Flight With Money

As far as the question you put to me goes, my brother, you now have our opinion, both as an answer and as encouragement. But anyone who asks whether we ought to run from persecution has to be ready for the next question as well: if we are not to run from it, may we at least buy our way out of it? So I will go further than you expected and give you my advice on this point too, and I will state it flatly: persecution, which we plainly must not run from, must just as plainly not be bought off either. The only difference is the payment. Flight is buying yourself off without money; buying yourself off is flight with money. Here too, beyond question, it is fear that is giving the advice. You pay because you are afraid, and so you are running away. Your feet stood their ground; the money you handed over ran. In fact your very standing still was a flight from persecution, since what you bought was release from it. [a]

But to buy back with money a man whom Christ has bought back with his blood — how unworthy that is of God, and of the way God acts! He did not spare his own Son for you, so that he might be made a curse for us, since cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. He was led like a sheep to the sacrifice; like a lamb before its shearer, he did not open his mouth. He gave his back to the whips and his cheeks to the hands that struck him, and he did not turn his face away from the spitting; and, counted in among the criminals, he was handed over to death — and not simply death, but death on a cross. All of it happened so that he could buy us back out of our sins. The sun gave up to us the day of our redemption; hell made over the claim it had on us, and our covenant is in heaven; the everlasting doors were lifted up so that the King of glory, the Lord of power, could come in — after buying man back from the earth, from hell itself, so that man could reach heaven.

So what are we to make of a man who works against that glorious One — who cheapens and fouls goods bought at so great a price, no less a price than his own most precious blood? It looks, then, as if it is better to run than to be cheapened, if a man will not lay out for himself what he cost Christ. The Lord bought him back from the angelic powers that govern the world, from the spirits of wickedness, from the darkness of this life, from everlasting judgment, from everlasting death — and you haggle over him with an informer, or a soldier, or some petty thief of a magistrate, under the fold of the tunic, as they say, as though he were stolen property: a man Christ bought in full view of the whole world, and set free besides. Will you put a price on this free man, then, and own him at any price except the one, as we have said, that he cost the Lord — his own blood? And if not, why are you buying Christ in the man he lives in, as though he were somebody’s piece of property? That is exactly what Simon was trying to do when he offered the apostles money for the Spirit of Christ. So this man too, who by buying himself has bought the Spirit of Christ, will hear the same words: “Your money perish with you, since you thought the grace of God could be had at a price.”

And yet who will look down on him for what he actually is — a man who has denied? What does the extortioner say? “Give me money.” Obviously so that he will not hand you over, since the one thing he has to sell you is the very thing he will hand over for the money. When you put it into his hand, plainly what you want is not to be handed over. But not to be handed over — did that mean you had to be put on public display? So, in being unwilling to be handed over, you were unwilling to be exposed; and by that unwillingness you have denied that you are the thing you were unwilling to be publicly known as. “No,” you say. “In being unwilling to be shown in public as what I am, I have admitted that I am what I am unwilling to be shown as — a Christian.” Can Christ, then, claim that you, as his witness, held him up steadily before people? The man who buys himself off does nothing of the kind. Before one man, I grant, it might be said that you confessed him; and just as truly, because you were unwilling to confess him before many, you have denied him. A man’s own safety is the verdict that he fell while getting out of persecution’s way. He has fallen, then, whose whole desire was to escape. Refusing martyrdom is denial.

So a Christian is kept safe by his money; that is what he keeps a fortune for — so that he will not have to suffer — while all the while he means to be rich toward God. But it was in blood that Christ was rich for him. Blessed, then, are the poor, because, he says, the kingdom of heaven belongs to those who have nothing laid up but their own soul. If we cannot serve God and mammon, can we be bought back by God and by mammon both? For who serves mammon more thoroughly than the man mammon has ransomed?

And finally, what precedent are you leaning on to justify heading off your arrest with money? When, in any trouble of persecution, did the apostles handle the matter that way and get themselves out by paying? They certainly had money: the proceeds of land sales were laid at their feet, and there were plenty of rich people among those who believed — men, and women too, who used to see to their needs. When did Onesimus, or Aquila, or Stephen give them that kind of help while they were being persecuted? And Paul: when Felix the governor was hoping to get money for him from the disciples, and even took the matter up with the apostle privately, Paul certainly did not pay it, and the disciples did not pay it for him. Those disciples who wept because he was so set on going to Jerusalem, and would take no step to protect himself from the persecutions foretold as waiting for him there, said in the end, “Let the Lord’s will be done.” And what was that will? Plainly that he should suffer for the Lord’s name, not that he should be bought off. For as Christ laid down his life for us, so should we for him — and not for the Lord alone, but for our brothers and sisters as well, on his account. That is John’s teaching too: not that we should pay for our brothers and sisters, but that we should die for them. It makes no difference whether the thing you must not do is buy a Christian off or buy a Christian outright.

And God’s will fits with this. Look at the way kingdoms and empires are arranged — arranged by God, certainly, since the king’s heart is in his hand. New devices for filling the treasury are provided every day: registers of property, taxes paid in goods, “gifts,” taxes paid in cash. But nothing of the sort has ever yet been set up that would put Christians under a purchase price for the person and the sect, though the returns would be enormous, since our numbers are far too large for anyone to be unaware of them. Bought with blood, paid for in blood, we owe no money for our head, because Christ is our head. It is not fitting that Christ should cost us money. And how could martyrdoms take place at all, to the Lord’s glory, if we paid a tax for our sect’s freedom? So the man who bargains to have it at a price is working against God’s own arrangement.

