91Èȱ¬

The rate of inflation is up for the second month in a row. According to reports, it’s the prices for fuel and clothes that are driving this increase, unsurprising in the winter. This means that the approaching time of gift giving will bring extra stress to many households, especially with children, who are hoping to give the young ones a good Christmas, and will be very stretched to do so.

But around where I live in central London, in these last few days before the festival, luxury shops are honestly completely full every day. I am struck that there are many people shopping for Christmas who are untouched by this inflation rise. Or at least untouched enough still to spend thousands of pounds in an afternoon on one gift for the season. It’s a commonplace to say that Christmas is too commercialised. But it’s also a common assumption, even unspoken, that agrees with Gerturde Stein– who famously commented ‘whoever said money can’t buy you happiness didn’t know where to shop’.

Economics, inequality, spending habits and wages were often the subject of the stories that Jesus told. One of his stories invited reflection on whether there was an un-fixable chasm between people in society; he raised the question of considering whether economic inequality was unsolvable, and insisted that it wasn’t. Jesus’s stories about money often revealed the brittle fears we human beings carry around inside us and the lengths we will go to protect the wealth we have, if we have it.

The Christian tradition will always want to talk about the positive power of money to transform, to enliven, to bring life, especially when it’s given away, shared, pledged for the common good. But it will not ignore its toxic power, the unfairness of it all either. Jesus often used the emotive language of slavery in talking about what pursing money does to us. Whether we think we have enough money is intimately linked to our need for security. The reality is that the rise in inflation will cause immense worry to many people who will be awake at night, even while at the same hour others order their fourth bottle of champagne.

And the desire to give gifts at Christmas reminds us that money has power not only in our material life, but in matters of the heart. And we can’t take it with us.

The story goes that at the funeral of the Greek shipping billionaire Aristotle Onassis in 1975, someone was heard to say as the coffin went past – I wonder how much he left?

And the reply came from an anonymous voice in the crowd: ‘How much he left? Everything’.

Show less