Parabola Magazine

LOVE AND MONEY

By Richard Smoley

In this provocative essay, Parabola consulting editor Richard Smoley explores the secret prices of love.

Although love has existed as long as the human race itself, it was Jesus Christ who posited this mysterious force as being at the center of experience. The Law of Moses told the Jews to "love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy mind" and to "love thy neighbor as thyself,"1 but it was Christ who chose these as the two greatest ommandments.

I am not saying that this emphasis on love makes Christianity superior to other religions. It's rather that we in the West extol love because we consciously or unconsciously remain Christians, no matter what box we may check under "religion" on the census form. Does love deserve to stand on the pinnacle of veneration? Since it is Christianity that makes this claim, it is to Christianity that we will turn for the answer.

One commonly overlooked motif in the Gospels is money. It's hard to think of any other sacred text that is more thoroughly pervaded with monetary images. People are given talents-sums that in those days were as remote and inconceivable as a billion dollars is to most of us today-and they are paid wages, lose and find coins, and accrue debts. The central prayer of Christianity includes the request "Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors" (it is "debts" and not "trespasses"; the word in the original is opheleimata, which comes from opheilo, "to owe," and Liddell and Scott's Greek lexicon, the standard work in English, does not even give "trespasses" as an alternate meaning)....