Presumably if you are a sex education teacher focusing on abstinence today’s reading from Ruth would be an interesting and possibly a useful Biblical story. Naomi was anxious that her daughter find a place in the land of Judah to which she had recently returned from exile in Moab, with neither husband nor sons to provide for her. And so she advises her daughter to go and make herself available to Boaz, a man who had already shown her kindness by leaving a generous amount of gleanings of his crop in the fields for Ruth to take home to her mother for food. Now the men used to sleep with the newly threshed grain after the harvest in order to prevent it from being stolen and Naomi is advised to wear her best clothes and perfume herself and go and make herself available to Boaz – literally ‘to uncover his feet’. This she does and Boaz being a perfect gentleman abstains from sexual relations with Ruth but instead offers to marry her. The next day Boaz goes to the marketplace and does a deal which secures Naomi’s ancestral lands – which she was in danger of losing as the family had no male heir. Boaz then offers to marry Ruth. Ruth in due course bears a son, and Naomi becomes his nurse. Naomi’s patrimony – the ancestral lands she was likely to have lost in the absence of men to inherit – are now secured for her childrens’ children.
There is so much in this fascinating ancient story and of course underlying the sexual theme there are issues about patriarchy, poverty and power, about immigration, racial identity and economic security. Ruth through her exile has become a stranger in the land of Judah. And through bad luck Naomi her mother is in danger of becoming destitute and of having no dowry, no gift of land to offer to a suitor for her daughter. In a patriarchal society only men had the power to inherit and dispose of land – the source of economic and productive power. All that women had were their bodies, their guile and their virtue. A faithful woman, a woman of virtue – for such is Ruth who has stuck by her mother through thick and thin – and a woman who is not lacking in guile will we learn from the story be rewarded; security will be hers in the end.
We learn something else from the story however. The story is set in a culture where the exchange and production economy are intricately tied up with the kinship and sexual economy. To put this another way what we now know as the money economy in ancient Israel was also a moral economy.
We are accustomed to living in a culture where money seems to be free of connections to land or blood, identity or culture. Our economy – and economists especially – think of money as value free, as a neutral resource, a kind of maths which carries with it no moral or cultural or social or power messages. Money is just a device – a device by which people seek to maximise their advantages in exchange relationships. It carries no baggage. Well in most cases anyway. There is of course something which the law recognises as dirty money as in the phrase ‘money laundering’. Dirty money is money made in the illicit or black economy – typically money made through the selling of drugs. Lawyers and bankers now have a vast range of regulations that they are supposed to comply with when handling their clients’ money in order to make sure that a law firm or a bank does not become a vehicle for money laundering – that is making money legitimate that was earned in illegitimate ways.
So it would appear then that for most purposes money in our culture is amoral – it carries no moral baggage, except that is when it has been earned through illegal activities.
But is this simple picture of the status of money in our culture really true to life? Can anyone think of ways in which it might not be true….? In Israel in the time of Jesus the money economy was becoming increasingly immoral. The Romans were essentially cleaning up in Palestine through the money economy. And the collaborators with the Romans, such as the corrupt scribes – really lawyers – some of whom stole widows’ houses as a fee for sorting out their affairs and paying their taxes when their husbands died were also cleaning up big time. Taxes were set by the Romans on all agricultural produce and even the poorest peasant farmer had to pay taxes to Caesar. The paying of tribute was highly controversial both because it implied obeisance – literally worship – of a foreign power, and because the tax system was driving thousands of peasant farmers off the land, and therefore rendering destitute. And to be destitute, landless in Israel was still to be without patrimony, and therefore without citizenship and without means of providing for the economic security of ones’ family, ones’ kin.
In the midst of this corrupt economy Jesus has already expressed deep ambiguity about money. When asked if it is lawful to pay taxes he asks to be shown the coinage of the Empire and suggests that since it comes from Rome it already indicates the power relations of Empire. In the story of the Widow’s Mite we learn that what people do with their money is though still a moral issue – the Widow is virtuous while the rich lawyers are ‘cleaning up’. She gives her all though it is a tiny amount, while the corrupt lawyers give only a tiny proportion of their ill-gotten gains to God.
