It must always, as heir to the missions of the prophets and to the Gospel of the incarnate God, be a voice first for the poor, and a voice raised whenever necessary against the rich and powerful, and against governments that neglect or abuse the weak in order to serve the interests of the strong.

And the Church must in every generation, remembering the example of the Church of the Apostolic age, ask of every society whether there are not effective means—and perhaps new economic models—by which it would be possible to achieve a more just distribution of wealth, and thereby a more radical commitment to the common good, of society and of the planet we all must share.

For St. Maria Skobstova *, this is a mandate addressed to everyone seeking to rise from earth to heaven and rejoice with the angels when a cup of water is offered to a single individual in the name of the Lord: “A person should have a more attentive attitude to his brother’s flesh than to his own. Christian love teaches us to give our brother not only material but also spiritual gifts. We must give him our last shirt and our last crust of bread. Here personal charity is as necessary and justified as the broadest social work. In this sense there is no doubt that the Christian is called to social work. He is called to organize a better life for the workers, to provide for the old, to build hospitals, care for children, fight against exploitation, injustice, want, lawlessness.”

• Russian refugee nun in France who protected Jews from the Nazis and was executed in a Nazi prison camp.

 

6) There are some good people at the top!

If you know any brave Orthodox people like these (and I’m sure there are some) I’d be glad to hear about it.

First, let me tell you about a devout wealthy couple in the little Episcopalian church where I was assigned as priest. They gave very generously – in fact, paid off our large debt when we were in financial difficulty – though they didn’t want it known. (Everyone knew, of course, because they were our only wealthy parishioners!) Over the years I discovered how very many good things they had done quietly, secretly with their wealth, all without pretense. One of them continues long after their death, as I can attest. In fact she, while remaining Episcopalian, gave a considerable amount of money to help us found our Saint Nicholas Orthodox Church! Dear John and Harriett, may your memory be eternal.

Alfred Nobel:  Nineteenth Century Swedish chemist and inventor, who invented dynamite and (perhaps to make up for it?) left his entire fortune to establish the Nobel Prizes, including the famous Nobel Peace Prize, ardently sought after by some. Nobel was first a Lutheran, then an agnostic, finally an atheist.

“I regard large inherited wealth as a misfortune, which merely serves to dull men’s faculties. A man who possesses great wealth should, therefore, allow only a small portion to descend to his relatives. Even if he has children, I consider it a mistake to hand over to them considerable sums of money beyond what is necessary for their education. To do so merely encourages laziness and impedes the healthy development of the individual’s capacity to make an independent position for himself.”

 

“Patriotic Millionaires”

Both in the United States and in the United Kingdom there exist  organizations called “Patriotic Millionaires”, whose members are petitioning their governments to raise their taxes. (Yes, you read that right.) Check them out:

https://patrioticmillionaires.org/meet-the-millionaires/?pg=4

patriotic millionaires uk

https://patrioticmillionaires.uk/latest-news/letter-to-burnham-2026

This is a portion of a long article – well worth reading in its entirety – about the frequent negative effects of inherited wealth, written by multi-millionaire Patriotic Millionaire Abigail Disney, daughter of Walt Disney, who knows the story from the inside. I read that she doesn’t consider herself religious. However, she treats politics and tax theory from a moral viewpoint, and she teaches what Jesus taught. I wish some “religious” people would read the Scriptures.

Abigail Disney:

As an inheritor, I exist only because of some quirks in the tax system, some good luck, and some very loving grandparents. But nothing else. That means I’ve never had to work or be brilliant. For me, the table was set long before I was born and there was very little I could do to lose my advantages.

I’ve seen all the good that wealth can do, but I have also stood witness to the way it can lead to personal, social, political, moral, and even spiritual corrosion on an epic scale. And now, I am grief-stricken as I watch the havoc that that moral and spiritual corrosion is capable of wreaking when they sink their teeth into a democracy.

For the last half-century, wealthy Americans have carried out a well-funded and ferocious campaign to change the narrative about democracy and money. My admittedly flawed country once told itself a story of how diverse people (mostly diverse insofar as European males can be diverse) came together to build a remarkable nation. A place where people could join together to face a challenge like the Depression or World War II. The heart of that narrative was that we need each other the way we need oxygen and that the best things we do we do together.

That narrative was purposely replaced with another, darker one – that each of us is in it for ourselves and that the best way to build a society is for everybody to walk their own solitary path. It urged us to raise ourselves up by our bootstraps, climb the corporate ladder, and grab the brass ring. But if you spend just one minute imagining how that works, you’ll understand how insulting and absurd that image is.

Central to the new narrative is the idea that the government is always wrong, can do nothing right or well, and that taxation is always destructive. Politicians and pundits say that taxes kill economies and inhibit creation. But when I hear this, I wonder, how did my grandfather and great uncle build a global juggernaut of a company while paying a 91% marginal income tax rate*  and how were they able to provide so much that even their great-grandchildren are set when their estates were taxed at over 50%* ?

• I have put those in bold print so it doesn’t escape your notice.

Inequality exerts a downward pull on the moral lives of the very wealthy. I have seen how wealth erodes character, the way it saps empathy out of even the most well-meaning people, and the way it leaves them under the impression that everywhere they go they must be protected from the “them.” No one can be trusted, and that, without their private guards, private airplanes, private parking lots, and private restaurants, they’d never survive.

Entitlement. Narcissism. Impunity. An unwillingness to acknowledge the suffering of others in any meaningful way. A willed ignorance about reality. An undisciplined idealism about how much philanthropy can actually accomplish and a deep intransigence about the idea that the world can ever be shaped in any other way. These are the characteristics I’ve watched form again and again and again in wealthy people around me. They are also the characteristics of people who should be kept as far from power as possible. And not just political power – any kind of power.

And yet, we have handed the keys in the United States to the wrecking ball to the very men (and yes, they are mostly men) who are bent on a kind of wreckage so absolute that when they are done, I believe they will even try to wreck the ball itself.

We are in a bind. Not just democracy but global stability itself in many cases rests in the hands of those least able, much less willing, to acknowledge that every single person on this planet is deserving of a life of dignity and that the world as it is currently shaped is a long way from being able to make that happen.

The only way out of this bind we are in is to get back to the place where it started: taxes. When we eviscerated our tax system, we started down the path that has led us to this point. When we tax income from work, we must tax it more favorably and more progressively than we tax capital. And we must tax wealth, not just income, because it is wealth that drives wider the chasm between us. Billionaires complain about this, but my feeling is that, if you can’t live on $999 million a year, you have bigger problems than a tax code can address.”

7) On the other hand…

Day before yesterday I read that now our government is cutting funding for bicycle lanes and for cameras to catch speeders … …so that more people will be killed?! Why?

So many things that help ordinary people have been cut or eliminated: food programs, health care, health research, scientifice research of all sorts including climate research *, foreign aid to the needy in the poorest countries, Americorps where my grand-daughter will work this fall.  The Peace Corps barely survives. Parents and even children are torn out of their families and sent to prison. Refugees who have settled and been productive and valued here for a generation, are now to be sent back to the gangland of Haiti? our doors now shut to those who truly need refuge. The very wealthy grow ever wealthier. This could go on to fill a page.

• In this time of dramatic dangerous climate change, the very word “climate” has been eliminated from most government documents.

And now they eliminate bicycle lanes? A small matter, but to me it felt like “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. But it isn’t, of course. There will be more to come.

8)  Psalm 10 

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