A Reflection for Tuesday of the Second Week of Easter
Find today’s readings here.
The community of believers was of one heart and mind,
and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own,
but they had everything in common…
There was no needy person among them,
for those who owned property or houses would sell them,
bring the proceeds of the sale,
and put them at the feet of the Apostles,
and they were distributed to each according to need. (Acts 4:32, 34-37)
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,”is a brilliant, pithy summation of communist philosophy made by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme. I will say nothing further about this critique other than to point out that Karl Marx was right to make it, mainly because the phrase “The Gotha Programme” scares me to death.
Did this communist koan, this keystone tenet of a defiantly atheist ideology, “from ability to needs” find its origin in a profoundly religious group? Namely, the early disciples as named in today’s reading from Acts of the Apostles, who took the goods of the early Christian community and distributed them “to each according to need”?
Luc Bovens, a philosophy professor at the University of North Carolina, argues that it did. The sentiment, if not the exact phrase itself, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” was articulated well before Marx by two 19th century French philosophers and one French novelist. All three of them, Louis Blanc, Étienne Cabet and Henri de Saint-Simon, says Bovens, were “committed Christians whose social programs were inspired by their faith.” Bovens writes that they took their versions of the famous phrase “from French Bible translations of the time, and defended them on scriptural grounds.”
The very heart of 19th-century communist philosophy born in the streets of first century Christian Jerusalem; the notion that for anyone to go without—without shelter, food, clothing, without care in sickness, without a decent humane life—while other Christians live in abundance–that is patently absurd. That which you have, even if you “earned” it, in one way or another, belongs to the entire community.
The church expands this sentiment to a broader level when considering society as a whole. It has for centuries. In his encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si’,” Pope Francis declares that “The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property.”
The 4th century presbyter St. John Chrysostom puts the idea of the common use of all goods in another, even more striking way: “Remember this without fail,” writes St. John, “that not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own wealth but theirs.”
Theft! Not sharing our goods with the poor, not laying one’s possessions at the feet of Matthew and Peter and Jude and their modern day successors, is theft of the poor!
There will never, ever be a time when we fully embrace exhortations like this. There will never be a full realization of the kingdom of God on this earth; never a worker paradise, never a time when all the rightful public goods will be in their rightful hands. Our greed and clinging and fear and striving will keep even the most idealistic of us clutching at our possessions. Fearful that if we gave away our things we would be, somehow, giving away our very selves.
But saying that the vast majority of Christians will never congeal into “an Acts 4 community,” is not “defeatist” or “throwing in the towel” of youthful idealism to hard cold facts. It is not constricting; it is liberating. Acknowledging our limitations in the work of building up a just society frees us up. As Bishop Ken Untener put it (in a statement often attributed to Oscar Romero), “We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it well.”
We lay what we can at the feet of latter-day apostles, to be given to the poor. And the next time we lay down a little more, and then a little more and a little more. We do something rather than nothing. We do not write off the early apostles as naive idealists; we see them as people who tried to, little by little, spread the acreage of God’s kingdom all around them.
And look how far they got.
