Love of Money ...

The Gospels do not reveal whether the young man later changed his mind and followed Jesus’s instruction, or forever after agonized over his inability to follow the command to become perfect by divesting himself of all his possessions to give to the poor. That the issue remains painfully difficult for Christians to decide even today, two thousand years later, is witnessed by, to give only one recent example, the ongoing bitter dispute at Trinity Wall Street Church in New York, an Episcopal congregation, over whether it should sell more of its rich holdings to be able to donate more to the poor. It is a remarkable strength of Peter Brown’s book that its fair-minded arguments uncover how and why this unsettling moral uncertainty first came to be, provoking us to wonder, and perhaps worry, what Jesus would think of its abiding persistence.