A great chasm: Jesus, Mary Poppins and Kendrik Lamar on the rich and the poor

Read the New Testament closely enough, particularly the Gospel of Luke, and you can’t help but think, this Jesus guy sure is hard on the rich.

“What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves?” he says in Luke 9:25.

Later, in Luke 12, he warns of the foolishness of “those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

And what does Jesus prescribe for those who risk letting wealth block their path to heaven? “Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” (Luke 18:22)

I’m no biblical scholar, but I was struck this weekend by how definitively Jesus puts riches on one side of the equation and righteousness on the far other side. Jesus isn’t leaving a lot of wiggle room here. He’s not saying, OK, you can be wealthy as long as you don’t beat your shepherds. Or maybe money won’t eat away your soul if you work really hard to be a good person. No, he’s pretty cynical about human capacity for grace out of abundance.

Admittedly, my analysis isn’t new. Jesus’ views on the rich and poor, at least as written by Luke, have been thoroughly noted and debated.

My thinking often turns on unique juxtapositions. Like, this weekend, I happened to be watching “Mary Poppins” with my sons with the evils of money on my mind. And, wow, there it was, the Gospel of Bert.

It starts with the scene in which Mr. Banks begrudgingly takes his offspring, Michael and Jane, on a field trip to the bank. Michael wants to give his tuppence to the bird lady, but his dad insists the boy and his sister listen to all his bank cronies sing a song about the prudence of careful investing.

The Fidelity Fiduciary Bank.

“When you deposit tuppence in a bank account soon you’ll see that it blooms into credit of a generous amount semi-annually!”

Why the puzzled faces? Still not getting it? Let us break it down for you.

The boy and girl will achieve a sense of stature, you see! Their influence will expand! To the high financial strata that established credit now demands!

But Bert, the lowly chimney sweep, sees through the soot to realize who in this equation is really in need of a better return on his investment.

“The one my heart goes out to is your father,” Bert tells the children. “There he is in that cold, heartless bank day after day, hemmed in by mounds of cold, heartless money. I don’t like to see any living thing caged up.”

“Father? In a cage?” Jane says, confused.

“They makes cages in all sizes and shapes, you know. Bank shapes, some of em. Carpets and all.”

Sure, movies about the evils of money are a dime a dozen. And, no, “Mary Poppins,” isn’t about the evils of money specifically. Actually, it’s a perfect and delightful movie in ways I never appreciated when I was a kid, and one of the many things it’s about, I’d argue, is how a focus on money and other adult distractions can rob a person of what makes life worth living. There’s even a suicide scare at the end of the movie, because would Mr. Banks end it all after losing his job? He doesn’t. Instead, he’s giddy after his “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” epiphany.

That’s a good thing. Because let’s turn back to the Gospel of Luke. Try this one on for size, Luke 16:19–31, from today’s church service.

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores.

The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham.

The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.’

He said, ‘Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house — for I have five brothers — that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’

He said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

Not a lot of sympathy to go around for our rich man, is there?

This may all be a way for me to get around to mentioning Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly,” a hip-hop masterpiece, but also an American literary masterpiece, which I only came to realize this weekend while listening to it twice on a long drive out and back to a job I was working.

I’m very late to this bandwagon. “To Pimp a Butterfly” came out in early 2015 to nearly universal acclaim and a top spot on the Billboard charts. As often is the case for my random listening habits, I’m just now giving it a thorough study. And during the whole album, my ears were glued to the speakers, my mind running over this and that metaphor and allusion or shifting point of view or historical reference.

I have a tendency to get wonky when listening to meticulously crafted music like that.

That said, I’m am woefully ill-equipped to fully appraise or critique the album, partly because my hip-hop expertise isn’t very extensive. But I will say that a clear theme/motif on “To Pimp a Butterfly” is the evils of money and inequality, starting with the almost cliched sham of “40 acres and a mule” to an uncomfortable encounter with a homeless beggar to confrontational track titles like “For Free?” and “For Sale?”

And a character named Lucy who presumably represents Lucifer.

“Lucy gonna fill your pockets / Lucy gonna move your momma out of Compton / Inside the gigantic mansion like I promised / Lucy just want your trust and loyalty.”

A lot of this comes off as a big star looking back on his roots and realizing (or at least rapping that he’s realized) that success is all hollow if you forgot your roots, your momma in Compton and those loved ones “fighting a continuous war back in the city.” But the skeptical references to money go beyond that perspective.

It’s a theme tackled most directly in the words of the late Tupac Shakur, whose voice appears at the end of the album, spliced from a decades-old interview in which he talked about how he found success and what it has meant to him. But also the metaphor of “the ground.”

“The ground is gonna open up and swallow the evil, that’s how I see it. … And the ground is the symbol for the poor people. The poor people is gonna open up this whole world and swallow up the rich people. ’Cause the rich people gonna be so fat, they gonna be so appetizing. …

“The poor gonna be so poor, and hungry.”

A great chasm we’re still dealing with today.