Wealth In Poverty

“One pretends to be rich, yet has nothing; another pretends to be poor, yet has great wealth.” – Proverbs 13:7

I kind of laughed when I came across this in our reading, because it seems so Bay Area. It’s like that scene from “Always Be My Maybe,” when Marcus says, “I thought this was a high-end restaurant. Why am I the only one wearing a tux?” and Sasha replies, “Oh, sorry, I should have told you. Rich people are done with fancy clothes. Now it’s all $4,000 T-shirts that look like they were stolen off the homeless.”

There is some debate regarding the translation of this verse; some suggest it reads closer to “one makes himself rich, yet has nothing; another makes himself poor, yet has great wealth.” Regardless, the point is that true poverty, and true wealth, does not always meet the eye. We ought to be wary of judging anyone based on how wealthy they appear. We ought to be wary of judging our own conditions based on how propitious or inauspicious they may seem. Jesus says the poor in spirit will have the kingdom of heaven, and the meek the earth: nothing is what it seems, or perhaps we need to learn how to look anew.

This is part of the hope Christmas offers us: the most wonderful thing in the history of the world happened in an insignificant stable in an insignificant village.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it well in a letter he wrote his fiancé, Maria von Wedemeyer, from prison on December 13, 1943:

“Be brave for my sake, dearest Maria, even if this letter is your only token of my love this Christmas-tide. We shall both experience a few dark hours—why should we disguise that from each other? We shall ponder the incomprehensibility of our lot and be assailed by the question of why, over and above the darkness already enshrouding humanity, we should be subjected to the bitter anguish of a separation whose purpose we fail to understand… And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.”