This week’s lectionary reading is Acts 4:32-35.

While the week’s Gospel lectionary focuses on the story of “Doubting” Thomas (John 20:19-31), I think the passage from Acts may present us with a more pressing challenge. This passage, as much as any in the Bible, calls into question our cultural views of property ownership, insisting that redistributing wealth to the poor is at the very heart of what it means to live a Christian life.

A Gospel of Redistribution

The passage concerns the radical economic practices of the earliest Christian community. It tells us that “no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common” (4:32). Of course, for a society as focused on the value of private ownership as we are, this is a disruptive view of ownership. We tend to think of our possessions as our own. Most often, we feel that anything we might choose to share with others is an act of beneficence on our part, and we should be properly credited for our generosity, whether with a tax break or a humanitarian award or a name on a plaque at church. We don’t typically consider ourselves as having financial obligations to people who are not our immediate dependents.

Not so for the early church, according to this text. Rather, the earliest Christians each sold all their possessions—their land and their houses—and gave the proceeds to the disciples, who distributed them “to each as any had need” (4:34-35). According to this text, the early church was communitarian. It was redistributionist. Property didn’t belong to individuals but was to be reapportioned for the good of the whole. No one became wealthy; no one languished in poverty

This isn’t the only time the book of Acts tells us about this practice of the earliest church. In 2:44-45, Acts likewise tells us that

All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. (Acts 2:44-45).

We can’t simply set this practice of economic redistribution aside as an unimportant detail in the story of the early church. Rather, the book of Acts emphasizes communitarian economics as essential to the life of the earliest Christians. Acts 5:1-11 even reiterates the point by telling the story of Ananias and Sapphira, who tried to hide some of their profits from the church, only to be struck dead by the Holy Spirit. God is not kidding around about the economic imperative of the Gospel.

Obviously this economic emphasis in Acts presents challenges for our culture, focused as it is on individual responsibility and private wealth. This text insists that the church should not be guided by the principles of American capitalism but by the Gospel’s insistence that we use what we have to lift up those who are in need.

Yet the message of this passage is even more difficult than that. While we are inclined to think of giving to the poor as an act of charity, done at our own discretion and marking us as generous people, that isn’t what this text has in mind.

Rather, Acts envisions the community as intrinsically belonging to one another, such that we can’t separate ourselves from those in need. Acts 4:32 tells us that “the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and one soul.” The Greek phrase “one heart and soul” (kardia kai psyche mia) refers to the entire essence of one’s being. It recalls the command in Deuteronomy Deuteronomy 6:5 to “love the LORD your God with all your heart (kardia), and with all your soul (psyche), and with all your might.” Deuteronomy means that we should love God with our whole selves—with everything we’ve got. In the same way, Acts 4:32 means that we belong to each other with everything that we have—heart and soul, we are as one. The community belongs to each other as though we share one heart and one soul. We are one entity, inseparable one from the other.

Thus, for the earliest believers, sharing what you had with another wasn’t understood as an act of charity. It wasn’t a deed of kindness from one person to another. Rather, sharing what one had was tending to one’s own life, which could not be separated from the lives of others. The community thrived or suffered as a whole. It succeeded or failed as a whole. Each belonged to the other, and, as such, their material goods belonged to the whole and not to any individual among them.

In that light, if we want to live out our Christian values in the public sphere, we ought to be economic redistributionists. We ought to use our wealth for the uplifting of others—not because we feel obligated or because we want to be recognized for our charity—but because we know we can’t survive without each other. We know that we have but one heart and one soul and a threat to one is a threat to us all. We live and die as a community.

Economics as Testimony

Yet, as if that were not enough, this text also insists that the way we treat the poor reveals the very essence of what it means to be a witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The way we care for the poorest among us reveals the essence of what it means to be a Christian.

The passage in 4:32-35 has a ring structure in which a declaration about the apostles’ testimony to the resurrection (4:33) is surrounded by two comments about the way they cared for the poor (4:32, 4:34-35). Visually, it looks something like this:

“They shared everything they had” (4:32)

“The apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection” (4:33)

“There were no needy persons among them (4:34)

The church’s testimony to the resurrection is inseparable from its economic life, which both precedes and grows out of the proclamation of resurrection

When outsider saws how the early Christians lived as one, sharing everything and leaving none in poverty, they wanted to know what power led the church to such a radical life. In response, the church would preach the Gospel of resurrection, declaring that Jesus’s victory over the power of death and over the economics of Empire compelled them to live together as one and to share all things in common. The evidence of the resurrection was their communitarian way of life, which was an impossibility for the Empire but a sign and seal of the beloved community of Jesus Christ.

Christian Economics

Thus, if we want to be Christian in the public sphere, we ought to stand for the redistribution of wealth so that there are no poor among us. Such a community of shared abundance seems impossible to the Empire, which fights to maintain economic stratification. But it is the very essence of the Christian life, the core of our witness to the possibility of resurrected life in Jesus Christ.

As such, we ought to fight for public education. We ought to demand universal healthcare. We ought to insist on affordable housing for all. We ought to willingly give our extra income to support these causes. We ought to sell what we own so and give it to others so that they might live with abundance. We ought to seek the well-being of the poorest of the poor—with whom we share one heart and one soul and one life—before we seek our own comfort and security. For this is the essence of what it means to be Christian. This is how the world knows who we are. This is how the world comes to understand the love of Jesus Christ that brings abundant life for all.