Daily Devotion for Monday 5th October 2026
Monday, 5 October 2026
James 5: 1 – 6
Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. Listen! The wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts on a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.
Reflection
The Church’s wealth stands in contradiction to Jesus’ poverty. The Church’s roots were poor – whilst some converts may have been wealthy enough to house congregations, many were slaves and of no account. A movement which was pacifist, objected to Roman state-imposed paganism, had a stricter morality than the Roman society, and which undermined slavery – the economic system of ancient world – was hardly at the centre of things.
Yet, growth was the Church’s greatest success and deepest failure. After Constantine, emperors endowed the Church with wealth and prestige. Buildings were given and constructed, bishops became part of the ruling classes and gained secular as well as religious authority and the rest, as they say, is history. Time and again women and men sought to reject all this wealth and went to the edges of society and lived in simple communities. Their holiness attracted patrons who gave them land and wealth; soon these great monasteries became ensnared in the very wealth they had tried to reject.
The 12th Century reform movements all rejected wealth seeing it as a snare – as did the writer of James. Existing on the margins allowed the earliest Church – and the various reform movements – to see the world differently, to value the edge, to question common values and to point to the coming Kingdom which would overthrow empires. Yet there’s an irony that, even in a declining church, wealth increases as we sell off surplus buildings. Would a poorer Church be more faithful to Jesus’ example? There’s a deeper irony in that I personally value the URC having enough wealth to pay me each month!
Obscene levels of wealth trouble our contemporaries – whether that’s in billionaires who refuse to pay their taxes and share their wealth or institutions, like the Church, which don’t use their wealth well. Pray, today, for the wisdom to use your own wealth worthily, and that the Church might have that wisdom too!
Prayer
God of the poor,
You count the hairs on our head,
and not one sparrow falls without You knowing it;
help us to trust in Your goodness,
to store up treasures in heaven and,
where we have to manage earthly wealth,
help us to do so with Your values.
Amen.