How the Apostles and the First Church Gave Up Everything

As if the apostle, who by claiming that he had the privileges of a Roman citizen from birth shows that he was no man of low rank by this world’s standards, could not likewise have been supported by the property that had once belonged to him! And as if those men in Jerusalem who owned lands and houses, and sold everything, kept back nothing whatever for themselves, and brought the price and laid it at the apostles’ feet, could not have supplied their bodily needs from their own property, if the apostles had thought this the best plan, or if they themselves had judged it preferable! But they gave up all their property at once, and preferred to be supported by their own labor and by the contributions of the Gentiles. The holy apostle speaks of this collection when writing to the Romans. He declares to them his own office in this matter and urges them, too, to make this collection: “But now I am going to Jerusalem to serve the saints. For those of Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make a contribution for the poor among the saints who are at Jerusalem. They have been pleased to do it, and indeed they are their debtors. For if the Gentiles have been made sharers in their spiritual things, they ought also to serve them in material things.” [a]

To the Corinthians, too, he shows the same concern about this, and urges them all the more earnestly to prepare before his arrival a collection, which he meant to send for the needs of the saints: “Now concerning the collection for the saints, as I directed the churches of Galatia, so you also are to do. On the first day of the week let each one of you put something aside by himself, storing up whatever pleases him, so that the collections need not be made when I come. And when I come, whomever you approve by your letters, I will send them to carry your gift to Jerusalem.” And to spur them to make a larger collection, he adds, “And if it is fitting for me to go as well, they will go with me.” He means: if your offering is such that it deserves to be taken there by my own service.

To the Galatians, too, he testifies that when he was settling with the apostles the division of the work of preaching, he had arranged this with James, Peter and John: that he should take up the preaching to the Gentiles, but should never give up his care and anxious thought for the poor in Jerusalem, who for Christ’s sake had given up all their goods and submitted to voluntary poverty. “And when they saw,” he says, “the grace of God that was given to me, James and Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should preach to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised; only they wanted us to remember the poor.” And he testifies that he attended to this most carefully, saying, “which I was also eager to do myself.”

Who, then, are the more blessed? Those who had only lately been gathered out of the pagans and, unable to climb to the heights of the gospel’s perfection, clung to their own property, in whose case the apostle counted it a great thing if they were at least kept from the worship of idols, from sexual immorality, from things strangled and from blood, and had embraced the faith of Christ, goods and all? Or those who live up to the demands of the gospel, carry the Lord’s cross daily, and want nothing of their property left for their own use?

The blessed apostle himself, bound with chains and fetters, or hampered by the difficulties of travel, and for these reasons unable to provide his food with his own hands as he usually did, declares that he received what supplied his needs from the brothers who came from Macedonia: “For what I lacked,” he says, “the brothers who came from Macedonia supplied.” And to the Philippians he says: “For you Philippians know too that in the beginning of the gospel, when I came from Macedonia, no church shared with me in the matter of giving and receiving except you alone; for even in Thessalonica you sent once and again to supply my needs.” If that is so, then, according to the notion these men have formed in the coldness of their hearts, will those who are found to have served him from their means really be more blessed than the apostle? But no one, however big a fool he may be, will dare to say this.