We are a greedy people. We will think about taking the five cookies for ourselves rather than sharing them with others. If a purpose of the Law is to curb our sinfulness; couldn't laws that require us to share be curbs against the sin of greed?
I was just listening to a podcast talking about an experiment done with children where they are offered one treat, or told that if they will wait 20 minutes to eat it, they can have two treats. (I'm oversimplifying, but you get the point.) The percentage of children in African agrarian countries who waited the twenty minutes was consistently much higher than in America or Europe. One theory is that people in agrarian cultures have learned to be patient, waiting for weather, crops, etc., while people in industrialized nations have lost that ability because they think everything is instantly and inevitably available.
Mark Allen Powell writes about his experiences with the Parable of the Prodigal Son in regards to the younger son's problem(s). When 100 American students were asked to retell the story from memory, only six mentioned the famine. All 100 mentioned the squandering. The story still makes sense when the famine is omitted.
When he did the same experiment with Russian students, a majority (84%) remembered the famine; while less than half (34%) mentioned the squandering. Going further, he asked the Russians, "Aren't we supposed to think that the son did something wrong?" Their answer (as Powell tells it): "… the boy's mistake was not how he spent his money - or how he lost it. His mistake was leaving his father's house in the first place. His sin was placing a price tag on the value of his family, thinking that money was all he needed from them. Once he had his share of the family fortune, the family itself no longer mattered. In a phrase, his sins was
wanting to be self-sufficient." (
What Do They Hear?: Bridging the Gap Between Pulpit and Pew, p. 18, italics in original).
He did something similar with Tanzanian students. After reading the story, he asked them to write down: "Why does the young man end up starving in the pigpen?" He writes: "I was curious to see how many would write 'Because he wasted his money' and how many would write 'Because there was a famine.' A few did write responses like that, but the vast majority - around 80 percent wrote something completely different: 'Because no one gave him anything to eat.'" (Ibid. p. 26)
He hadn't expected that answer! (Nor did I when I read this.) He relates more of what the Tanzanians told him:
I pressed the matter with them. I asked, "Why should anyone give him anything?" Wasn't it his own fault - squandering his money like he did?" They told me that was a very callous perspective. The boy was in a far country. Immigrants often lose their money. They don't know how things work - they might spend all their money when they shouldn't because they don't know about the famines that come. People think they are fools just because they don't know how to live in that country. But the Bible commands us to care for the stranger and alien in our midst. It is a lack of hospitality not to do so. This story, the Tanzanians told me, is less about personal repentance than it is about society. Specifically, it is about the kingdom of God. It contrasts the father's house with the far country. The father's house is the kingdom of God that Jesus keeps talking about, but the far country is a society without honor. Everyone who heard this parable would be shocked by his depiction of such a society, a country that would let a stranger go hungry and not give him anything to eat. And a central point of the parable is that the scribes and the Pharisees are like that. Jesus tells the parable as a response to the scribes and Pharisees, who are grumbling that he welcomes sinners and eats with them (15:2). The parable teaches that the kingdom of God is a society that welcomes the undeserving, and it puts the scribes and Pharisees to shame by showing them that they are like a society with no honor, that shows no hospitality to the stranger in its midst. (Ibid. p. 27)
These stories are in a chapter called: "Social Location: A Matter of Perspective." While some of us see the Nordic countries as having democratic socialism; others see them as not socialists at all. Whatever it is called, it is more like the model that the liberal Democrats are talking about rather than Russia, Cuba, or Venezuela.