Since, then, Caesar has laid nothing on us in the way of a tax-paying sect — and in fact such a thing never can be laid on us, with the Antichrist now close at hand and gaping for Christians’ blood, not their money — how can anyone quote at me the command, “Give Caesar what belongs to Caesar”? A soldier, whether informer or enemy, squeezes money out of me by threats and collects nothing on Caesar’s behalf. He does the exact opposite, since for a bribe he lets me go — a Christian, and by human law a criminal. The denarius I owe Caesar is another matter altogether: a thing of his, the very thing the question was about that day, a tribute coin owed by those liable to tribute, and not by sons. And how am I to give God what belongs to God — his own likeness, that is, and coin stamped with his name, which is to say a Christian man? What do I owe God, as I owe Caesar the denarius, except the blood his own Son shed for me? Now if what I owe God is a human being and my own blood, and if I have come to the point where payment of that debt is demanded of me, then I am plainly cheating God if I do all I can to hold the payment back. A fine keeping of the commandment — to give Caesar what is Caesar’s and refuse God what is God’s!

Yes, and I will give to everyone who asks me — on a plea for pity, not under intimidation. “Whoever asks you,” he says. But a man who uses intimidation is not asking. Someone who threatens you if he does not get it is not begging; he is forcing. He is not looking for alms, this man who comes not to be pitied but to be feared. So I will give because I pity, not because I am afraid — where the man who takes it honors God and gives me his blessing in return; not where he thinks instead that he has done me a favor, and eyes his plunder and calls it money for a crime. Am I to be angry even with an enemy? Enmity, though, has other grounds than this one. And in any case he did not say “a betrayer,” or “a persecutor,” or “a man out to frighten you with threats.” In fact I heap coals on the head of a man like that far more effectively by not buying myself off with money. [p]

“In the same way,” Jesus says, “to the man who has taken away your tunic, give up your cloak as well.” But that has to do with someone who is after my property, not my faith. The cloak too I will hand over — if I am not being threatened with betrayal. If he threatens me, I will demand even my tunic back. Even here the Lord’s sayings have their own reasons and their own rules. They are not open-ended, and they do not cover every case. He commands us to give to everyone who asks, and yet he himself does not give to those who ask for a sign. Otherwise, if you think we ought to give to everyone who asks without distinction, then as far as I can see you would give — never mind wine to a man with a fever — poison or a sword to a man who longs to die.

As for how we are to understand “Make friends for yourselves out of mammon,” let the parable just before it teach you. The saying was addressed to the Jewish people. They had mismanaged the Lord’s business, which had been put in their hands; so they ought to have made friends for themselves out of the men of mammon — which is what we were then — rather than enemies, and to have released us from the debts of sin that were keeping us from God, by granting us that favor. And the Lord gives the reason: so that when grace began to leave them, they might come over to our faith and be taken into the everlasting homes. Hold any other explanation of the parable and the saying you like, so long as you see clearly that there is no likelihood our persecutors, once we have made friends of them with mammon, will then receive us into everlasting homes.

But what will cowardice not talk a man into? As if Scripture both permitted them to run and ordered them to buy their way out! And in the end it is not a case of one man or another getting off this way. Whole churches have taxed themselves as a body. I do not know whether to grieve or to blush when, among peddlers and pickpockets and bath-house thieves and gamblers and pimps, Christians too are entered as ratepayers on the lists of the soldiers and the spies. Did the apostles design the office of overseer with all this foresight, so that the men holding it could enjoy their authority free of anxiety, under cover of arranging the same freedom for their people? Because that, of course, is the peace Christ told us to buy from the soldiers, with presents like the ones handed round at the Saturnalia, as he went back to his Father!

“But how are we to meet?” you say. “How are we to keep the Lord’s observances?” Exactly as the apostles did, of course — men protected by faith, not by money. And if that faith can move a mountain, it can much more easily move a soldier. Let your safeguard be wisdom, not a bribe. Even so you will not have complete security from the general public at once, supposing you have bought off the soldiers’ interference. So everything you need for your protection comes to this: have both faith and wisdom. If you do not use them, you may lose even the escape you bought for yourself; and if you do use them, you can have no need to buy anything at all. [w]

And finally, if you cannot meet by day, you have the night, with the light of Christ shining against its darkness. You cannot go running from one group of them to the next. Be content with a church of three. It is better that you should sometimes not see your crowds than that you should put yourselves under a tax. Keep Christ’s promised bride pure for him; let nobody make money out of her.

All this, my brother, may look to you harsh and past bearing. But remember that God has said, “Let the one who can take it, take it” — meaning, let the one who cannot take it go his way. A man who is afraid to suffer cannot belong to the One who suffered. But the man who is not afraid to suffer will be perfect in love — the love of God, that is; “for perfect love drives out fear.” “And that is why many are called, but few chosen.” The question is not who is ready to take the broad road, but who will take the narrow one. And that is why the Paraclete is needed, who leads into all truth and puts heart into a man for all endurance. Those who have received him will not stoop to run from persecution or to buy it off, because they have the Lord himself — the one who will stand by us to help us in our suffering, and be our mouth when we are put to the question.