By Alan Bean
My wife Nancy and I are teaching a confirmation class at our Methodist church in Arlington, Texas. While we are stuffing our students’ heads with information about the Bible, God, Jesus, the Church and Christian discipleship, we thought we should also let the Bible speak on its own terms. We decided to work through an entire book of the Bible in the course of nine months and settled on the Gospel of Mark; it’s the shortest and most succinct of the Gospels.
Mark is also the most brutal document in the Christian New Testament, in the sense of assaulting modern sensibilities. It isn’t just that Jesus performs miracles of healing every time he turns around (we moderns could attribute that to the power of suggestion); it’s the bits about money and power that sting the most.
Take Mark’s tenth chapter, for example. This will take a few minutes of your time, but I want to demonstrate that we aren’t just dealing with an isolated verse or two–the whole book is shot through with ideas that have no place in the moder world.
Mothers are bringing their tiny children to Jesus for a blessing and, as the old Sunday school song has it, “the stern disciples drive them out and bade them to depart.” Jesus takes an infant in his arms and says, “Verily, verily I say unto thee, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”
Immediately (in Mark, everything is immediate), a rich young man rushes from the wings with his famous question, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus gives the expected answer, follow the ten commandments and you’re in. The young man is unconvinced; surely it can’t be that easy.”
As a matter of fact, it is. “You lack one thing,” Jesus says, “go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
If the first answer was too easy, the second answer is way too hard. The man slinks away. He had much too much to give away.
Jesus is just getting warmed up. “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God,” he says. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
I have heard any number of sermons designed to deflect the blow. Some suggest that the “eye of the needle” was a gate in Jerusalem built so low that a camel would have to crawl under it. In that case, the preacher assures his relieved listeners, it’s okay to be wealthy as long as we’re humble too.
The disciples took Jesus far more seriously than that. “Then who can be saved?” they ask. “Jesus looked at them,” Mark tells us, and said, “For men it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”
As C.S. Lewis once said, “Anything is possible with God. It is even possible to fit a camel through the small eye of a needle, but it will be extremely hard on the camel.”
With that, Jesus strikes out for Jerusalem. Mark tells us that his disciples “were amazed, and those who followed were afraid.” Of course they were. You can talk a radical game up north in Galilee (although, even there, it’s hardly recommended) but you can’t spout such stuff in Jerusalem, especially not with Passover just around the corner. With the Holy City crammed with pilgrims and nationalistic fervor running high, the Romans will be watching for the slightest sign of a disturbance. If Jesus doesn’t tone it down, he could find himself in real trouble.
Noticing that his followers are lagging several yards behind, Jesus turns and addresses their fears directly: “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles (Romans); they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise.”
Jesus frequently talks this way in the Gospels, and the disciples never hear a word he says. Two brothers, James and John (known as “the sons of thunder” for their brash courage) step forward and deliver a speech they have obviously been rehearsing for some time. “Teacher, grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.”
“You do not know what you are asking,” Jesus replies. “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”
The thunder-boys assure Jesus that they can handle anything he throws their way.
The rest of the disciples are indignant. What gall, with Jerusalem looming over the next hill, to be thinking about their own advancement.
Jesus waits for the shouting to die down before speaking. “You know that among the Gentiles (Romans) those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whomever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
Very little of this makes it into popular Christian literature in raw form. If Jesus’ hard words about money and power are uttered in the pulpit at all, they are instantly explained away. The teaching, taken straight, is simply unacceptable.
It was not always thus. The monastic orders that sprung up in the first few centuries after Jesus, were designed to facilitate literal obedience to the Master’s teaching. In our modern world, not surprisingly, the religious orders are dwindling away.
The most successful attempt to ignore Jesus by glorifying the Christ is called the Prosperity Doctrine. Not only is it okay for Christians to be rich; your salvation depends on it. God wants to make you rich, and if you aren’t, you must be doing something wrong.
According to Prosperity teaching, God and Mammon are the best of friends.
Similarly, the religious wing of the Tea Party movement refuses to acknowledge a distinction between the teaching of Jesus and the tenets of laissez-faire capitalism. There is an admirable symmetry to this philosophy. If you are convinced that markets, unencumbered by government regulation, deliver the best of all possible worlds, the teaching of Jesus must be amended and abridged.
Of course, the modern economy doesn’t consist of individual entrepreneurs hawking their wares in the marketplace; when we speak of capitalism in the 21st century we are talking about corporate capitalism. Charles Erwin Wilson said it best in 1953 when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “What is good for General Motors is good for the country, and vice versa.”
What is a corporation for? A corporation is for making money for the shareholders.
Is that it?
Yes, that is it. There is no other consideration, moral, legal or otherwise. If the corporation determines that impoverishing Toledo by shifting operations to Ecuador is the best way to maximize profits, that’s what the corporation will do. No tears; no regrets.
Ayn Rand famously applied corporate reasoning to the moral life. I am an autonomous individual, she said. I have no claims on anyone, and no one has any claims on me. This being so, the only rational course is seek my own best interest. If I take the needs of others into consideration everything goes to hell.