In this story we find that against the corrupt money economy which the Romans are imposing on Palestine, gift giving remains central to the moral purposes of God for human exchange relationships. A gift in ancient times was not – as we often think of it – simply something freely given. Rather a gift was something which moved between giver and recipient and through which relationships were established and moralised. Ruth and Boaz were strangers and yet through the exchange of gifts – her body, her mother’s land, his offer of food, marriage and security– they created a new community in which they both found a future. Exchange relations are also moral relations.
But as I say we live in a culture which encourages us to see money purely as something neutral. We are encouraged to see ourselves as consumers and producers – we are connected by an invisible hand, a money economy but we don’t need to know the people whose products we consume – our purchases don’t involve moral relationships or decisions – we simply are supposed to act in our own interests. The money economy has grown out of all proportion in the last thirty years. Trillions of dollars are created by private banks and corporations as credits lent to companies, governments and individuals who are deemed credit worthy. But even as the money economy grows inexorably, social capital is being eaten up. People work longer hours with less economic security, they have less time to care for their children or to work in community organisations. Public works are neglected or privatised or a combination of the two while private wealth accumulates in off shore bank accounts and behind ruched drapes or in gated communities. (To take just one example of the new public/private parsimony – the ERI. The building has a third fewer beds than the old Royal Infirmary, it is a temporary shed rather than a solid structure, so temporary that it is too thin to keep cool in summer and suffers from regular power cuts and the building belongs to a corporation and not to the people of Edinburgh. A hundred years ago people donated by public subscription to build a hospital – it is hard to imagine this happening today.) The modern money economy is essentially a demoralised economy – we live in a society and under a government which gives power to the private manipulators of money markets, and to economists who conceive of money as an essentially amoral resource or a bit of maths.
But money is not just maths. It is a symbol yes, but an extremely powerful symbol which represents in gold but mostly in electronic numbers in bank accounts real workers, real farmers, fisherfolk, and fish, real trees, saw mills and furniture factories. Money represents ecological and human relationships – there is no such thing as money without a history, money without relationships.The idea that we could find a way to exchange gifts which did not involve moral judgement is itself the source of so many of our societies’ ills. The accumulation of so much money and wealth by a small percentage of the human population means that increasingly the world’s money economy looks like an old fashioned champagne glass – twenty per cent of us enjoy the majority of the liquid in the broad top of the glass, while more than sixty per cent live on less than 5 dollars a day in the narrow stem of the glass.
The greatest moral challenge of our time than is to find ways to reconnect the money economy with the moral economy – to find means of exchange which connect our purchases of food and drink, clothes, transport and leisure products with the providers of these commodities and services. Fair trade is precisely such a device. Through fairly traded coffee, cocoa, tea, wine and a growing range of other goods we are enabled to pay a price not just for the commodity but a price which ensures those who make it get a fair return – earn enough to feed their own families, to provide them with economic security. And of course in addition to fair trade there are the gifts we exchange with God and with one another. We give gifts to the Church and to charities and organisations which support those who lack the essentials of life, most often in developing countries. Most of our giving these days is in electronic transfers rather than actual cash gifts, though there is still a plate at the back for those who would like to use it.
How much is enough? What is our widow’s mite? The traditional Biblical answer has been the tithe or 10 per cent of income. Are we giving 10 per cent? Well I confess I checked my own accounts and I find I am only giving 6 per cent right now. We can all make our excuses – children at university in my case….! But the challenge ultimately of our Gospel today is that our own moral economy is manifested in the way we use our money. Recovering an economy of gift is not without difficulty in a world so ordered to an economy of amoral exchange and accumulation. But we cannot expect an economy so given over to the idea of monetary accumulation to advance human happiness or true security, or the health of the planet. We may have to go in for a bit of abstinence to get to the Biblical 10 per cent – but not of course sexual abstinence, just abstinence from Princes Street. Thank God for that!