Lectionary Year C
September 23, 2001
1 Timothy 6:6-19

Context

Step IV - Context

A. Primitive Christianity

(JFC) It is said that Jesus spoke about money more than any other single topic. Wonder if that assertion is accurate? Anyway, He certainly spoke of one's selling all he possessed and give to the poor to gain treasure in heaven, like in Mark 10:21. Also, in His Parable of the Sower, in Matthew 13:18-23, Jesus said, "As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one hearing the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing", verse 22. Elsewhere in the New Testament we read that freedom from the love of money is recommended with contentment being a by-product, Hebrews 13:5. Thomas C. Oden writes, in the Interpretation Commentary, "It was an inordinate love of money that seduced Judas into betraying Jesus, Ananias and Sapphira into deceptively reporting, and the rich fool into imagining that all was well." Luke's (12:33) version of Jesus' saying about selling possessions adds giving alms and its leading to treasures in heaven. Jesus' confession before Pontius Pilate in our text's verse 13 is in Matthew 13:11 and parallel John 18:36. James 1:10 expects the rich to be brought low, disappearing like a fading flower. The storing up image in our text's last verse must reflect Jesus' words in Matthew 6:20.

B. Old Testament and Judaism

(JFC) Job (1:21) seems to have similar understandings as our text's second verse states, re: being born and being buried empty-handed. Ecclesiastes 5:15 agrees and Psalm 49:16f also agrees, although it singles out the wealthy for such an experience. Lovers of money get bad press in Proverbs 15:27 and 28:20b, as well as in I Timothy 6:9. In Exodus 33:20, as our text's 16th verse alludes to, God tells Moses, "You can never see my face for no one can see me and live." Psalm 37:16 claims that, "Better is a little that the righteous person has than the abundance of many wicked."

Then later, in the Sibylline Oracles (2:109-118), the advice comes, re: "On Money (neither wish to be wealthy nor pray for it. But pray for this: to live on little, having nothing unjust.) The love of money is the mother of all evil. (Have no desire for gold or silver. Also in these there will be double-edged iron, which destroys the spirit.) Gold and silver are always a deception for men. Life-destroying gold, originator of evils, crushing all things, would that you were not a desired affliction for men, for because of you are battles, plunderings, murders, children hostile to their parents and brothers to their kindred." The much earlier, first century, Ahiqar 137 says, "[Do not amass] wealth, lest you pervert your heart." Then in a rather contemporary Joseph and Aseneth 8, Joseph tells Aseneth, "May the Lord God who gives life to all (things) bless you." Next, the second to third century CE, Hellenistic Synagogal Prayers at 12:33, in "A Prayer of Praise and Benediction, Spoken by a Bishop at the Close of a Eucharist Service," poetically addressed God as, among several other characteristics, "the one who dwells in unapproachable light: the one who by nature is invisible." Next, from a poem from the second century BCE to the first century CE, Pseudo-Phocylides, we read this advice/judgment/evaluation, "Great wealth is conceited and grows to insolence."

C. Hellenistic World

(JFC) The Hellenistic elitists must have heard their names being called by such Biblical passages as the one at hand here, which tells of money, treasures and desires to be rich. These upper echelon of their societies must have been affluent, surely? However, soon after these images get mentioned in our text, a warning against their insecurities opposes finding them so reliable. So, what do they do with this rift? And, surely these Greek-educated philosophers could appreciate the oneness of God, but must have had trouble accepting such a deity whose relationship to a Messiah, herein and so many places elsewhere in Scripture, followed upon the name, qeoj. Then, too, according to G. B. Caird, in The Apostolic Age, these Hellenists saw here, in qeoj, a "rational principle or pattern underlying the manifold phenomena of the sensible world, the universal within the particular. The divine Logos of the Stoic, for example, was but the universal counterpart of the logos or rational faculty, which is found in human nature. Greek thought could accommodate itself to a belief in a creation, in which the Creator had left the stamp of his own character on all his works, or to a providential ordering of history according to a changeless decree. But the Biblical faith in a living God, who had done in the history of one people that which he had done in no other place and at no other time, and whose mighty acts had reached their climax in a particular, unique event - that was the denial of all that the Greeks held dear."


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