Ayn Rand didn’t have any use for religion, especially the Christian variety. Following the lead of Friedrich Nietzsche, she disavowed the teaching of Jesus, repeatedly and without apology. If we’re all running around trying to serve one another, she reasoned, the fires of commerce won’t be stoked, the economy will collapse, children will starve, and Jesus will be to blame.
Although they would rather perish than admit it, most American Christians agree with Rand’s assessment of their Savior. This places them in a tight spot. Uttered in the context of the kingdoms of this world, Jesus’ words sound like pious clap-trap. On the other hand, Jesus holds the keys to the kingdom of God.
Something has to give. You can’t reconcile the claims of the corporate world with Jesus’ kingdom teaching. It’s impossible; it can’t be done.
Fortunately, there is a way out. God alone can do the impossible; but any old fool can believe the impossible. The White Queen bragged to Alice that she could imagine six impossible things before breakfast. So can we, if we put our minds to it.
And we have put our minds to it. Pretending that Jesus and Ayn Rand are joined at the hip might not be a sensible idea, but it sells. In fact, in our America, this weird equation has been maximizing profits for Christian stockholders for generations, so it must be good.
The good news is that Jesus has had plenty of time to modernize his message. When the Angel shouts, the trumpet sounds and the Son of Man appears on the clouds of glory, he will update things a bit. Perhaps he will publish a retraction in the New York Times. Or, taking his cue from his disciples, Jesus may simply forget he ever talked about love, money, power and servanthood.
If he doesn’t, we’ll have to find a humane way to shut him up. For Christians, that would be embarrassing.
Friends of Justice 
The character John Galt, in Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged said:
“The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains. Such is the nature of the competition between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of ‘exploitation’ for which you have damned the strong.“
Now here is a different take on this theme from PBS.
BILL MOYERS: In this regard, I take my cue from the late Edward R. Murrow, the Moses of broadcast news.
Ed Murrow told his generation of journalists bias is okay as long as you don’t try to hide it. So here, one more time, is mine: plutocracy and democracy don’t mix.
Plutocracy, the rule of the rich, political power controlled by the wealthy.
Plutocracy is not an American word but it’s become an American phenomenon. Back in the fall of 2005, the Wall Street giant Citigroup even coined a variation on it, plutonomy, an economic system where the privileged few make sure the rich get richer with government on their side. By the next spring, Citigroup decided the time had come to publicly “bang the drum on plutonomy.”
And bang they did, with an “equity strategy” for their investors, entitled,
“Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer.”
Here are some excerpts:
“Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper…[and] take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years…”
“…the top 10%, particularly the top 1% of the US– the plutonomists in our parlance– have benefited disproportionately from the recent productivity surge in the US…[and] from globalization and the productivity boom, at the relative expense of labor.”
“…[and they] are likely to get even wealthier in the coming years. [Because] the dynamics of plutonomy are still intact.”
And so they were, before the great collapse of 2008. And so they are, today, after the fall. While millions of people have lost their jobs, their homes, and their savings, the plutonomists are doing just fine. In some cases, even better, thanks to our bailout of the big banks which meant record profits and record bonuses for Wall Street.
Now why is this? Because over the past 30 years the plutocrats, or plutonomists — choose your poison — have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding. Remember that Citigroup reference to “market-friendly governments” on their side? It hasn’t mattered which party has been in power — government has done Wall Street’s bidding.
Don’t blame the lobbyists, by the way; they are simply the mules of politics, delivering the drug of choice to a political class addicted to cash — what polite circles call “campaign contributions” and Tony Soprano would call “protection.”
This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet.
According to a study from the Pew Research Center last month, nine out of ten Americans give our national economy a negative rating. Eight out of ten report difficulty finding jobs in their communities, and seven out of ten say they experienced job-related or financial problems over the past year.
So it is that like those populists of that earlier era, millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable. Then, the remedy was a popular insurgency that ignited the spark of democracy.
Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs.
As the financial crisis unfolded banks continued to promote Rand’s Objectivism philosophy. Here is just one example notice the date.
March 20, 2008
AUSTIN, Texas — BB&T Corporation, one of the nation’s largest banks, has awarded $2 million to the Department of Philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin to establish the BB&T Chair for the Study of Objectivism.
BB&T Corp., headquartered in Winston-Salem, N.C., is a financial holding company with $132.6 billion in assets.
Thanks for the feedback, Nil.
Thank you so much for this great piece and for drawing people’s attention to Rand’s philosophy. This is a really important issue. I came across your blog while doing my own research on Rand for the non-profit, the American Values Network (AVN). My apologies for reaching out through the comments section, but I couldn’t find another way to reach you. In case you might do further writing on Rand, I just wanted to make sure you were aware of this resource that AVN put together that might be useful to you – http://americanvaluesnetwork.org/aynrandvsjesus/. It’s a pretty exhaustive collection of her quotes, broken down by topic, specifically focused on what she said the goal of her books and teachings were. Specifically, we focus on how she stands in complete opposition to Judeo-Christian morality and her condemnation of Christ’s teachings and those who follow them. And for her quotes, we supply specific Biblical passages on what the Bible teaches on these subjects. Thank you again for raising these issues. Please feel free to use AVN’s memo however you would like if you find it useful.
Im to tired an stressed out to come where u r an do a study on marks account of jesus life